The School Board's Great White Hope

Try as he must, school board chairman David Fox cannot change the real subject of the debate about the school rezoning plan: West Nashville cluster is getting whiter and North Nashville cluster is not. From this morning's Tennessean:

the rezoning plan was specifically developed to stop the busing of black students to the affluent Hillwood area in West Nashville, said Larry Woods, attorney for parents who are suing over the rezoning. The new enrollment figures show the percentage of white students increased at Hillwood High School and almost every elementary and middle school that feeds into it.

"What they've fought hard to conceal is that this is not a rezoning plan for the city, it's a plan to end busing by taking African-American students out of the Hillwood cluster and transferring them to the Pearl-Cohn cluster" in North Nashville, Woods said ....

A closer look at schools at the center of the rezoning controversy shows that the racial makeup of schools in the Hillwood cluster changed with the loss of some of its black population, making schools "more white," as the lawsuit claims.

But rezoning those black students to the Pearl-Cohn zone did not significantly change the racial makeup there. Most schools in that cluster were already black majority.