'The Orwellian Transformation of Diversity'

By Ted Gup

Last April, I sat in the library of the Rock Creek Forest Elementary School in Montgomery County, Md., one of five white parents talking over our concerns with the principal. On the surface, the subject was academic quality, but the subtext was race. We were all exploring ways to avoid sending our children to the school, though maybe like all parents, I felt mine was a unique case. Our eagerness to leave the school was ironic, given that Rock Creek Forest is a "magnet school," designed to attract students throughout the country to its much-touted Spanish-immersion program. Here, even kindergartners are taught in Spanish.

That evening, the principal was fending off a barrage of questions about the school's racial composition. For her, it was a painful and recurring ritual of spring. Try as she may, there was no getting around the numbers: Though the school was 40 percent white, the Spanish- immersion and English programs were largely divided along racial lines. The immersion program was predominantly white. The English program was 90 percent minority, including both African-Americans and Hispanics, a third of whom were studying English as a second language.

The immersion program, as I would soon learn from several parents in our neighborhood, had too often become an unspoken haven for white flight. What was meant to be the multicultural pride of the school was now a subterfuge for disgruntled white parents who didn't want their children in an English program many perceived as inferior, largely because it was mostly composed of minority children from a different socioeconomic status. To many of these parents, it was as much a matter...