Big S/O from the charter school thread-segregated schools.

[Dmmetler]

While in grad school, I had the honor of working at this school. I taught 3/4 yr old preschool. I learned far more from the kids and the community than I taught. It closed soon afterwards-the old building could not live up to state regulations.

 

http://lubbockonline.com/local-news/2014-07-10/commission-recognize-east-lubbocks-historical-mary-mac-school#

 

The other thread diverging into neighborhood schools, busing and segregation brought back memories. I suspect my seeds of homeschooling and taking control of my eventual child's education were sparked there, in that tiny schoolhouse filled with children of parents who wanted more for their kids than the local community expected, many of whom had attended there as children.

[Arcadia]

There was self segregation right after the school board rezone the school boundaries. So far rezoning has happened twice. Renters affected either move to another school district, or switch to the county's charter schools or switch to private schools. My area probably wanted more than the school district is interested to give.

 

San Francisco had desegregation plans in the past but has partially resegregated.

[DawnM]

Can I ask what the bent of discussion is that you were going for here?

 

Is it a conversation about segregation or a thread about why we homeschool because local schools aren't good or how to make local schools better????  Not quite following.

 

All of the schools I have worked in were inner-city, so I am trying to figure out if the discussion is about the schools themselves or how to improve them.

[Farrar]

Anyone interested in the issues around segregated schools and busing should absolutely listen to the two part TAL about this from last year. It was incredible. Some of the best work TAL has ever done:

 

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with

 

The second part is linked at the top of the report.

 

I attended middle and high school in a school system exactly like the one that is the focus on the second part of the report (the county I grew up in is mentioned as one of the few that has successfully integrated schools). In other words, we (and I do mean we - my mother and I talked about it) chose to have me bused from our mostly white suburban neighborhood halfway across the county to a more inner city neighborhood next to government housing (and a prison - I remember when people used to escape and we'd have to go on lockdown) and attend a school that was majority black in order to access arts and enrichment programs. My high school was also part of that magnet program, though I wouldn't call it part of an inner city neighborhood, just a more heavily African-American one. There was no clear racial majority at my high school. 

 

While middle school was mostly a social hellhole for me, high school was incredible. And both provided me with a solid academic foundation. My high school was an incredibly good public school where I had a chance to take electives that I still think about to this day as having been better than some college classes. And as an adult, I'm deeply grateful to have had those experiences attended schools that were racially diverse. I know the focus of the data they're talking about is that it's good for the black kids, but it was good for me as a white kid. And it has been good for the real estate in the county - it has helped make all the neighborhoods more diverse. When you know you're buying into a school system, not a school, it helps increase diversity in zip codes faster.

 

Anyway, the experience made me pro-busing. Strongly. And the TAL explains why. I didn't read the other thread. Now I'm a little afraid...

[DawnM]

Anyone interested in the issues around segregated schools and busing should absolutely listen to the two part TAL about this from last year. It was incredible. Some of the best work TAL has ever done:

 

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with

 

The second part is linked at the top of the report.

 

I attended middle and high school in a school system exactly like the one that is the focus on the second part of the report (the county I grew up in is mentioned as one of the few that has successfully integrated schools). In other words, we (and I do mean we - my mother and I talked about it) chose to have me bused from our mostly white suburban neighborhood halfway across the county to a more inner city neighborhood next to government housing (and a prison - I remember when people used to escape and we'd have to go on lockdown) and attend a school that was majority black in order to access arts and enrichment programs. My high school was also part of that magnet program, though I wouldn't call it part of an inner city neighborhood, just a more heavily African-American one. There was no clear racial majority at my high school. 

 

While middle school was mostly a social hellhole for me, high school was incredible. And both provided me with a solid academic foundation. My high school was an incredibly good public school where I had a chance to take electives that I still think about to this day as having been better than some college classes. And as an adult, I'm deeply grateful to have had those experiences attended schools that were racially diverse. I know the focus of the data they're talking about is that it's good for the black kids, but it was good for me as a white kid. And it has been good for the real estate in the county - it has helped make all the neighborhoods more diverse. When you know you're buying into a school system, not a school, it helps increase diversity in zip codes faster.

