What, you ask, is CNN referring to when it talks about "segregation", once in the title of the story, and again in the text?
Well:
A Pennsylvania high school says some students are separated by race, gender and language for a few minutes each day in an effort to boost academic scores.
In other words, segregation.
Look, if administrators at this high school (or anyone else) want to defend segregation as a tool for increasing academic success, I suppose they're welcome to discuss their idea, even if they're really not entitled to do so as public school administrators.
But they don't get to pretend that this policy isn't real segregation. I know the term segregation in reference to schools brings to mind things like Brown vs. Board, Little Rock Central, and Governor Wallace. But, uh, that's because those are also things that involved actual, yes literal segregation.
Responsible news media wouldn't enable folks' claims that polished versions of the same old shit are fundamentally different from past policies that many people (including :ahem: these guys) acknowledge to have been horribly wrong.
Let's be clear here, racial (and economic) segregation is still a problem in the United States, and public schools are no exception. We are not in a post-racial, post-feminist, post-civil rights era, and no amount of scare quotes changes that fact.
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