The Same Myths That Thwarted Busing Are Keeping School Segregation Alive
July 5, 2019 1:26 PM Subscribe
Brown v. Board of Education was sabotaged from the start. That busing has long been presented as an independent evil worthy of bipartisan resistance in both white and black communities represents the triumph of a false narrative packaged to excuse one of the ugliest and most destabilizing realities of American society: the extent to which raw racial prejudice and the protection of white supremacy have divided the nation since its founding through today.
Thanks for posting this. I had fallen into the trap of believing the "false narrative" (i.e. "it's the distance,") because I had a 90 minute bus ride to school, owing to being in a rural place - there was no integration program where I lived. I tried to learn more about this by posting on Ask a while back, and while it was eventually helpful, the thread was not without its (now-deleted) contingent of comments to the extent of "asker, you are a racist for posting this ask." So like, I hope people are able to learn from this post and I hope this thread doesn't end up dominated by shouty reductionists
posted by seiryuu at 2:41 PM on July 5, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by seiryuu at 2:41 PM on July 5, 2019 [4 favorites]
I was bused, in Pontiac Michigan in 1972. I was one of the kids affected when the anti-busing folks blew up the school buses.
My view is that there are three problems with busing or attempting to integrate schools via busing kids to other schools. The students, the teachers, and the parents.
The students, including myself as a 4th grader, hated it. I didn't want to go to school across town, I didn't want to go to a new school, and I wanted to go to school with my friends, the ones I'd lived nearby all my life.
The kids at the new school hated me as a newcomer, and because their parents told them to, and because I was white. I got told that, several times in the first few months.
The teachers hated it, because they had to deal with a whole bunch of new kids with which they had no history and who didn't want to be there.
And my dad and stepmother hated it. HATED it. My older sister and I were in a different school than our younger sister because it was 1st through 3rd grade at one school, then 4th through 6th at another. And we forced to be in this situation in the same year our mother died. For literally no reason other than a court mandate, and no exemptions were allowed.
My dad had been raised in the same neighborhood we lived in. He knew the teachers at the schools around us, because he attended them himself. But nope, we were going across town, to a school we didn't know, and to teachers he didn't know, to be with students who resented us.
So it's no wonder that we became, with many of our neighbors, white-flighters. We bailed out to the suburbs, where we kids would all be in the same school, there were no tensions caused by busing, and the opportunities were better.
It's awfully easy to look at a societal problem, derive a solution, and then implement it as a one-size-fits-all solution. But the education of a child isn't a one-size-fits-all situation or process. It's full of nuance and any educator worth their salt knows this.
I think the solution is NOT to move kids around school districts. The solution is to equally and fairly distribute educational assets to a community. Make sure kids get the same access as all the other kids. Make sure the finances are available to make it happen. And get the politicians and the courts out of the educational system.
posted by disclaimer at 3:44 PM on July 5, 2019 [16 favorites]
My view is that there are three problems with busing or attempting to integrate schools via busing kids to other schools. The students, the teachers, and the parents.
The students, including myself as a 4th grader, hated it. I didn't want to go to school across town, I didn't want to go to a new school, and I wanted to go to school with my friends, the ones I'd lived nearby all my life.
The kids at the new school hated me as a newcomer, and because their parents told them to, and because I was white. I got told that, several times in the first few months.
The teachers hated it, because they had to deal with a whole bunch of new kids with which they had no history and who didn't want to be there.
And my dad and stepmother hated it. HATED it. My older sister and I were in a different school than our younger sister because it was 1st through 3rd grade at one school, then 4th through 6th at another. And we forced to be in this situation in the same year our mother died. For literally no reason other than a court mandate, and no exemptions were allowed.
My dad had been raised in the same neighborhood we lived in. He knew the teachers at the schools around us, because he attended them himself. But nope, we were going across town, to a school we didn't know, and to teachers he didn't know, to be with students who resented us.
So it's no wonder that we became, with many of our neighbors, white-flighters. We bailed out to the suburbs, where we kids would all be in the same school, there were no tensions caused by busing, and the opportunities were better.
It's awfully easy to look at a societal problem, derive a solution, and then implement it as a one-size-fits-all solution. But the education of a child isn't a one-size-fits-all situation or process. It's full of nuance and any educator worth their salt knows this.
I think the solution is NOT to move kids around school districts. The solution is to equally and fairly distribute educational assets to a community. Make sure kids get the same access as all the other kids. Make sure the finances are available to make it happen. And get the politicians and the courts out of the educational system.
posted by disclaimer at 3:44 PM on July 5, 2019 [16 favorites]
Desegregation of schools is much more difficult, well, impossible today than back in the 70s and 80s. Since then whites have segregated themselves from minorities geographically, moving to completely separate political jurisdictions. Today only 15% of students in New York City schools are white. In Los Angeles it is only 10%. How can you desegregate schools in NYC or LA with numbers like that?