 

Anyway, the experience made me pro-busing. Strongly. And the TAL explains why. I didn't read the other thread. Now I'm a little afraid...

 

 

Our city school district has done this, moved enrichment and magnet programs to the more inner city schools, to attract a greater diversity.  

 

I think if you are in one of those programs and you are with like minded people, who have a common goal, and want to be there, it is different than just saying, "Oh, I will send my kid to an inner-city school for the experience, even if he doesn't qualify for any particular programs or honors classes."

[Farrar]

Our city school district has done this, moved enrichment and magnet programs to the more inner city schools, to attract a greater diversity.  

 

I think if you are in one of those programs and you are with like minded people, who have a common goal, and want to be there, it is different than just saying, "Oh, I will send my kid to an inner-city school for the experience, even if he doesn't qualify for any particular programs or honors classes."

 

Absolutely. But I think if it's a question of how do we convince people to want to attend more diverse schools, then it's one good potential answer. The magnet programs where I grew up were strictly lottery based.

 

My step-sister attended a school with a similar program in a neighboring county, but she felt like they did a poor job of integrating the two populations (the magnet and neighborhood base kids) and she never had classes with them or knew them. The neighborhood kids couldn't really access the magnet programs easily. There was some of that at my experience, but not most... I think it can be done poorly too, I guess.

[Zinnia]

The county I grew up in successfully integrated.  I graduated in 1993, and it was sort of the pinnacle for desegregation, I think.  It helped that it was a small county with a decent sized population (121 square miles with 90,000 people).  At most, it takes 20 minutes from one side of the county to the other, so no one could make an argument against busing.  

That county has remained mostly desegregated in the schools, though there has been a good bit of white flight in the last 25 years.  The schools in the entire county try to maintain the same racial balance, though, which is good.  Small area helps that a lot.  The black areas of town and the white areas are very close, and they don't tend to be big enough to warrant separate schools.

 

The county I live in now is much bigger (700,000 people in 271 square miles).  That denser population means that when court ordered busing ended in the 90s, schools tended to go back to being majority one race.  The south side of the county tends to be black (most schools 99%), and the north end of the county tends to be white (over 50% white).  It takes 1.5 hours from one side of the county to the other, so busing is often fought.

But...I have a child going to a beloved program that was created out of the desegregation/busing court orders, and it has survived because it is so wonderful.  He has to catch a bus at a central pickup, then drive another 20-30 minutes to school.  For us, it's worth it.  But it's one of the few good things that remain out of the court orders.  Mostly, it seems to be an experiment that failed.

 

This is an interesting article, too.  https://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-the-resegregation-of-americas-schools/#intro

[DawnM]

Where we moved FROM, tried desegregation and kept moving the lines, etc......but they also didn't cap how many private schools could be built/started and the result was that over 30% of the population went to private schools (mostly white students.)

 

[Farrar]

You can't change the number of private schools really. Or the number of families choosing to homeschool. And the homeschool and private Christian school movements sadly owe a lot to desegregation. Both have other threads of cause behind them, but both were massively boosted by white families who didn't want their children to be in "that kind" of public schools. And by "that kind" they meant integrated schools. Not always (or even mostly) explicitly - but a lot of the perception that public schools were "too rough" or that academic standards were falling came out of fears of integration. :(

[Dmmetler]

If you didn't read the article, the school was a small, Black private school created in the 1950's to help kids get into local colleges, by a woman who was the first Black student at Texas Tech. Discussions of school segregation va neighborhood schools just brought back those memories. I have little doubt that, had charters existed in the 1950's, those parents and community would likely have taken that route if they could. Ultimately, they wanted a school for their kids, so they built it.

 

I've also taught in public schools where "neighborhood school" was used as a way to segregate along SES lines (which also often led to racial segregation), and it's night and day difference.

