Toronto's Solution to school crime - Segregated Schools!

Angela Wilson, left, and Donna Harrow celebrate last night after Toronto public school trustees voted 11-9 to open an alternative Afrocentric school.

Students at Blyden take regular academic lessons and have emerged with higher than average test results. Raton believes this is down to the school's message and mission. "Culture is the glue. Without the culture, nothing else matters. That's what gives the self-belief and determines the character. Then you can teach. With desegregation, they threw our children into a void."

But it is also about choice. A survey of African-Americans in the city showed that 60% of black Americans prefer to live in neighbourhoods that are at least 50% black. Milwaukee's Public Policy Forum found that, while there were some affordable homes in white suburbs, some black people simply didn't want to move there. "We always assumed the reason had to do with overt discrimination," Jeff Browne, the PPF's executive director told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "A more important factor might be cultural affinity, people wanting to live with other people they're comfortable with."

Every morning before they start their lessons, and after they have walked the corridors lined with African masks, children at the Blyden Academy in Milwaukee say the pledge. Not the pledge to the American flag, the one that most children in the US say - "We don't do anything that ties us to western culture from a ritual standpoint," says the principal and founder of the school, Taki Raton. Instead, they recite an "Afrocentric" pledge at an Afrocentric school: "I love myself/I love my beautiful image/I am in the image of my creator/My creator blessed me to be the best/The genius of my ancestors are in my genes/I will excel in school/I will work, study, create, build, and prosper/I am the perfect design of success/I am just simply magnificently fabulous."

Raton thinks that desegregation has been "a dismal failure". He set up his school six years ago for children aged 4-14 and has 97 students. It costs around $6,000 a child, most of whose parents pay with vouchers. "Black children need to be under the control and modelling and direction of black teachers," he says. "I don't have a problem with segregation. Nobody has the right to impose those conditions on us. But we had our best, strongest black communities when we lived together. We didn't have as much stuff, but we did much more with it."

Once, a white family came to the school, interested in enrolling their son. "I told them there's nothing here for your child. Your child will probably emerge with low self-esteem because there's nothing here that represents them."

What would he have done if the child's mother had persisted? "I would have talked her out of it," says Raton. "I would have had to take the child by law, but I would have made it very clear it was not in their interests. This does not have to be everything for everybody. There are 700 schools in Milwaukee, and this just isn't the right one for them."