Today, segregation is more about economics. The affluent have segregated themselves from the poor.
posted by JackFlash at 4:30 PM on July 5, 2019 [9 favorites]
Today, segregation is more about economics. The affluent have segregated themselves from the poor.
posted by JackFlash at 4:30 PM on July 5, 2019 [9 favorites]
I think the solution is NOT to move kids around school districts. The solution is to equally and fairly distribute educational assets to a community. Make sure kids get the same access as all the other kids.This is known as "separate but equal," and it was rejected by the Supreme Court, because in practice separate is never equal. Also, people with resources generally don't want separate schools to be equal. They're all for equality in theory and possibly when it comes to baseline funding, but then they howl up a storm when you suggest that the PTA can't donate a computer lab to their kids' school or that they can't have fundraisers, the outcome of which will invariably reflect the greater resources of some schools' families and communities. (A few school districts pool the funds that every school raises in fundraisers, which inevitably enrages well-off parents, because why should the money they raise go to those other kids who don't do as good a job raising money. As if the outcome of your silent auction is merely indicative of your priorities, not your resources.)
Since then whites have segregated themselves from minorities geographically, moving to completely separate political jurisdictions.One solution to this is to have metropolitan desegregation plans that include both the city and the suburbs. It's harder to do that in some jurisdictions than others, and it might not be feasible in New York or L.A., because of distances, commuting challenges, and the fact that New York's suburbs are spread over several states. But it could work in a lot of smaller metro areas.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:51 PM on July 5, 2019 [22 favorites]
Today, segregation is more about economics.I would be really curious to know whether this was true. I suspect it's not, or at least it's not in any straightforward way. I could swear that I read somewhere that a middle-class black kid in America was more likely to attend a high-poverty school than a poor white kid was.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:53 PM on July 5, 2019 [5 favorites]
I wrote a couple of things and deleted them. When I was a kid going to integrated schools, it never occurred to me that in 25 years the schools I was going to would be resegregated and the Democratic party would be going out of its way not to offend segregationists.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:55 PM on July 5, 2019 [23 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 4:55 PM on July 5, 2019 [23 favorites]
One thing that some very rural districts have begun doing is putting wifi hotspots on their buses that serve junior high and high school students, especially as schools giving every child a device becomes more common. What results is a very quiet and well-behaved bus ride where most of the students are working on homework for the 60-120 minutes they're on the bus. Junior high students can usually finish all their homework on the bus; high school students can make a very solid dent. There is an expense to it, but districts that have done it have found those costs either offset by the massive reduction in disciplinary infractions and bullying on the bus, or worth it because of the increase in students completing their work.
Long bus rides can be a concern -- they're hard on students (especially elementary schoolers), and they often result in big increases is disciplinary issues and bullying. But technology has given us new ways to turn busing into productive time for students, and I think it'd be worth it for an urban district to try this for students it's busing across the district. Pie-in-the-sky education futurists also point to a self-driving future as a potential boon for integration by "bus" (/self-driving taxi) and for students with disabilities who need to attend particular regional schools.
(Also in general bus rides for all students are longer than they used to be -- in the 1960s, about 2/3rds of households had K-12 students and neighborhoods were a lot more dense, so many more students lived within walking distance of their schools and bus routes were a lot more compact. In 2019, around 1/3 of households have K-12 students, and neighborhoods are way, way, way less dense -- like in single-family detached home neighborhoods you used to have 12 or even sometimes 15 or more houses to an acre; now it's pretty common to have FOUR, while average household size has fallen precipitously as people have fewer children and less often live in multigenerational households. Which means more busing in general, and "long" bus routes can be really painfully long even in urban and surburban areas.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:07 PM on July 5, 2019 [9 favorites]
Long bus rides can be a concern -- they're hard on students (especially elementary schoolers), and they often result in big increases is disciplinary issues and bullying. But technology has given us new ways to turn busing into productive time for students, and I think it'd be worth it for an urban district to try this for students it's busing across the district. Pie-in-the-sky education futurists also point to a self-driving future as a potential boon for integration by "bus" (/self-driving taxi) and for students with disabilities who need to attend particular regional schools.
(Also in general bus rides for all students are longer than they used to be -- in the 1960s, about 2/3rds of households had K-12 students and neighborhoods were a lot more dense, so many more students lived within walking distance of their schools and bus routes were a lot more compact. In 2019, around 1/3 of households have K-12 students, and neighborhoods are way, way, way less dense -- like in single-family detached home neighborhoods you used to have 12 or even sometimes 15 or more houses to an acre; now it's pretty common to have FOUR, while average household size has fallen precipitously as people have fewer children and less often live in multigenerational households. Which means more busing in general, and "long" bus routes can be really painfully long even in urban and surburban areas.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:07 PM on July 5, 2019 [9 favorites]
In addition to Wifi, there need to be adults with authority on the buses to help stop bullying. Also the buses themselves should be more comfortable than the janky, smelly sardine cans of my childhood. Make them like luxury commuter buses with wifi and comfortable seats and kids can do their homework on them, as Eyebrows describes. I do wonder, in this day and age of most kids having extracurriculars, how that would work with bus commutes - would there be different buses at different times to take the kids who had choir or baseball or whatever for an hour after school?
