Wake County, North Carolina, is a place people like to live. People with ideas and energy. Folks from vastly different backgrounds. One of the most educated regions of the country, it boasts an excellent public school system where you can find superb schools in poor neighborhoods, and suburban schools where poor kids learn and play right alongside affluent peers.
But the Tea Party wants to change things in the place where I grew up. The Wake County school board, recently taken over by Tea Party-backed Republicans, has looked upon this much-envied school district and found it wanting. With a vow to defy "social engineers," the new members have thrown out the diversity policy that has allowed tolerance and hope to flourish in Wake County in a manner sadly lacking in other regions of the country. Why? Because, claim the new board members, poor children (often dark-skinned in these parts) are better off isolated in their own schools. John Tedesco, a new board member who hails from northern regions, dismisses the notion that such a plan could hurt minority children: "This is Raleigh in 2010, not Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s - my life is integrated."
Fair enough. But let me tell you what Raleigh was like in the 1980s, at the height of desegregation efforts. It was a place where Ku Klux Klan vitriol was recorded at phone numbers circulated among students at my elementary school. A realm where the N-word was dropped casually on the playground -- and not in a whisper. It was a world where wary looks -- and occasionally violent gestures -- passed between black and white students in the hallways. In this new world, children of different hues felt awkward and unsure of ourselves.
Broughton High School is the oldest in Raleigh, traditionally populated by the well-heeled southern families whose stately homes line the nearby streets. After busing, it became a laboratory were white country club kids and children from black housing projects attended class together. At times you might have thought that the black and white students existed in parallel universes, so little did we wander from our respective social circles. But since we couldn't avoid each other altogether, something else happened. Slowly -- sometimes painfully -- we began to get used to each other. At a party thrown at a rich white kid's house you might have seen one or two black students mingling in the crowd. And at a gathering hosted by black students in a housing project, you might have spotted a couple of whites. Hardly a big post-racial bear hug. But better than the unbreachable divide that preceded busing. It was progress.
At times the busing was hard and inconvenient. But children like me who dealt with people from all walks of life at an early age found ourselves better equipped to meet the demands of 21st-Century America when we grew up. Part of the reason that Wake County is such a great place to live, less marred by the racial tension that plagues other cities, is the long-cherished commitment to diversity that dared to dream that kids from different backgrounds could not only grow to accept one another -- but actually enhance each other's education.
In 2000, Wake County shifted the focus of its integration policy from race to economic status, taking on a new challenge that no school should have more than 40 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, the hallmark of poverty. Farsighted leaders understood that schools with large concentrations of poor children have trouble keeping good teachers, and that the quality of education diminishes -- along with students' dreams of a better future.
Shuffling and reassignments continued to vex students and families with the new policy. I know firsthand what these inconveniences are like, having attended seven different public schools, K-12. My parents didn't like to see me enduring long bus rides. But they knew that there was something happening in their city that was even more important than the inconveniences. A terrible and traumatic divide was slowly healing. And more children were getting a shot at the American Dream.
The David Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity -- the country's largest Tea Party organizers -- has a different way of thinking. The Washington Post's Stephanie McCrummen reports that when the group threw its support behind conservative school board candidates, it initiated a campaign against "forced busing" and branded the old school board members as dangerous leftists. Terry Stoops of the libertarian John Locke Foundation scoffed at the notion that schools should somehow reflect a city's diversity and dismissed those who wanted to turn them into "some socially acceptable melting pot." School board member Tedesco says he just wants something simpler, a plan in which kids can go to school close to home. If that means some kids end up segregated in high-poverty schools, well, maybe that's a good thing. "If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high-poverty, the public would see the challenges, the need to make it successful," he said. "Right now, we have diluted the problem, so we can ignore it."
You read that correctly. If we just segregate poor kids, we might do a better job of paying attention to them.
One of the most surprising results of the school board takeover has been the rushed appointment of Brigadier General Anthony Tata to the position of superintendent. This professed Tea Party fan, who has stated that Sarah Palin is better suited to lead the country than the current president, will be presiding over a school system whose population comprises one the highest concentrations of PhDs in the country. If the Tea Party can get a foothold here, it can do so anywhere.
Unless we protest and insist that a vital part of education is interacting with people who are not exactly like we are. Unless we remember that we learn to tolerate others by getting out of our narrow worlds. Unless we step up to our obligation to take a long-term view of how our schools are organized, recognizing the benefits of diversity and the danger of consigning students to homogeneous pockets of poverty -- or privilege.
Plans like those of the new Wake County school board have no place in our interconnected 21st-century world. The 20th century taught us that improvements to long-term social ills occur gradually and incrementally. But the 21st century is teaching us that it doesn't take nearly as long to turn once-tolerant communities into breeding grounds for hatred and mistrust.
Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.
In our city of 200,000, there is no forced busing. Instead, under a desegregation order, the city instituted a "freedom of choice" plan. There is a window of opportunity in February when you can choose the school you would like for your child to attend the next year. You can mark a first, second and third choice. Academies in poorer neighborhoods were established with special academic and arts programs to attract students from outside of the neighborhood. 98% of families were awarded their first choice in school; the remainder received their second choice. Not bad. Of course, along with that, if you did not choose your neighborhood school, you did not receive busing unless you were attending an academy that was out of your neighborhood.
This has kept the cost of busing down. My children never took a bus to school although they rarely attended the school within our busing area - our neighborhood school. Neither did they attend the academies.
This scenario seems to have been highly effective in our community. It is one that I would recommend. All of the schools are diverse in race, ethnicity and income level and all by the parent's choice.
Brown vs. Bd. of Ed. is not the only decision governing school assignments.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/01/31/v-print/1454250/public-silence-greets-poors-powerlessness.html
Except, you see, if you are poor, you can not move into a prosperous, high-income neighborhood. You don't have the money.
Please read the whole article before starting on your diatribe.
It's not racism just because minority advocates happened to not get their way about everything for once - it's called LIFE.
I mean, for instance, what about the people who live in the affluent areas who don't want ANY kids from poor neighborhoods attending schools their children do? Even if the rules are relaxed so that parents who WANT to bus their kids to other schools can, aren't you then "forcing" the parents who prefer segregated schools to have their children mingle with undesireds? Choice is an "ideal"...so what happens when a parents 'choice' to send their kids to affluent area schools bumps heads with an affluent parents 'choice' to not want their kids to attend the same schools??? Why should those parents be 'forced' to pick another school that's less integrated for their children that's maybe not in their district?
All that happened, however, was the teachers were so busy trying to babysit the remedial students that they didn't have time to actually teach anything to any of the students. The experiment resulted in test scores for the entire student body dropping drastically.
The point is that you can't force students to learn or be diverse and tolerant if they don't want to be. Forcing kids who actually want to learn and succeed to attend schools and classes with kids who have no desire to learn just takes opportunities away from the kids who want to actually take advantage of those opportunities.
Atlanta area schools actually have a program now which makes much more sense. If a particular school doesn't meet annual testing requirements, then parents of children in that school zone have the option of sending their children to a school which did pass the requirements.
The key is that the parents have an OPTION and nobody is FORCED to do anything against their will.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/brown.html
The implementation of the order required busing in many communities because of the segregation of the races in housing. Separate and Equal was specifically denied as possible in the case of education, ... the populations of students had to be made as homogeneous as possible to provide the same opportunity for equal education.
That was the judgment of the Court in 1954 and has been the Law of the Land since. Wake County is still subject to that, as are all districts in the United States.
You are welcome to take the issue back to the Supreme Court, if they will hear it. For now, this is the Law of the Land.