Say it Ain't So, Joe!

August 4, 2015 8:41 PM

How A Young Joe Biden Turned Liberals Against Integration. Metafilter has been talking about another Joe Biden presidential run, and about school integration, and given that the most deeply segregated schools aren't where you might think they are, perhaps it's a good time to explore how Joe Biden turned against busing as a tool of desegregation in the 1970's.

Bonus Links:
Joe Biden on Civil Rights
Biden’s Record on Race Is Scuffed by 3 Episodes

posted by gryftir (51 comments total)

Busing was an episode of collective insanity in the U.S. Good for Biden.
posted by jayder at 9:14 PM on August 4, 2015 [5 favorites]

I feel like I'm missing something in that link about segregated schools in NYC... isn't a charter school something that the parents need to intentionally choose to send their kids to instead of public school? If these charter schools are "apartheid schools", are the parents who choose to send their kids there part of the apartheid system?

I mean from what I understand there are lots of reasons not to like charter schools but to pick them, out of all of the racially-problematic stuff in the NYC educational system described there, to label as or compare with "apartheid" seems pejorative.
posted by XMLicious at 10:01 PM on August 4, 2015

this fpp brought to you by the committee to elect hillary clinton
posted by entropicamericana at 10:03 PM on August 4, 2015 [25 favorites]

In Louisville, busing still exists. School assignments were once determined in large part by race; that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2006. Assignments are now based on neighborhood and income level (read: race).

It's transformative on a community level, with the result that there are no highly segregated public schools like the charter schools described in these articles. On an individual level, it's a harder pill to swallow. My parents moved out of Louisville in the 1980s when they found out their 4 year old soon to be kindergartener (me) would be facing over an hour of riding the bus each way, as well as a transfer at a large downtown bus station. I'm now a parent myself, back in Louisville, and soon to be facing a similar decision. Our school "cluster" contains three schools that are about thirty minutes from our home - on a bus, probably more like 45-50 minutes. Do we roll the die with school assignments, accepting the possibility that one day our son, too, might spend a good portion of his waking hours riding the bus? Or do we too flee the county?
posted by pecanpies at 10:07 PM on August 4, 2015 [5 favorites]

Country kids regularly ride the bus for an hour, often more, to get to and from school.

I usually got my homework done then.
posted by notyou at 10:29 PM on August 4, 2015 [24 favorites]

He made a fantastic Vice President but as a Senator I had gave misgivings over several of the directions he was taking as a Senator

In addition to his earlier stance on segregation, it might also be helpful to remember that prior to being chosen as Vice President, Joe Biden, was in bed with the Hollywood copyright Mafia who was one of his strongest election contributors.
posted by AGameOfMoans at 10:33 PM on August 4, 2015 [5 favorites]

@notyou Oh, I've no doubt many kids have long bus rides. I realize it's not the end of the world. As a child, though, I was horribly bullied both verbally and physically on the bus. My experience is colored by that. I can't imagine someone having to go through that for an hour, twice a day.
posted by pecanpies at 10:37 PM on August 4, 2015 [13 favorites]

Indeed, that happened, too, pecanpies, and I'm sorry that my comment discounts that.
posted by notyou at 10:56 PM on August 4, 2015 [5 favorites]

Having always lived within walking distance of (as well as attended) the neighborhood schools, busing across a city sounds like an absurd idea. Why couldn't funding incentives or penalties be used instead of busing?
posted by The arrows are too fast at 11:10 PM on August 4, 2015

My family moved to a rural areas when I was a teenager. The hot and cold running National Guard was not really fun for any of us. I had about an hour and a half on the bus one way and it was horrible.
Literally nothing was done to stop it. That to go to a school where bullying and harassment were all in a day's work.
There wasn't a real race element in this. Nearly all the kids were white except for a small contingent of Native Americans. I can't even imagine how bad it would have been if race had played any real part in the mess.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 11:11 PM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Why couldn't funding incentives and penalties be used instead of busing? Per the first article, because they were resisted by local school boards or didn't work, leaving two choices: Busing or leaving segregation intact. Despite the Supreme Court ruling that it is unconstitutional and has a disparate impact , we apparently went with the latter.
posted by gryftir at 11:46 PM on August 4, 2015 [9 favorites]