Disclaimer's post also made me think that you can't just bus kids to a school, dump them there, and expect things to just work out. It needs to be a guided, facilitated process with teachers and administrators trained and on board. All kids deserve good schools that make a welcoming and nurturing environment. No "building character" or "toughening up."
This will require lots of money and it warms my heart to see Elizabeth Warren turning her gimlet eye to the pocketbooks of the 1%. Confiscate the Koch and Mercer wealth alone, and most of Betsy D's fleet of yachts, and we could have an education system on par with Finland's.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:29 PM on July 5, 2019 [6 favorites]
Disclaimer's post also made me think that you can't just bus kids to a school, dump them there, and expect things to just work out. It needs to be a guided, facilitated process with teachers and administrators trained and on board. All kids deserve good schools that make a welcoming and nurturing environment. No "building character" or "toughening up."
This will require lots of money and it warms my heart to see Elizabeth Warren turning her gimlet eye to the pocketbooks of the 1%. Confiscate the Koch and Mercer wealth alone, and most of Betsy D's fleet of yachts, and we could have an education system on par with Finland's.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:29 PM on July 5, 2019 [6 favorites]
As long as housing segregation exists, breaking the link between housing and schooling is necessary to integrate schools. And of course, the desire for school segregation is a major driver of housing segregation. Busing, or something like it, is one of the only ways to break that self-reinforcing cycle.
The status quo drives a lot of societal ills. Disparity between school districts drives up the cost of housing in the "good" neighborhoods, which further exacerbates the funding disparities between schools and negatively impacts families who feel obligated to move, increasing their housing costs, for the sake of those schools. Breaking the link between housing and schooling fixes more than just schools - it has the potential to fix cities.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 5:31 PM on July 5, 2019 [9 favorites]
The status quo drives a lot of societal ills. Disparity between school districts drives up the cost of housing in the "good" neighborhoods, which further exacerbates the funding disparities between schools and negatively impacts families who feel obligated to move, increasing their housing costs, for the sake of those schools. Breaking the link between housing and schooling fixes more than just schools - it has the potential to fix cities.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 5:31 PM on July 5, 2019 [9 favorites]
In Charlotte-Mecklenburg's integration plan, teachers were reassigned as well as students so that the faculty at every school was diverse as well. Some teachers grumbled, no doubt, but the intentionality of the plan was vital to its success (and it was very successful). There was also a policy in K-3 that the teacher and teacher's aide were of different races.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:34 PM on July 5, 2019 [12 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 5:34 PM on July 5, 2019 [12 favorites]
This is known as "separate but equal," and it was rejected by the Supreme Court, because in practice separate is never equal.
Almost.
There's a reason it's Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka and not of Columbia SC or Jackson MS or some other deeply segregated, enthusiastically oppressive city/district. Topeka had segregated schools that were separated but equal in pretty much any objective measure, except that they were segregated.
What the court decided was that segregation creates inequality by setting up a superior and inferior race, so segregated isn't equal and cannot ever be made equal.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:48 PM on July 5, 2019 [2 favorites]
Almost.
There's a reason it's Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka and not of Columbia SC or Jackson MS or some other deeply segregated, enthusiastically oppressive city/district. Topeka had segregated schools that were separated but equal in pretty much any objective measure, except that they were segregated.
What the court decided was that segregation creates inequality by setting up a superior and inferior race, so segregated isn't equal and cannot ever be made equal.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:48 PM on July 5, 2019 [2 favorites]
Oh, I also meant to say -- neighborhood schools are really nice and they're deeply embedded in the American system and they have a lot of advantages. But! Lots of countries don't do neighborhood schools at all AND THEY'RE FINE, they have good schools with little bullying and great school communities even though the kids don't all live in close proximity to each other. Our obsession with neighborhood schools in the US largely comes from the fact that when the Northwest Territory (and points west) were platted out, they planned for one school in every township, or 6x6 mile square (23,040 acres, or 576 40-acre farms). Lots of parts of the US still have school districts organized not by city or county, but by original-plat townships, which may encompass little bits of six suburbs, or zero rural towns but a lot of corn, or a small quantity of an urban metropole. County-wide school districts, school districts contiguous with a metropolitan boundary, and regional districts are the exception, not the rule. If they were the rule, school integration would be a LOT less complicated -- Charlotte-Mecklenberg's success with school integration has a lot to do with the fact that they were a countywide system. Durham's failures in the same era in the same state had a lot to do with the fact that there was a mostly-black city district and a mostly-white outlying-county district and the white outlying-county district fought successfully for a long time to prevent unification of the county into one district so they could maintain segregation by geography. (And even that is unusual because NC was well-settled by the time universal public school came into vogue so they have city-wide districts and county-wide districts like crazy, whereas in the midwest we're lousy with township districts that bear no relation to the actual human geography of the area.)
