Durham schools offer education

It is true that many Duke parents avoid the Durham Public Schools. But we know from first-hand experience that E.K. Powe Elementary offers an excellent education to all of its students, most from poor and minority families. E.K. Powe has many brilliant, committed teachers and staff, and our children have flourished there. It is reprehensible and absurd to suggest, as one Duke student did, that an academic "gene pool" makes for better schools and that Chapel Hill high schools have "more sum intelligence combined" than the mostly African-American Durham high schools. Surely our task as citizens should be to build a public school system that includes and educates all of our children and stands against the destructive dynamics of money, resegregation, and thinly veiled racism too often on display in America today.

Robin Kirk

Duke Human Rights Initiative

Orin Starn

Professor of Cul. Anth.