There's a closely-related MeFi thread here. As I said in that one, I think a lot of this comes down to the funding model. If schools were funded on a Federal- or State- basis it would be easier to maintain consistent standards. As it is, though, schools in poor areas will tend to be poor, because they're funded locally, with priorities set by schoolboards whose interests don't always match the population.
posted by Joe in Australia at 12:04 AM on August 5, 2015 [6 favorites]

It must be noted that Joe Biden is SO OLD (How old IS he, foop?), he was a Democrat before the Republicans got the monopoly on racism.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:24 AM on August 5, 2015 [4 favorites]

See there? Not perfect, so forget him.
posted by tommyD at 3:31 AM on August 5, 2015

It's hard not to read this as a transparent attempt to discourage Biden from running.

On the other hand, he shouldn't run. Let Clinton and Sanders have a debate on principles, let Clinton beat Sanders handily when the primaries start to have Black people in them. Let's save the drama and suspense for the Republican primary.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:40 AM on August 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ok. Take two: it's very hard not to read this as anything other than a transparent attempt to take the wind out of the sails of a potential Biden run.

I personally don't think he's going to declare, but the timing of this (and not just its reposting to MeFi, but the links themselves) smacks of desperate pro-Clinton retaliatory fire.

I stand by my position that these links belong in the open thread on Biden, but there: I've spoken to their merits. Such as they are.
posted by Xavier Xavier at 5:15 AM on August 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Obligatory Ochs:

The people of old Mississippi
Should all hang their heads in shame
I can't understand how their minds work
What's the matter don't they watch Les Crain?
But if you ask me to bus my children
I hope the cops take down your name
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal
posted by Drexen at 5:38 AM on August 5, 2015 [14 favorites]

Typical, an article about busing in Delaware that spends all of its time talking about Boston. They are just now redistricting Wilmington schools.
posted by interplanetjanet at 5:54 AM on August 5, 2015

There was a fantastic podcast on this American life called "The problem we all live with". It is a somewhat lengthy talk on how "busing" helped desegregation. Most importantly it shows the impact it may have on communities in need.

Jayder, totally disagree with your statement. Busing was a good thing for many and as a minority, I wish more people had the education I had.

This is something that I wish more presidential candidates would talk about.
posted by The1andonly at 6:20 AM on August 5, 2015 [14 favorites]

XMLicious:

I mean from what I understand there are lots of reasons not to like charter schools but to pick them, out of all of the racially-problematic stuff in the NYC educational system described there, to label as or compare with "apartheid" seems pejorative.

Except for all the data showing that white parents would rather walk barefoot across shattered glass than send their white kids to schools with more than 10% people of color. And the multiple regression analysis that shows you can control for all other factors and (perceived) race is the most salient one.
posted by allthinky at 6:42 AM on August 5, 2015 [8 favorites]

Having always lived within walking distance of (as well as attended) the neighborhood schools, busing across a city sounds like an absurd idea. Why couldn't funding incentives or penalties be used instead of busing?

And this is why, fundamentally, inequality in America is never going to change. The people with the money and power, even the liberals, have the attitude "I got mine, why expect us to make even the smallest sacrifices for equality?"
posted by happyroach at 7:15 AM on August 5, 2015 [4 favorites]

Except for all the data showing that white parents would rather walk barefoot across shattered glass than send their white kids to schools with more than 10% people of color.

And what happened in a lot of cities is that white parents, when given no choice, pulled their kids out of public schools, put them into private schools, moved out of the cities and voted against school taxes since their kids were no longer in the schools.

"Separate but equal" was an complete and unmitigated wrong, but busing really did nothing to fix it in the long term. It sucks, don't get me wrong, but that was one of the big killers of the cities in the US. White families with money were not going to put their kids into schools with blacks, period, end of statement, and they enforced this with their cars, their wallets, and their votes.

The big problem is the incredibly inane way we do schools. Everything is incredibly local. Everybody has their school board, their funding, and so forth. We could have fixed this if we had schools managed at the federal level, or even the state level, but no, schools are managed at the city level. So, you don't like that city's policy? Move to the suburbs, get elected to the school board, or elect your flunky, and change the policy to what you want.

And, that's exactly what happened. The public schools that were well funded and supported? Well, they were where the people with the money had moved to. And that could turn around, if the population changed and decided that they didn't need public schools anymore because everyone was in private schools.