Edited July 31, 2016 by dmmetler

[Zinnia]

I live in a county with a school district that is 88% non-white.  The county alone is 64% non-white.  17 of our 132 schools are majority white, which seems nuts to me.  And 47 of them are over 95% black.  We are not inner city, but we are urban.  But the kind of urban with tidy houses on 1/4 acre lots and a 1-2 mile drive to any kind of store you want/need and traffic.  Lots of traffic.

 

Our school system is failing.  It's failing black kids, white kids, and brown kids.  It's failing all over the place, with a few bright spots here and there.  

 

But it seems so bizarre that such an easy fix is just "too hard" and so many people aren't interested in it.

 

And yes, we have small black private schools and small white private schools.  Large (mostly white) private schools.  Lots of homeschoolers.  Charter schools.  Magnet schools.  Lots of options.  But the one thing that likely will work the best seems to be off the table since court-ordered desegregation stopped in 1996.  Just bizarre.

Edited July 31, 2016 by Zinnia

[Arcadia]

The magnet programs entry in my district is by family interviews and whatever holistic method. No lottery. The magnet program that is hosted in one of the worst performing middle school does not have mixing. So same campus but as good as two schools. Kids in the magnet program on that campus has a t-shirt just for that program for use on field trips.

Also there are private achools that offer as well or better programs, so people who sent their kids to private in K-5 aren't attracted back to public for the 6-8 magnet.

Here there are about as many secular private schools as religious affliated private schools. My city is average size. My county is very big, about 2hrs drive from north edge to south edge in normal commuter traffic.

 

Bullying is what drove many to opt for homeschooling or online charter or public charter that gives stipends. Parents basically want to avoid B&M classes because of staff that pay lip service to bullying. We know a friend that had to log three police reports of his daughter being bullied at school for having a hearing aid after school did nothing useful/helpful.

[Pam in CT]

re easy fix being "too hard"

 

I live in a county with a school district that is 88% non-white.  The county alone is 64% non-white.  17 of our 132 schools are majority white, which seems nuts to me.  And 47 of them are over 95% black.  We are not inner city, but we are urban.  But the kind of urban with tidy houses on 1/4 acre lots and a 1-2 mile drive to any kind of store you want/need and traffic.  Lots of traffic.

 

Our school system is failing.  It's failing black kids, white kids, and brown kids.  It's failing all over the place, with a few bright spots here and there.  

 

But it seems so bizarre that such an easy fix is just "too hard" and so many people aren't interested in it.

 

And yes, we have small black private schools and small white private schools.  Large (mostly white) private schools.  Lots of homeschoolers.  Charter schools.  Magnet schools.  Lots of options.  But the one thing that likely will work the best seems to be off the table since court-ordered desegregation stopped in 1996.  Just bizarre.

 

 

I don't think I'd call integrating schools, particularly when resistance to integration is alive and well, "easy," but I take your point.

 

The other unacknowledged elephant in the room, that again isn't "easy" but which strangely virtually never comes up in discussions about differential school outcomes, is how schools are funded.  This is really stark in my state, which mostly funds education through local-level property taxes (see the third column here; which actually significantly understates the per pupil discrepancies since the wealthier towns also have 501c3's alongside the public budget, which literally fund whole salaries and whole programs but which do not run through the public budgets).  In other nations, education is funded at more aggregated (national or provincial) levels, so there is much less school-by-school variance in -- for example -- how much teachers are paid (as one starting point from which many other factors follow).

[Guest]

I am in an officially diverse part of the country. The issue we have is that full integration combined with the lowered standards of common core mean that middle class kids and gifted of all socioeconomics are spinning their wheels academically. The material is not in their zpd and they get into mischief consequen tly. Then, because they end up with high gpas, they get their butts kicked in college as they realize how far behind their socioeconomic peer group they are. The parents who arent drinking the koolaid afterschool like crazy. The hostility toward the academically capable is beyond belief. Those kids are told to grad in three with no honors/ap level classes....hardly sufficient prep for flagship state u, but if they are gifted they will just go on the 5 year plan, retaking freshman chem, physics etc as they compete on the curved grading plan with students from schools like Bronx High School of Science.

