I've always been against busing, but... http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/education/21RACE.html?todaysheadlines CHARLOTTE, N.C., Jan. 20 — Sanetra Jant still wonders where all the white kids went. Only last spring, they made up a quarter of her class, not to mention her friends. And then, poof, they were gone. "I don't know why they left," said Sanetra, a fourth grader at Reid Park Elementary School. Last year, before a federal appeals court ended three decades of judicial-supervised desegregation by the district, Sanetra's school was 68 percent black. Now it is almost entirely black, and the many white pupils who once rode in on yellow buses number one in a hundred. According to a new study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, black and Latino students are now more isolated from their white counterparts than they were three decades ago, before many of the overhauls from the civil rights movement had even begun to take hold.
This was bound to happen when school systems went to neighborhood schools. I never had and never will be a fan of forced busing. Students should go to the closest school they live to or a magnet school.
Which is fine as long as school funding is mandated at the state level and distributed on a per-student basis. But in most places it is based on local property taxes. Most places follow a pattern of oddly parallel economic and racial neighborhood and community disparity. Ergo a school funding system that is de facto if not de jure racially uneaqual. THAT's the problem.
Growing up in New Hampshire in the 70s, I had a front row seat for the busing situation in Boston. Having also read some fairly detailed descriptions of the circumstances that led to the law suit, I am forced to conclude that the problem with busing is it is an insufficiently subtle solution to the problem. What happened in Boston was that during the 60s, the folks running the Boston schools were pretty blatantly racist. The higher the percentage of black students in a school the more likely that school was to rank near the bottem on per-student spending in the City. The elected school board rarely, if ever, had any black members, and voters in neighborhoods with significant black populations tended to get ignored. Eventually, a group of parents sued the City because their children were getting a miserable education because they didn't live in lily white neighborhoods. The merd hit the fan when Judge Arthur Garrity concluded that systems the Boston School Department used to parcel out students and resources were so profoundly discriminatory that there was no way to give every student an even chance without mixing up who went where. Hence, busing and white flight from the public school system. Now Boston school system (except for the magnet schools) has a far lower percentage of white students than does the city as a whole, and many of the schools are no better at educating than they were 30 years ago.
White flight is alive and well. One of my coworkers is Filipino, and he said most of his neighbors in Georgia were white when he was but a young lad. Now all of his parent's neighbors are black.
Without a doubt the deft hand of judicially enforced busing in the 70's led to all kinds of chaos. Boston was the poster child for how busing didn't work. Growing up in lily-white Iowa (but being born in Washington, D.C) I remember the news showing riots and stone throwing as the first busses rolled. But Chicago was just as bad. Busing -- despite its good intentions -- just totally ignored human nature. You cannot legislate or even mandate racial tolerance. The white flight that busing helped exacerbate -- for many white citizens it was the last straw after allowing “those people” to live wherever they pleased – led inexorably to the urban sprawl and ex-urbanization that blights our countryside today. But lots of urban centers are being reborn and there exists a chance and I think the will to fix the school funding situation overall. It starts by putting a spike in the incredibly unequal local property tax funding situation and replacing it with state-mandated per-head funding and needs-based facility management.
Actually, you can. That's what almost any anti-discrimination law attempts to accomplish. The Civil Rights movement always had the twin goals of shaming harmful discrimination where it is legal and enacting laws to eliminate harmful discrimination. It seems to me that the 2nd is at least as responsible as the 1st for such improvements in America's racial climate as have taken place. Where busing falls down about human nature is in it's failure to focus on the actual source of the discriminatory behavior. The imbalance happened because the management of the schools was at the mercy of a political system where the majority had too much political influence. In Boston, politically powerful neighborhoods had schools as good as they wanted. Everybody else got neighborhood schools that didn't educate. A better technique would have been to redistribute the power at the top of the City's school system so that poorer, less politically wired neighborhoods would actually have a say in what their schools were going to be like. Reconfiguring the school committee or school board to look more like the actual students and their parents would be a good place to start. White flight probably still would have happened in a less racist school system, but it wouldn't have caused as much damage as it did.
Agreed. Although I am still firmly a member of the Bullworth school of racial reconcilliation: "We all need to keep f**** till we're all the same color."
This would be a rational position if not for a century long history of public policy causing neighborhoods segregated by race and class. But you can't wish that history and, more importantly, its current impact. So I don't think your position is defensible. Unless you mean it in the "in a perfect world, but obviously not practical or moral in the real world" sense.