Because really, the disease that gripped America in the early 1980s was mineitis. I've got mine, fuck you if you ain't got yours. Greed is good.

To be honest, it's why I think we're doomed. Too many people believe this shit, and will do anything to win. They've rigged the game too much to make sure they'll stay in power. They don't care about rules, or honor, or honesty. They want to win, so they can get power, so they can take more.

And they will.
posted by eriko at 7:19 AM on August 5, 2015 [8 favorites]

I am a proud product of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools that were integrated by busing under the Swann v Board order. Going to schools that were actually integrated made all of the difference in the world in my life. In the 1970s, my parents (who both attended legally all-white schools under Jim Crow) specifically chose to live in a place with court-ordered integrated schools because they wanted a better life for their children and everybody else's children, too. When did "and everybody else's children, too" stop mattering? If you did not live this, if segregation is the only life you have ever known, like many Americans, please consider that what you heard about the riots in Boston is not the only story of integration in America.

Life under Swann was good! Integration through busing was by and large popular among both black and white people in Charlotte (back then, we didn't have many people not in those two categories). I made lifelong friends from neighborhoods different from mine, from backgrounds different from mine, from worlds different from mine.

Joe Biden's behavior here seems absolutely typical of white "liberal" politicians who are only liberal when it's convenient and otherwise are absolutely as right-wing reactionary as the GOP.

When I talk to my friends with kids, and hear them talking about "good schools" and "neighborhood schools" and "charter schools" and really any schools at all except having to send their kids to school with people who aren't like them, it makes me really despair about how much we've moved backwards.

Few white northerners viewed busing as a way to provide equal opportunity for black children. In fact, by the mid-1970s, whites viewed themselves as the aggrieved party when it came to busing. They believed that African Americans had already won their rights with the civil rights bills of the previous decade. With little regard or care for whether African-American children would be confined to segregated schools, whites thought their rights were violated if their children couldn’t attend “neighborhood schools.”
posted by hydropsyche at 7:20 AM on August 5, 2015 [16 favorites]

Having always lived within walking distance of (as well as attended) the neighborhood schools, busing across a city sounds like an absurd idea. Why couldn't funding incentives or penalties be used instead of busing?

I've done a lot of work on the desegregation of the Denver public schools in the 1970s, and this is exactly the tactic that the anti-busing school board used before court-ordered busing began to claim that it was doing something about its segregationist policies. It gave students from minority neighborhoods the chance to enroll in other schools elsewhere in the city, and gave schools some incentives to attract more minority students. Voluntary integration, as it was called, worked well for some individual students and families, namely black kids who lived in neighborhoods that were close to white neighborhoods and could attend schools that weren't too far from home, and may still be within biking or walking distance. Some schools did increase their minority enrollment. But this put the burden for solving the problem of discrimination in education on the individual student and family, or individual schools, when it was a problem affecting the entire system. Not to mention that DPS didn't offer transportation help for students wanting to attend other schools under voluntary integration -- parents had to drive their kids to school, meaning only kids who had parents with the time and resources to do so could attend a better school elsewhere in the city.

Opposition to busing was more about the parents than the children. When you grow up in a school system under court order, every kid in your school is taking the bus to get there. It's totally normal, it's just what you do. The people I've talked to who grew up attending DPS schools in the 1970s and 1980s report that it was fine -- their parents were much more upset about it than they were.
posted by heurtebise at 7:48 AM on August 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

When did "and everybody else's children, too" stop mattering?

I think people are conflating "opposed desegration via 'busing'" and "opposed desegration".

The WP article awkwardly entitled 'Desegregation Busing' is worth a look if you weren't around when all this started.

As someone who was, I recall a PSA* from the 1970s that I can't find anywhere online. Two teenaged boys, one white one black, are in line at the cafeteria talking about how great it is to be young and mod and hip and now and to be without the race hang-ups their parents had. They get to the end of the line and say, "Well, see ya in class. Later," as they split up and the black kid goes to sit at an all-blacks table and the white kid goes to sit at an all-whites table.

I don't know who sponsored it, nor do I recall if there was any expository text or voiceover. But it made me sad.