 

Eta when we were an IB/AP school, our nongifted grads were doing well academically.IB was open to all who were willing to do the work.

Edited July 31, 2016 by Heigh Ho

[DawnM]

You can't change the number of private schools really. Or the number of families choosing to homeschool. And the homeschool and private Christian school movements sadly owe a lot to desegregation. Both have other threads of cause behind them, but both were massively boosted by white families who didn't want their children to be in "that kind" of public schools. And by "that kind" they meant integrated schools. Not always (or even mostly) explicitly - but a lot of the perception that public schools were "too rough" or that academic standards were falling came out of fears of integration. :(

 

CA has had some strict regulations on the numbers of schools that were non-public.  Some of those regulations have included the numbers of non-public school allowed for any given area.  Now, you can certainly go outside of your city and go elsewhere, but there are cities who have caps on how many are allowed.

 

I am well aware of the reasons, as I said, I worked in the inner-city for over 16 years in LA.  I am now going into the worst high school in my current area (according to test scores, news, etc...)

 

And there are rough schools where even the parents of those attending wish they didn't have to send their kids there.  I would not send my kids there unless I seriously had no other choice.  I am not going to make apologies for that.  I have attended more than a dozen student funerals, only one of those was from something medical.  The rest were gang violence related.

 

The charter my son went to was actually far more diverse and lower performing than our local school.  We CHOSE it partly for that reason.  However, we can no longer provide transportation for him, so he will be going to our local school, highly rated, and over 90% white.  I would prefer it to be more racially diverse but would not like it to be inner-city, if that makes sense.  There is a difference.  People who say they desire diversity or want more diversity rarely mean they want schools full of gang violence.

Edited July 31, 2016 by DawnM

[Farrar]

The magnet programs entry in my district is by family interviews and whatever holistic method. No lottery. The magnet program that is hosted in one of the worst performing middle school does not have mixing. So same campus but as good as two schools. Kids in the magnet program on that campus has a t-shirt just for that program for use on field trips.

 

Good grief. What an absurd situation. Why bother to put the magnet school in an inner city school then? You're not helping the kids at that school, which ought to be part of the point.

[Guest]

Is this regional? Or am I just too young? I'm don't recall this ever being much of a discussion in the San Diego district I attended as a kid. We didn't even have school buses except for field trips - it was walking/driving by parents or a subsidized public bus pass. I think back to east and in the south it was a big deal but integration isn't something I'm culturally familiar with - positive or negative. My schools were always fairly mixed and reflected the local demographics, as one would expect.

Edited July 31, 2016 by Arctic Mama

[DawnM]

Is this regional? Or am I just too young? I'm don't recall this ever being much of a discussion in the San Diego district I attended as a kid. We didn't even have school buses except for field trips - it was walking/driving by parents or a subsidized public bus pass. I think back to east and in the south it was a big deal but integration isn't something I'm culturally familiar with - positive or negative. My schools were always fairly mixed and reflected the local demographics, as one would expect.

 

Very surprised by that.  I came from Los Angeles and it was a huge issue.   

 

In SD, it is def. an issue now.  Just google and you will find a lot of articles about it.

 

Here is an article about how it was in the late 70s and 80s. 

 

 

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/no-school-district-in-the-country-has-ever-done-it/

[Arcadia]

Good grief. What an absurd situation. Why bother to put the magnet school in an inner city school then? You're not helping the kids at that school, which ought to be part of the point.

It helps bring that under performing school's state standardized scores up :(

[Farrar]

It helps bring that under performing school's state standardized scores up :(

 

Ugh. It's like, let's fix the problem without fixing the problem. Boo.