Someone tell this to Gov Taft of Ohio. He still is violating the Ohio Supreme Court ruling to find a new way to fund schools. Simple and quality analysis, -cman-. I asked my uncle who works for the Columbus Public School system, when are they going to fix this problem. He wasn't even aware this was going on.
That means he received a 20%? I don't know about the new math people always talk about, but that is a failing grade by most standards.
So we don't like forced busing but we still want our schools to be diverse? Have there been studies on effectiveness of magnet schools? It seems to be a win-win, at least on the surface. Gifted students choose to attend inner city schools and learn in a diverse environment while the inner city school sees funding it wouldn't have gotten from property tax. Of course, the suburban schools remain, well, suburban.
For the students who win positions in magnet schools it is, but aren't they always going to be a minority of total student body? Your comment about suburban schools reminds me of another seemingly inevitable problem with busing. It can only work in school districts large enough to have multiple schools at each level. Most suburban towns are like the one in New Hampshire that I grew up in: 3 elementary schools, 1 junior high and 1 high school. Our uniform paleness (4 black students out of 1100 total) was primarily a reflection of the town, and the town's population had grown five fold in the 20 years before I graduated, so most of us where there as a result of conscious decisions made by our parents. Race matters were only area where people simply did not expect to encounter anyone who didn't look they did, or talk like they did, or think like they did.
Yep, it included a tax raise. Basically there were two camps, those opposed to any increase in taxes and those who said it didn't go far enough.
It's not as diverse as it sounds, at least where I grew up (North Alabama). My parents are semi-retired university professors whose jobs now involve supervising the university's locally-placed student teachers. They've been to each of the area's magnet schools (in this case, each magnet school building is located next to or as an addition to a regular public school building, usually in a predominantly minority neighborhood) several times, and they report that physical proximity is the only thing the public and magnet children have in common. They have no contact with each other whatsoever. There are separate lunch periods, assemblies, field trips, and extracurriculars.
While in an ideal world it would solve the problem, there are several problems with per-head financing through income taxes. First, it assumes that teachers and staff cost the same statewide, which they don't in most places where there is a diverse population. In New Jersey, for example, urban Hudson County teachers make significantly more than they do in rural Cumberland County, due to the high cost of living and the higher percentage of long-tenured teachers who are protected by the NEA. Giving the Hudson district the same amount per kid as the Cumberland County kid puts Hudson at a disadvantage because it's more money to teachers and less for other things. Second, it assumes proportional overhead costs, for buildings and land. But in less populated districts or high land cost districts, the per-child cost of building a school is much higher. Third, it assumes that private donations will not play a role in education funding, which has been proven untrue. If wealthy parents who want the best for their kids donate an entire computer lab or fully fund the football team in their child's district (both of which are examples of things that have happened), does this mean the school gets less state funding? No, not usually, which brings us back to inequality problems. Rich parents can and will find ways to get their children advantages -- not to spite the poorer districts, but because they are trying to maximize their district's educational opportunities. Until you figure out how to make "equal" really mean "equal" in terms of educational opportunity, income tax funding alone cannot and will not solve the problem.
Fairness in education is the ultimate goal but in a place like NJ where the state-run city schools spend MORE per pupil than the richer suburbs (and NJ is near the top in the US in per student spending), it would be hard to convince voters that money is the issue. The state took over the systems of big cities like Newark because local control was getting the students nowhere (graft & corruption - NJ style). But I don't think that the takeover of the school system has achieved better scores for the kids or a better graduation rate. In some of the Newark schools something like only 10-15% of students can pass the minimum basic skills tests. Maybe magnet schools would help that portion of the kids that are going to learn anyway, but the majority will still be stuck in underperforming schools. It's a vicious cycle with no easy solutions.
That's unfortunate. I didn't attend public schools but I have quite a few friends who attended a magnet high school in Raleigh, NC (Enloe HS) and from what they tell me, classes and lunch periors were separate by necessity, but extra curriculars were not. So there were limited contact between gifted and regular students, and the facilities were better maintained than they would have been without the magnet program, but the inner city kids weren't getting exactly the same education as the gifted kids were. Overall, it seemed to be a mixed bag.
I think the lack of any contact between reg and gifted students is a biggie. The facilities are pretty nice just about everywhere, as Huntsville's a reasonably middle to upper-middle class town almost across the board. The schools in general are considerably more segregated than they were 20-plus years ago, tho (When I was a high school student in the late 70s and early 80s, my school's diversity -from top to bottom- was something we were proud of), and the division between reg students and gifted students reflects the spirit of segregation that was renewed in the early 80s.