-----------------------------------------
*Back before the Reagan administration auctioned off the public airwaves to the highest bidders, there were these things called Public Service Announcements, produced by various groups to help local teevy stations fulfill their obligation to serve the public for the privilege of profiting from said public airwaves. These have of course been latterly replaced by "Ask your doctor if sending lots of money to Pfizer is right for you" and "Injured? Help law firms profit from class action lawsuits" private service announcements.
posted by Herodios at 8:04 AM on August 5, 2015 [5 favorites]

On the personal side, I was bused to school for a year, in my fourth grade, in 1972-73. It was the first year that mandatory desegregation was put in place in the district. Before I even went to school that year, ten school buses were bombed. There was near rioting at school board meetings.

I'm a white kid and was bused to a very predominantly black school. I was bullied quite a bit. We were certainly not welcomed by the students, and the teachers were in some cases, worse. My grades went through the floor. Friendships I'd had since starting school disappeared. We were only there for a year, because that's exactly how long it took to sell the house. By the end of that year, the bullying had settled down, mainly because the parents stopped making such a big deal out of it. By the end of that year, I'd made at least a couple of friends there. I'm certain I'm a less bigoted person because of the experience.

I moved back to this city in the early 90s and except for a short break, I've been here ever since. Busing is still discussed here on Facebook "memory" groups and the like, as an unmitigated disaster for the city. White flight? We used jets. Something like 35% of the districts students left, leaving large deficits. Much of the school district administration left, leaving a large hole that was very quickly filled by nepotistic, corrupt opportunists that bankrupted the district. It has never scholastically recovered, receiving failing marks at the state and federal levels.

This school district was lauded for well over fifty years as one of the very best in the state of Michigan. It was considered a privilege to get an education through our schools, one that out of towners actually paid extra tuition for. That all disappeared within ten years of the desegregation attempts. Today, the district has one middle school, one high school, and three elementaries, down from I think six high schools and over 40 middle and elementary schools.

Maybe forced desegregation works in other areas of the country. But it sure didn't work here, and it's considered to be one of the most shameful aspects of our city's history.
posted by disclaimer at 8:07 AM on August 5, 2015

I have nothing against Biden - indeed, this is about the first thing I've read about him personally and I really don't know his politics aside from this - but if the Democrats put him up, they'll just lose unless the Republicans put up such a bad candidate that they can't win.

He's made little or no impression on Americans in 6 years and counting. Nothing is going to overcome that.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 8:12 AM on August 5, 2015

I really don't know his politics

With kindness, that would be a good place to start before weighing in on his presidential prospects (which are admittedly dim at the primary level but nowhere near as dismal as your take on his general election prospects).

That said, this is nominally a thread about busing so I'll bow out.
posted by Xavier Xavier at 8:21 AM on August 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think people are conflating "opposed desegration via 'busing'" and "opposed desegration".

Currently in the US, it is difficult to find many truly integrated schools. Modernly, that is about continued housing segregation and white flight to charter schools or away from all public schools rather than about Jim Crow laws. Maybe people just "opposed desegration via busing", but the outcome was exactly the same as if they just "opposed desegregation".
posted by hydropsyche at 9:26 AM on August 5, 2015 [4 favorites]

(a note again that I've had to leave in various other discussions that charter schools play different roles in different places: In some places, they are inner-city alternatives to other inner city schools and have few or no white students. In other places, they are suburban alternatives to city schools and have few or no non-white students.)
posted by hydropsyche at 9:29 AM on August 5, 2015

The primary problem in America with schools is that the predominately local funding model causes large funding and achievement gaps between rich and poor school districts, making school integration a complicated mess of racism and fears that your child won't receive a quality education.

Take away the funding issue and you're dealing only with the racism issue, which is something that could be solved by making sure that white parents couldn't escape integration just by moving to a district that is pro-segregation. It would do a lot to heal this country to have people from all races and backgrounds interacting at an early age.
posted by zug at 9:30 AM on August 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Having always lived within walking distance of (as well as attended) the neighborhood schools, busing across a city sounds like an absurd idea. Why couldn't funding incentives or penalties be used instead of busing?