A lot of this is because Americans were the first country to say "free universal public education - fuck yeah!" and we built our entire system on spreading schools across a rural and "frontier" nation. But much of the rest of the world took our idea for free universal public education, but not our township platting with one school each as settlers moved in -- they just put schools where they made SENSE to put them, and they leveraged existing transit networks, and they're not nearly as beholden to neighborhood schools. Some municipalities in the US have been experimenting with abolishing neighborhood schools in favor of city-wide choice schooling, with mixed success (there is a group of forward-thinking Black superintendents deeply committed to integrated schools who have been studying and experimenting with these approaches in some mid-sized cities). But tying our school district taxing districts and attendance areas to 19th-century platting is not an unchangeable requirement! And other countries do quite well without it! Building citizen support for this kind of plan is VERY DIFFICULT because it will be a very large change (and people hate change), but it's a plausible future for American schools that some cities are exploring.
"In addition to Wifi, there need to be adults with authority on the buses to help stop bullying. Also the buses themselves should be more comfortable than the janky, smelly sardine cans of my childhood. Make them like luxury commuter buses with wifi and comfortable seats and kids can do their homework on them, as Eyebrows describes. I do wonder, in this day and age of most kids having extracurriculars, how that would work with bus commutes - would there be different buses at different times to take the kids who had choir or baseball or whatever for an hour after school?"
To these points, it is QUITE common to have a bus monitor on buses specifically to monitor bullying and misbehavior. In Peoria, these were often single mothers attending community college, and we would do our darndest to put them on a route that served their kid's school. The idea was, they'd bring their kid with them to the bus barn in the morning, ride with them to school, then work as a lunch lady midday, then ride the bus back to the bus barn with their kids. During the gaps in their schedule, they'd do homework and study for classes. (And we paid a substantial portion of tuition for employees.) It's also pretty common at the high school level to have an "activity bus" that takes kids with extracurriculars home at a set time when most extracurriculars are over. (They typically serve drop-off points rather than individual neighborhoods, so you might get dropped off half a mile from your home and have to walk.)
Regarding luxury buses, that isn't possible. School buses in the US and Canada are the safest damn things on the road anywhere in the world. Every individual seat is its own roll cage, and their uncomfortable closeness to each other and annoying height you can't see over provides spectacular protection for students in the very rare event of a flipped-over bus. Even the padding in the seats is optimized for safety. They must be inspected literally every single day, or they cannot go out on the road. For the millions of miles buses drive, accidents are very rare and fatal accidents so incredibly rare that they make national news, and every single bit of a bus is designed with that safety in mind. (Like your kids don't wear seat belts on the bus because if there's an accident, the roll cage seats keep them nearly as safe as a seatbelt, and the reduced speed in evacuation due to seat belts is more likely to lead to fatalities than not wearing one during a rollover or head-on collision.) School buses have to meet way, way, way higher safety standards than any other vehicle on the road; nice charter bus type buses are not nearly safe enough and cannot be made to conform to national safety standards required of school transport.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:01 PM on July 5, 2019 [38 favorites]
A lot of this is because Americans were the first country to say "free universal public education - fuck yeah!" and we built our entire system on spreading schools across a rural and "frontier" nation. But much of the rest of the world took our idea for free universal public education, but not our township platting with one school each as settlers moved in -- they just put schools where they made SENSE to put them, and they leveraged existing transit networks, and they're not nearly as beholden to neighborhood schools. Some municipalities in the US have been experimenting with abolishing neighborhood schools in favor of city-wide choice schooling, with mixed success (there is a group of forward-thinking Black superintendents deeply committed to integrated schools who have been studying and experimenting with these approaches in some mid-sized cities). But tying our school district taxing districts and attendance areas to 19th-century platting is not an unchangeable requirement! And other countries do quite well without it! Building citizen support for this kind of plan is VERY DIFFICULT because it will be a very large change (and people hate change), but it's a plausible future for American schools that some cities are exploring.
"In addition to Wifi, there need to be adults with authority on the buses to help stop bullying. Also the buses themselves should be more comfortable than the janky, smelly sardine cans of my childhood. Make them like luxury commuter buses with wifi and comfortable seats and kids can do their homework on them, as Eyebrows describes. I do wonder, in this day and age of most kids having extracurriculars, how that would work with bus commutes - would there be different buses at different times to take the kids who had choir or baseball or whatever for an hour after school?"
To these points, it is QUITE common to have a bus monitor on buses specifically to monitor bullying and misbehavior. In Peoria, these were often single mothers attending community college, and we would do our darndest to put them on a route that served their kid's school. The idea was, they'd bring their kid with them to the bus barn in the morning, ride with them to school, then work as a lunch lady midday, then ride the bus back to the bus barn with their kids. During the gaps in their schedule, they'd do homework and study for classes. (And we paid a substantial portion of tuition for employees.) It's also pretty common at the high school level to have an "activity bus" that takes kids with extracurriculars home at a set time when most extracurriculars are over. (They typically serve drop-off points rather than individual neighborhoods, so you might get dropped off half a mile from your home and have to walk.)