[MistyMountain]

After watching a documentary that explored drugs and bad neighborhoods I looked up reports on why bad neighborhoods that did not have many whited people formed. Before the civil rights laws in many parts of the country there were all black neighborhoods but these neighborhoods were functional. They had people of all classes and community organizations and strong churches. Afterwards there was a flight of the people that were middle class or above and the community organizations went with them. Real estate practices also began blacklisting these neighborhoods and you could no longer buy houses and it became mostly rentals. Highways often cut through these neighborhoods and made it harder to get to jobs. The people that were left had a hard time finding jobs, they were all poor and their was nothing left in the neighborhood so drugs became a way for people without jobs to make money.

 

I do not think forced bussing is a magic fix but I do like the idea of trying to put better housing that people own, better access in and out, more businesses, community organizations and attractive schools that the kids in the neighborhood and kids in wealthier neighborhoods will both be attracted to will help.

Edited August 1, 2016 by MistyMountain

[MistyMountain]

Is this regional? Or am I just too young? I'm don't recall this ever being much of a discussion in the San Diego district I attended as a kid. We didn't even have school buses except for field trips - it was walking/driving by parents or a subsidized public bus pass. I think back to east and in the south it was a big deal but integration isn't something I'm culturally familiar with - positive or negative. My schools were always fairly mixed and reflected the local demographics, as one would expect.

I know that it was big in LA because I know people who grew up in LA and experienced desegregation. In the area I grew up in on the East Coast my siblings and I did not experience desegregation but the schools were not very diverse. There definitely were mostly white and Asian neighborhoods and mostly minority neighborhoods. It is still like that today.

Edited August 1, 2016 by MistyMountain

[Farrar]

I was thinking about the link in the OP... I wonder sometimes if it hurts the cause of integration to hold up these certain schools that manage to do great work in segregated environments. It says, look, *this* school managed to be successful with a poor, non-white population. Therefore we don't need integration. But the studies seem to suggest that integration is better for students overall. The success of a lot of these schools that are founded around a charismatic leader or that have managed to develop an atypically strong community are hard to recreate and don't have any "magic bullet" to them. But integration is much closer to that magic bullet for kids. Not that I don't think those shining examples shouldn't be lauded. Just musing...

 

I was also thinking about how the changing demographics of the inner cities are probably changing the face of this problem. I'm guessing that it's becoming that certain suburban schools are increasingly segregated.

[SKL]

Our city school district has done this, moved enrichment and magnet programs to the more inner city schools, to attract a greater diversity.  

 

I think if you are in one of those programs and you are with like minded people, who have a common goal, and want to be there, it is different than just saying, "Oh, I will send my kid to an inner-city school for the experience, even if he doesn't qualify for any particular programs or honors classes."

 

Right - in the district where I attended elementary school, they had magnet schools on the "east side" (mostly black neighborhoods) before busing even started.  They still do.  Wonderful schools from what I hear.  But the same cannot be said of the non-magnet schools in the same area.  Because the outlook of the students, the % who actually want to be there, is so different.

 

FTR I attended a diverse high school - we had moved and it was the only public high school, and a good school, so nearly everyone sent their kids there.  It took about 10 seconds to get used to it, and some of my best friends were AA.  That was natural as the school system had never been segregated in the first place.

Edited July 31, 2016 by SKL

[SKL]

In my observation in my little corner of the world, there was one benefit to school desegregation.  The neighborhoods that used to be all one color are now more mixed.  People did get more used to the idea that people of the other color aren't fundamentally different.

 

I have always felt they went about it the wrong way where I lived.  Most people were not against desegregation per se.  They weren't afraid of putting their kids in diverse classrooms, in a safe school.  But, they should have closed the worst schools.  They should have phased in busing starting with kids who were old enough to be away from Mom, but young enough to not be hardened racists.  (This would have prevented some of the violence that scared so many people out of the district.)  It still would not have been "easy," but it might not have been an unmitigated disaster.