This makes sense. For rural kids, a bus aggregates kids from across a large geographic area. Busing kids out of their own neighborhood, presumably past many different schools, in order to get them to a certain target school within a given city seems frankly bonkers. Racial integration issues aside, I would question the sanity of a system that would attempt to place my kid in a school bus and move her across town when there's a perfectly good school three blocks away.
posted by theorique at 12:39 PM on August 5, 2015

Racial integration issues are the entire point.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:46 PM on August 5, 2015 [6 favorites]

Racial integration issues are the entire point.

Look, people are allowed to have opinions of how good a policy is aside from racial integration. Race matters, but it isn't the only thing that matters. No one is saying this whole thread should ignore race — other comments have pointed out that busing wasn't even effective at racial integration. The policy was a notorious failure. Just read the Wikipedia page, which makes a lot of the same points that have been made in this thread. Excerpt:

Since the 1980s, desegregation busing has been in decline. Even though school districts provided zero-fare bus transportation to and from students' assigned schools, those schools were in some cases many miles away from students' homes, which often presented problems to them and their families. In addition, many families were angry about having to send their children miles to another school in an unfamiliar neighborhood when there was an available school a short distance away. The movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities, so-called white flight, reduced the effectiveness of the policy. Many whites who stayed moved their children into private or parochial schools; these effects combined to make many urban school districts predominantly nonwhite, reducing any effectiveness mandatory busing may have had.

There are many reasons for Biden not to run for president. His opposition to busing isn't one of them.
posted by John Cohen at 8:58 PM on August 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Racial integration issues are the entire point.

I guess. But I'd be pissed if it was the 1970s and my daughter had a perfectly good neighborhood school five minutes walk from home and instead she was being bused a hour from home. I can see why people have perfectly good (and perfectly non-racist) issues with such a process, and why they would move their kids to private or parochial schools, or else move to districts where this is not an issue.

It may be cynical, but almost nobody wants their children to be the pawns of some politician's grand social-engineering experiment, even if the intentions are good (perhaps especially if the intentions are good).
posted by theorique at 12:42 AM on August 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

And I am telling you that in the 1970s, my parents gladly signed up for their kids to be bused and gladly participated in social engineering because they wanted their kids to go to integrated schools. In the 1990s, when recent transplants from other places looked at the wild success of integration in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools and decided to sue for their kids to attend the schools of their choice without regard for integration, my parents and others like them stood up to fight for continued integration. Ultimately, they were unsuccessful, and the CMS schools are now de facto segregated like most public schools in the country. It didn't have to be that way, but at some point, America looked at integrated schools and collectively shrugged its shoulders. And as someone who attended integrated schools, I think that's a shame.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:17 AM on August 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

almost nobody wants their children to be the pawns of some politician's grand social-engineering experiment, even if the intentions are good (perhaps especially if the intentions are good).

And I am telling you that in the 1970s, my parents gladly signed up for their kids to be bused and gladly participated in social engineering because they wanted their kids to go to integrated schools.

So you've got one data point.
 
posted by Herodios at 6:18 AM on August 6, 2015

Well considering that CMS was one of the larger school systems in the country at the time, that busing was successful and popular for over 20 years, and that when the new people brought their law suit there were plenty of people who stood up to fight against it, my parents weren't the only people in the US who supported integration.
posted by hydropsyche at 9:12 AM on August 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Some other people whose parents cared about social engineering:

Ruby Bridges
Dorothy Counts
Elizabeth Eckford
Thomas Franklin Welch, Madelyn Patricia Nix, Willie Jean Black, Donita Gaines, Arthur Simmons, Lawrence Jefferson, Mary James McMullen, Martha Ann Holmes and Rosalyn Walton
James Meredith
Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes
Vivian Malone and James Hood

I think what my parents and other white parents did in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s in supporting their kids attending integrated schools was awesome. But I think this sneering at social engineering really does a great injustice to the black children and their parents who put their bodies on the line for the right to have integrated schools. Dorothy Counts' picture was burned into my brain as a kid. And it feels like spitting in her face (as was literally done back then) to just reject integration as inconvenient.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:59 PM on August 6, 2015 [3 favorites]

I had not had a chance to listen to last week's This American Life episode (transcript here) until today (the second episode broadcasts tonight). I was expecting it to be depressing. I was not expecting it to be completely devastating.