Regarding luxury buses, that isn't possible. School buses in the US and Canada are the safest damn things on the road anywhere in the world. Every individual seat is its own roll cage, and their uncomfortable closeness to each other and annoying height you can't see over provides spectacular protection for students in the very rare event of a flipped-over bus. Even the padding in the seats is optimized for safety. They must be inspected literally every single day, or they cannot go out on the road. For the millions of miles buses drive, accidents are very rare and fatal accidents so incredibly rare that they make national news, and every single bit of a bus is designed with that safety in mind. (Like your kids don't wear seat belts on the bus because if there's an accident, the roll cage seats keep them nearly as safe as a seatbelt, and the reduced speed in evacuation due to seat belts is more likely to lead to fatalities than not wearing one during a rollover or head-on collision.) School buses have to meet way, way, way higher safety standards than any other vehicle on the road; nice charter bus type buses are not nearly safe enough and cannot be made to conform to national safety standards required of school transport.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:01 PM on July 5, 2019 [38 favorites]
Anecdata:
Some years ago, I attended the high school graduation of my oldest niece on my wife's side in central Pennsylvania. This was in one of the few towns in that region that is reasonably well populated; there are a couple of high schools in the area, and this was one of them.
I went with my wife's immediate family, which included her brother and his youngest daughter via adoption, who happened to be African-American.
I looked around rather intently while we were there, because something stood out to me. After scanning the graduating class of around 100, the faculty, the band, the crowd on the bleachers and everyone else I could see there, there was one (1) African-American person there, and we had brought her.
We still have a little ways to go as a society.
posted by delfin at 6:24 PM on July 5, 2019 [3 favorites]
Some years ago, I attended the high school graduation of my oldest niece on my wife's side in central Pennsylvania. This was in one of the few towns in that region that is reasonably well populated; there are a couple of high schools in the area, and this was one of them.
I went with my wife's immediate family, which included her brother and his youngest daughter via adoption, who happened to be African-American.
I looked around rather intently while we were there, because something stood out to me. After scanning the graduating class of around 100, the faculty, the band, the crowd on the bleachers and everyone else I could see there, there was one (1) African-American person there, and we had brought her.
We still have a little ways to go as a society.
posted by delfin at 6:24 PM on July 5, 2019 [3 favorites]
The high school I graduated from, which, as I recall, had about 350 kids in its graduating class, had a single Black student in said class.
posted by maxwelton at 9:05 PM on July 5, 2019
posted by maxwelton at 9:05 PM on July 5, 2019
I love that my school wasn't all white.
I wish I hadn't sleepy all the time because I had to wake up so early to catch the bus in high school. Even driving there after I got my license took a long time.
I also kind of wish I hadn't felt so on edge all the time after the chaos of those anarchic bus rides.
I wish we could have just had people live in mixed neighborhoods.
posted by amtho at 12:13 PM on July 6, 2019 [2 favorites]
I wish I hadn't sleepy all the time because I had to wake up so early to catch the bus in high school. Even driving there after I got my license took a long time.
I also kind of wish I hadn't felt so on edge all the time after the chaos of those anarchic bus rides.
I wish we could have just had people live in mixed neighborhoods.
posted by amtho at 12:13 PM on July 6, 2019 [2 favorites]
Eyebrows, I just want to say how much I value your informed and thoughtful comments about all things school-related. They are wonderful. They are one of my favorite things about MetaFilter. Thank you for sharing them.
posted by kristi at 12:36 PM on July 6, 2019 [10 favorites]
posted by kristi at 12:36 PM on July 6, 2019 [10 favorites]
What the current discussion of busing shows, and what I saw of it firsthand in the 90s in New England, is that it's not enough to just develop a top-down solution, or even to develop and then implement a top-down solution: you have to sell people on that solution and get buy-in. There wasn't, and I'm not sure there currently is, enough buy-in to busing as a widespread solution to school segregation. Or at least there wasn't a few decades ago, and I'm skeptical that enough has really changed since then. Maybe it has; that'd be nice. But given the general direction of the country in the past few decades I think my skepticism is, uh, not totally unwarranted.
You can say "well, I don't think we should have to negotiate with racists" and that's a fine sentiment, but the country is demonstrably full of racists, at least to a definition of "racist" that includes "aren't going to willingly allow their kids to get bused to a different school for the purposes of furthering a desegregation policy", and they vote. More importantly—and again, demonstrably—they're willing to basically become single-issue voters on that issue alone, in elections at virtually all levels of government, from local school boards to Federal offices.
I mean, there are areas (as the article notes) where white people just literally stopped sending their kids to public school en masse, and started using parochial/religious schools instead, and good luck stopping that. The current Supreme Court is probably unlikely (to put it very mildly) to allow the Federal government to ban religious schools. Hell, right now the struggle is to stop having tax dollars rerouted to those schools via vouchers; they're not going anywhere. But even without vouchers, there's not an easy way to prevent people from pulling their kids out of public schools and then de-funding what's left, if they act in a coordinated fashion and vote as a bloc. It's a difficult problem, to say the least, and there are a lot of double-edged swords when you start looking at solutions (any policy that lets you ignore or override the expressed will of a large segment of local voters, is by definition going to be undemocratic, so... caution is advised).
Maybe busing can be part of the solution if there's enough of a bottom-up component, or if it comes with a carrot rather than just a stick (so that getting bused to a different school is something people want for their kids, instead of viewing it as a sacrifice to the diversity gods). Magnet schools seem reasonably effective; I can think of several well-funded magnet school programs (and not just STEM ones, either) where people from the suburbs compete viciously to get their kids into very diverse, urban schools, despite the long bus rides. That's just "busing" by another name—yet nobody bats an eye.
