This week's column: Lunch Bunch controversy teaches lessons

Our society has struggled with racial debates for decades. It doesn’t matter what the specifics are. If race is involved there often is no right or wrong answer.

The same was the case this week for Ann Arbor’s Dicken Elementary School. Its administrators learned the hard way that racial tensions overshadow all good intentions and that the legality of equalizing measures is still—and probably always will be—a heated debate.

I know that this is a Manchester column and I know that Dicken Elementary is an Ann Arbor school. I still think it is a worthy topic, because what school doesn’t deal with race issues? What school doesn’t have outsiders or minorities or certain groups that perform differently?

The answer is none. Affirmative action within public institutions may have recently been made illegal in the state of Michigan, but the test score disparity between the poor and the rich is still there. In many districts in Washtenaw County, the test score disparity among races is still there too.

In Ann Arbor the MEAP results reveal a stronger performance average in white students compared to black students. The trend apparently has been there for several years in Ann Arbor, so the district went about trying to close that gap.

One of the results of those discussions was the formation of the African American Lunch Bunch. It was a club meant to close the achievement gap before students headed off to middle school.

Well those kids went on a field trip, and they went to see a powerful and successful black physicist at the University of Michigan. When the club’s students got back, their peers were unhappy and jealous. They wanted to go too, so they booed their classmates and told their parents, who in turn wrote angry letters and called media outlets.

I’m not writing about this story to debate whether this group breaks state law. I’m not a lawyer. I’m also not writing this to debate whether affirmative action is good or bad. I’ll save that little token for a separate blog post.

I’m here to point out that this situation is a very real reminder that we don’t have it all figured out. We’ve come a long way, to be sure, but we have a long way to go.
The club was disbanded, but the disparity still exists. So what should the various school districts do? Why is the disparity there? What can teachers do differently? What can counselors and parents do differently?

I still think we need to find ways to accomplish what the Dicken school administrators were trying to accomplish. They might not have done it in a way that is popular (or even legal, arguably), but that did something nonetheless.

My worry is always that blowups like this one will discourage districts from continuing to seek that progress and improvement. Whether we like it or not, those disparities still exist. And whether we like it or not, many of us do grow up with certain privileges.

For example, every year when I went back to school I knew a majority of my classmates would have the same skin color. I could guarantee that my teachers would look at me with a blank slate and that strangers wouldn’t judge me. That isn’t the case for all children, whether they’re Asian, African American, Latin, Middle Eastern, South American, and the list goes on.

Those are comforts that cannot be ignored and that require acknowledgement to level the playing field. Dickens Elementary is on the right track theoretically. Clearly these students need something that they’re missing.

That to me is the real cause for concern, not the field trip and not the angry parents.

Jana Miller is the editor of the Manchester Enterprise. She can be reached at (734) 429-7380 or jmiller@heritage.com. Follow the Enterprise blog at www.wireenterprise.blogspot.com.