Please, whatever you think about public schools, whatever you think about integration, whatever you think about busing, set aside an hour to listen to this or read the transcript. And recognize that if you are an American, Mah'ria and the other kids from Normandy are our responsibility. And we have failed them.
posted by hydropsyche at 7:02 AM on August 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

hydropsyche, it's clear you had a good experience with busing but there are lots of people who have good reasons to be unhappy with busing ... from being forced to go to a school far outside their neighborhood, to the way that busing led to the boom in suburban sprawl and ultimately led to more segregation and hastened the decline of the central city, etc. Do you recognize that? It's not surprising that some people may feel it worked out well for them. But you seem unwilling to acknowledge that there's any possibility that someone else may have a valid objection to the practice based on their own experience. The fact that your experience was good doesn't decide the merits of busing all by itself.
posted by jayder at 7:07 PM on August 7, 2015

My opinion, supported by research, is that integrated schools are incredibly important to the success of students of color. My opinion, supported by research, is that giving up on the idea of integration because it is inconvenient or because white people want their kids to go to all white schools is doing a disservice to students of color and perpetuating the system established by slavery and Jim Crow. Do you recognize that?
posted by hydropsyche at 3:28 AM on August 8, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think people are conflating "opposed desegration via 'busing'" and "opposed desegration".
 
posted by Herodios at 5:09 AM on August 8, 2015

As noted several times in several links throughout this thread, the end of busing has meant the resegregation of America's Schools.

In the This American Life episode, they note that the peak of school integration in the US was 1988. I was in the 6th grade. I'm guessing some participants in this thread weren't even born yet.

Indeed, public will seems more determined than ever against integration, including in NC--that article cites a study that says that white parents don't want to send their kids to a school with more than 20% black students, in a state that is 27% black.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:20 AM on August 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Also, did you hear those parents in the TAL episode? Yes, some people oppose integration.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:42 AM on August 8, 2015

It's often been said that "the personal is the political", and this appears to be the case here. The (white) people in the TAL episode seem to be cast in the "bad guy" role but it seems like have been placed into a double bind. If they just roll over and say "OK", then their school gets an influx of 1000 new students from the worst school district in the state. If they resist, then they are the stereotypical inhabitants of an evil Southern sundown town in a bad '80s movie.

As a parent, what I want is the best possible education for my daughter. If that means homeschooling, fine. If that means integrated public school, fine. If that means private school, fine. Seems like that's what the parents in the TAL show want as well - regardless of whether they are white or black.
posted by theorique at 9:21 AM on August 8, 2015

Being the beneficiary of a historically racist system and wanting to hold on to those benefits while denying them to others makes you a bad guy.
posted by rdr at 10:41 AM on August 8, 2015 [5 favorites]

Assuming that the black kids from a different town are by definition violent and thus you have to have metal detectors installed if they are going to attend school in your town is racist.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:48 AM on August 8, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, they definitely could have expressed their concerns in a more politic and less clumsy way.

But here's a question: is it racist to view the surrounding school district of a $500K house as part of the "benefits package" that you purchased as part of that house, in contrast with what you would get with the school district of a $75K house? (And I'm not saying it is or isn't - just that property tax payers / parents in a given region do have a very personal interest in anything that is perceived to affect the quality of their local school.)

It would be interesting to see how house prices would have moved given the alternate-reality assumption of (e.g.) federalized equalization of schools, so that "good school district" was factored out as a decision point for home buyers. I wonder if anyone has modeled this effect?
posted by theorique at 3:34 PM on August 8, 2015

A recent article from the New York Times describing the housing side of the situation. Just as the wealthier (and more white) school districts don't want crossover with the poorer (and more black) school districts, the wealthier districts have a much smaller percentage of rental property that accepts Section 8 housing welfare vouchers, and apparently they aim to keep it that way.
posted by theorique at 4:49 PM on August 8, 2015

I admit that I just don't understand even the idea that buying a house gets you anything other than a house. Or that we as human beings and citizens of a country have no obligation to other human beings or citizens of a country.

Obviously, as others have mentioned at various times and places, including in many of the links in this thread, we need to eliminate the connection between local property taxes and school funding so that people no longer feel that purchasing an expensive house entitles them to better schools than people who cannot afford an expensive house (or schools that exclude people who can't afford an expensive house). I would also like to fix people so that they actually cared about kids other than theirs, but it seems like that is hopeless, so fixing school funding is a good start.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:13 AM on August 9, 2015 [2 favorites]