Just generally speaking, there's almost always no way to enforce a law on a population that's broadly hell-bent on not going along for the ride. All laws depend on voluntary compliance, with enforcement used to correct the odd misbehavior. Not even armies of occupation manage to exercise control entirely via coercion, it's just too hard. I don't think that the entire Federal government had the resources to implement busing once opposition to it started to mount in the mid-70s; the fact that opposition to "forced busing" became a bipartisan cause (awkward though Biden et al may find their stance now) makes it pretty clear that it wasn't going to be successful.
Sometimes a top-down application of force can be a solution. But it's not a solution that scales very well.
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:40 PM on July 6, 2019 [3 favorites]
You can say "well, I don't think we should have to negotiate with racists" and that's a fine sentiment, but the country is demonstrably full of racists, at least to a definition of "racist" that includes "aren't going to willingly allow their kids to get bused to a different school for the purposes of furthering a desegregation policy", and they vote. More importantly—and again, demonstrably—they're willing to basically become single-issue voters on that issue alone, in elections at virtually all levels of government, from local school boards to Federal offices.
I mean, there are areas (as the article notes) where white people just literally stopped sending their kids to public school en masse, and started using parochial/religious schools instead, and good luck stopping that. The current Supreme Court is probably unlikely (to put it very mildly) to allow the Federal government to ban religious schools. Hell, right now the struggle is to stop having tax dollars rerouted to those schools via vouchers; they're not going anywhere. But even without vouchers, there's not an easy way to prevent people from pulling their kids out of public schools and then de-funding what's left, if they act in a coordinated fashion and vote as a bloc. It's a difficult problem, to say the least, and there are a lot of double-edged swords when you start looking at solutions (any policy that lets you ignore or override the expressed will of a large segment of local voters, is by definition going to be undemocratic, so... caution is advised).
Maybe busing can be part of the solution if there's enough of a bottom-up component, or if it comes with a carrot rather than just a stick (so that getting bused to a different school is something people want for their kids, instead of viewing it as a sacrifice to the diversity gods). Magnet schools seem reasonably effective; I can think of several well-funded magnet school programs (and not just STEM ones, either) where people from the suburbs compete viciously to get their kids into very diverse, urban schools, despite the long bus rides. That's just "busing" by another name—yet nobody bats an eye.
Just generally speaking, there's almost always no way to enforce a law on a population that's broadly hell-bent on not going along for the ride. All laws depend on voluntary compliance, with enforcement used to correct the odd misbehavior. Not even armies of occupation manage to exercise control entirely via coercion, it's just too hard. I don't think that the entire Federal government had the resources to implement busing once opposition to it started to mount in the mid-70s; the fact that opposition to "forced busing" became a bipartisan cause (awkward though Biden et al may find their stance now) makes it pretty clear that it wasn't going to be successful.
Sometimes a top-down application of force can be a solution. But it's not a solution that scales very well.
posted by Kadin2048 at 4:40 PM on July 6, 2019 [3 favorites]
Today only 15% of students in New York City schools are white. In Los Angeles it is only 10%.
Jesus Christ, if ever there was a single statistic that manifested decades and decades of structural racism. Seriously they're just all in private school? Good fucking Lord.
I had an hour+ commute each way all through middle school and high school. Sometimes I did homework; mostly I decompressed. Lots of things in life are harder than that.
And you know what's bad for both kids and society? Fucking segregation.
posted by schadenfrau at 5:32 PM on July 6, 2019 [7 favorites]
Jesus Christ, if ever there was a single statistic that manifested decades and decades of structural racism. Seriously they're just all in private school? Good fucking Lord.
I had an hour+ commute each way all through middle school and high school. Sometimes I did homework; mostly I decompressed. Lots of things in life are harder than that.
And you know what's bad for both kids and society? Fucking segregation.
posted by schadenfrau at 5:32 PM on July 6, 2019 [7 favorites]
Seriously they're just all in private school?
This still works out to a pretty shameful percentage, but only about 25% of NYC kids are anglos.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:06 PM on July 6, 2019 [4 favorites]
This still works out to a pretty shameful percentage, but only about 25% of NYC kids are anglos.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:06 PM on July 6, 2019 [4 favorites]
I was part of an interesting experiment in Florida in the late 70's and early 80's where the approach to de-segregation was that *everyone* got bussed.
Kids went to one school for K-5, and most of these schools were neighbourhood schools, and smaller in scale. Then you were bussed to a "6th grade center" in another part of the city (in my case I traveled from a suburban neighborhood to an inner city neighbourhood) with only a small subset of the kids you attended elementary with. The 6th grade school had about 15 homerooms, and the whole school was a single grade. Then you got bussed to a different school for 7th grade, again with a different slice of kids (the bussing maps broke down my neighborhood so that even kids a few streets over might be at a different school). Then a 8th/9th grade school. Then a high school for 10-12th. Each one of these schools was in an entirely different part of the city. My 7th grade school was in the "projects", and my 8-9th grade school was in one of the most affluent neighborhoods. I rode the bus each day 40 minutes each way on average.
