Barack Obama said today that our currently segregated schools create and prolong achievement gaps. He compared them to segregated schools 50 years ago. These ideas are patently false--segregated schools circa 1960 are not, for a pile of reasons, analogous to the naturally, racially separated schools that exist today. To keep blurring this distinction doesn't get anyone "beyond race"; it merely misrepresents a complicated issue by eliding the facts and history of public-school desegregation. And it neglects to acknowledge the fine work being done in some of the most educationally separated settings.
