The Chicago Tribune reports on the progressive suburb of Evanston , Illinois:
A parent of a District 65 student and a safety officer at Evanston Township High School, Daniel Featherson, said he witnesses black high school students "treated unfairly all the time every single day."
Featherson spoke as a member of a community panel during a special meeting on Evanston Skokie District 65 black student achievement Monday night. District staff members presented a substantial amount of data illustrating a significant disparity in academic achievement among the district's black students and their white peers, both in terms of grades and standardized test results. Well over 100 people packed the board of education meeting room inside the Joseph E. Hill Education Center in Evanston. The meeting spanned five hours during which staff summarized the data and listed actions the district plans to take to mitigate the discrepancy. The board also heard several hours worth of testimony from community members and parents.
There's more:
Staff outlined several strategies to combat the gap, including the introduction of curriculum with cultural relevance to black students' lives, more intensive family outreach and hiring more teachers who do not identify as white.
Godard noted that nearly 80 percent of the district's teachers are white. He said 43 percent of the district's 7,000 students are white and 23 percent are black.
"Our staff doesn't represent the full diversity of the students in our classroom," he said.
Assistant superintendent of human resources, Beatrice Davis, said about 20 percent of teachers hired by the district last year self-identified as "other than white." She said the district has set a goal to increase that figure to 30 percent by the 2017-18 school year.
It appears that Evanston wants to discriminate against white applicants for teachers jobs in the future.