It seemed fairly disruptive and inconvenient in some ways, because it was hard to keep friends from year to year, and often the new friends you made lived literally on the other side of the city, so you couldn't see them easily after school or on weekends. But I credit this experiment with giving me exposure to a really wide range of kids and teachers from all kinds of backgrounds, and I learned to get along with a lot of different people. I would have been a different person if I had only mixed with kids in my own neighborhood (predominantly Air Force families) growing up.
Kids still mostly stuck to their cultural groups socially, but your classes, sports, and clubs were fully integrated. My high school was 30/30/30 white, latino, and African American. The incidence of bullying throughout my schooling was rare, because everyone had to make new friends nearly every year, so it was harder for there to be "in" and "out" groups. Probably just as important as racial spread was that there was a broad socio-economic spread as well. It's my view that we lost academically in the disruption of moving schools all the time, we gained in being more wise to the world around us.
I don't think this model is still being practiced, and has reverted to more segregated models, which is a shame. It would be interesting to revisit the kids who were part of this system later in life to see what effect it had (or not), particularly for those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. For me as a middle-class suburban kid, I know it opened my eyes (politically) and gave me an ability to be socially agile in my adult life. It certainly didn't hold me back.
posted by amusebuche at 7:30 PM on July 6, 2019 [9 favorites]
Kids went to one school for K-5, and most of these schools were neighbourhood schools, and smaller in scale. Then you were bussed to a "6th grade center" in another part of the city (in my case I traveled from a suburban neighborhood to an inner city neighbourhood) with only a small subset of the kids you attended elementary with. The 6th grade school had about 15 homerooms, and the whole school was a single grade. Then you got bussed to a different school for 7th grade, again with a different slice of kids (the bussing maps broke down my neighborhood so that even kids a few streets over might be at a different school). Then a 8th/9th grade school. Then a high school for 10-12th. Each one of these schools was in an entirely different part of the city. My 7th grade school was in the "projects", and my 8-9th grade school was in one of the most affluent neighborhoods. I rode the bus each day 40 minutes each way on average.
It seemed fairly disruptive and inconvenient in some ways, because it was hard to keep friends from year to year, and often the new friends you made lived literally on the other side of the city, so you couldn't see them easily after school or on weekends. But I credit this experiment with giving me exposure to a really wide range of kids and teachers from all kinds of backgrounds, and I learned to get along with a lot of different people. I would have been a different person if I had only mixed with kids in my own neighborhood (predominantly Air Force families) growing up.
Kids still mostly stuck to their cultural groups socially, but your classes, sports, and clubs were fully integrated. My high school was 30/30/30 white, latino, and African American. The incidence of bullying throughout my schooling was rare, because everyone had to make new friends nearly every year, so it was harder for there to be "in" and "out" groups. Probably just as important as racial spread was that there was a broad socio-economic spread as well. It's my view that we lost academically in the disruption of moving schools all the time, we gained in being more wise to the world around us.
I don't think this model is still being practiced, and has reverted to more segregated models, which is a shame. It would be interesting to revisit the kids who were part of this system later in life to see what effect it had (or not), particularly for those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. For me as a middle-class suburban kid, I know it opened my eyes (politically) and gave me an ability to be socially agile in my adult life. It certainly didn't hold me back.
posted by amusebuche at 7:30 PM on July 6, 2019 [9 favorites]
Hillsborough County and you lived in Brandon/Valrico?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:19 PM on July 6, 2019
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:19 PM on July 6, 2019
Alost nailed it, GCU. Hillsborough County. Town N Country. Do you know more about this? Until this thread, I never really gave much thought to whether this approach was outside the norm for southern schools.
And on further thought, kids I knew from the more affluent neighborhoods did somehow seem to escape bussing to inner city schools, though they didn't escape bussing altogether.
posted by amusebuche at 11:36 AM on July 7, 2019
And on further thought, kids I knew from the more affluent neighborhoods did somehow seem to escape bussing to inner city schools, though they didn't escape bussing altogether.
posted by amusebuche at 11:36 AM on July 7, 2019
I've never heard of quite that approach. In Charlotte, one common approach was to pair elementary schools in white and black neighborhoods and make one K-3 and the other 4-6 so that each group of kids was bused half the time. My elementary school was K-6 and was integrated by busing a bunch of mostly white farm kids and a bunch of kids from the north Charlotte housing projects all to a small mill town that was sort of integrated itself. The junior high and high schools were big enough that multiple elementary schools would all end up together and integration was then pretty straightforward and just took some creative line drawing.
posted by hydropsyche at 2:44 PM on July 7, 2019
posted by hydropsyche at 2:44 PM on July 7, 2019
Do you know more about this?
Nope. Just spent 81-85 in exciting Brandon, is all.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:01 PM on July 7, 2019
Nope. Just spent 81-85 in exciting Brandon, is all.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:01 PM on July 7, 2019
> Today, segregation is more about economics. The affluent have segregated themselves from the poor.
> I would be really curious to know whether this was true. I suspect it's not, or at least it's not in any straightforward way.
perhaps in democratic socialist/social democratic sweden?
colorado tried:
> I would be really curious to know whether this was true. I suspect it's not, or at least it's not in any straightforward way.
perhaps in democratic socialist/social democratic sweden?
Sweden is particularly striking. The country has, for decades, been hailed as the north star of social democracy. Yet the Sweden Democrats, one of the most aggressive far-right parties in Europe, has risen to poll regularly at close to 20 per cent of the vote, even though before the 2008 recession the party never came close to winning a seat in parliament, which requires a minimum 4 per cent of the national vote.> But tying our school district taxing districts and attendance areas to 19th-century platting is not an unchangeable requirement! And other countries do quite well without it! Building citizen support for this kind of plan is VERY DIFFICULT because it will be a very large change (and people hate change), but it's a plausible future for American schools that some cities are exploring.
Pippa Norris, the Harvard political scientist, is one of those who has asked, apparently rhetorically, how populism can have economic roots in successful social democracies... Sweden is not what it used to be, nor what it remains in the popular imagination of many outside observers... might it be economics after all, even in Sweden?
[...]
On what the study calls the “supply side” of politics, politicians for the Sweden Democrats are much more likely than in other parties (and indeed in the population at large) to be from the groups of people who have lost out to economic change — and the greater those losses are in a particular area, the greater the over-representation among Sweden Democrat politicians. On the “demand side”, voter support for the Sweden Democrats was strongly correlated across electoral districts with the negative impact of these economic changes.
Finally, economic loss led to reduced trust in government, including established parties, and even those with a policy to redistribute to the losers. This echoes a similar finding in Thiemo Fetzer’s analysis showing that support for Brexit increased more where the impact of UK fiscal austerity was greater: “dissatisfaction with political institutions as a whole increased” among individuals who experienced social benefit cuts.
What about values? Surveys show, unsurprisingly, that Sweden Democrat voters are strongly opposed to immigration. But the party’s vote share is not higher in areas with more immigrants, according to this study. Instead, it finds “a sharp increase in the support for the Sweden Democrats among anti-immigrant voters (compared to moderate anti-immigrant or pro-immigrant voters) after the make-work-pay reforms”. Illiberal values and ideology seem not to be a direct, independent determinant of how people vote, but something whose salience for their political choice is triggered by economic stress.
colorado tried:
BRUNDIN: Amendment 66 is predicated on the belief that a child's zip code shouldn't determine the quality of his or her education. It targets money at the kids who need it. Hickenlooper explains that high-poverty districts like Denver would get up to 40 percent more money per at-risk student because they're costlier to educate.posted by kliuless at 10:52 PM on July 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
HICKENLOOPER: And that money follows the kid. For the first time in the United States, if a kid drops out, the school stops receiving money from the district at that moment.
BRUNDIN: A big incentive, the governor says, for schools to keep students from dropping out. The driving force behind the measure is a young Democratic senator from Denver, Mike Johnston. He says districts with low property tax bases would get more state funding.
perhaps in democratic socialist/social democratic sweden?No, I was talking about the US. We’re dealing with a fairly specific legacy of segregation and desegregation, and I’d be surprised if there were direct analogs in Sweden.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:35 PM on July 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
that's kinda the implicit hypothesis: is sweden following in the US's footsteps?
yes, the US was founded on slavery, sweden wasn't, and through the relative rise of (still-segregated) democratic socialism in the US following the great depression, illiberal forces subsequently systematically dismantled successful and popular public 'new deal' programs afterward. so, could a similar (not identical) process be at work whereby a once-egalitarian culture, following destabilizing economic hardship, fracture along in-group (nationalist populist)/out-group (immigrant other) lines?
posted by kliuless at 1:26 AM on July 9, 2019
yes, the US was founded on slavery, sweden wasn't, and through the relative rise of (still-segregated) democratic socialism in the US following the great depression, illiberal forces subsequently systematically dismantled successful and popular public 'new deal' programs afterward. so, could a similar (not identical) process be at work whereby a once-egalitarian culture, following destabilizing economic hardship, fracture along in-group (nationalist populist)/out-group (immigrant other) lines?
posted by kliuless at 1:26 AM on July 9, 2019
It Was Never About Busing, Nikole Hannah-Jones
In other communities, school buses were considered a prized luxury reserved for white children. During my reporting, I have heard many stories of black children walking long distances to their assigned schools and being covered in dust by the passing big yellow buses — paid for with the tax dollars of black parents as well — that were shuttling white children to their white schools.posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:45 AM on July 12, 2019 [5 favorites]
The school bus, treasured when it was serving as a tool of segregation, became reviled only when it transformed into a tool of integration. As the federal judge who ordered busing for desegregation in the landmark case that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court said, according to the 1978 book “Nothing Could Be Finer,” “Heck, I was bused as a child in Robeson County. Everybody who attends school in North Carolina has been bused. Busing isn’t the question, whatever folks say. It’s desegregation.”
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Where did they move? The suburbs.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:51 PM on July 5, 2019 [9 favorites]