[bettyandbob]

I was in a school that was required to bus to integrate. In my case African American dc were bussed to my school. It's not like we were a wealthy school. The vast majority of families were blue collar. There was one family where both parents were doctors and they had a maid (I was in first grade so I just thought that family was weird). There were a few African American dc at the school already, but only a few.

 

The bussing started in second grade. Looking back I think the kids who rode the busses hated it. Suddenly they were out of their own school and they had to come to this place. It wasn't a real happy year at all. Third grade was better, however I didn't stay at the school because my parents had a dispute regarding instruction.

 

We moved from there a couple years later to a fully integrated area -- integrated racially and SES. No bussing for integration in the new area, just plain old bussing because schools were too far to walk.

[SKL]

To the point of the OP, I really enjoyed the book Marva Collins' Way, which is another example of an AA-run school for AA children in families that seek excellence.  Unfortunately that school also eventually failed due to lack of funding IIRC.

 

The person who gave me that book was Marva Collins' daughter.  We were working together on setting up another inner-city charter which hopes to inspire kids and communities.  There are many similar projects around the country.  I think it's a shame that the idea of charter schools is so politically charged.  There are some great ideas there and I think they deserve support.

[Farrar]

I got caught in Denver's forced busing in the early 70's. At my school, it was still optional, but my roommates in college were in schools where it was forced. It was a disaster--there were riots and my friends barely graduated. In my case, we were on split session, so started school at 0700. So wait--the kids were supposed to get on the bus at 0530? Understandably, few of them did. And then they couldn't do sports as the school bus left at 1215. There was no public transportation, so that wasn't an option. I was glad I graduated when I did, as the next year the school was bombed. Interestingly enough, my old neighborhood is now almost completely Latino, no longer white. Because of the forced busing, the whites moved to the suburbs and left the Denver Public Schools altogether. So, all the money and heartache was for naught. Denver is the classic failed ps system: failing Inner city schools, with mostly minority kids, ringed by white suburbs with some of the best ps in the country. 

 

It's stories like these that make me think you catch more flies with honey though. I did choose to take the bus that early to get to school as a kid and be bused. Because the programs they poured into the school made it worth it. And then the result is that property values become less attached to single schools. Districts don't choose to do it, but it can be done.

[Farrar]

DPS didn't do anything other than dump unprepared kids into schools far above their educational level. These were kids whose parents thought they were doing well--they were at THEIR schools. But, compared to the new school, where 90% went on to college, they floundered. They were coming out of schools where the dropout rate was 40%, so just staying in looked pretty good. My high school was very tracked. I remember looking at my yearbook and thinking, "Did I even GO to school with these kids?" If you were an academic kid, you spent most of your time on the 4th floor for the high academics. Rarely did we hit another floor, except for the basement for music. Looking back, we were even tracked as to where our lockers were. It was almost a school within a school. So, the bused kids were put into the tracks they "should" be based on their grades. And within a few weeks, they were failing everything. So, they were put down into the 2nd and 3rd floor kids' track. The parents that moved heaven and earth to get their kids into the good school found that they were shunted off. The kids were cheated. White flight really began, taking the most-prepared kids, with the concerned parents, out of DPS altogether. And thus, you have DPS now. 

 

The statistics overall belie this.

 

From the transcript of that TAL I linked above:

 

 

 

Ira Glass

What she noticed was that it never worked. I mean, like, never. The bad schools never caught up to the good schools. And the bad schools were mostly black and Latino. The good schools were mostly white.

And sure, there might be a principal here or a charter school there who might do a good job improving students' scores, but even there, they were just improving their student scores. The minority kids in their programs were still not performing on par with white kids. They hadn't closed the achievement gap between black kids and white kids.

Nikole Hannah-jones

And my question is, all of these different ways that we say we're going to address this issue aren't working, so what actually works? And that's what I really began to look at. And I find there's one thing that really worked, that cut the achievement gap between black and white students by half.

Ira Glass

By half?

Nikole Hannah-jones

By half. But it's the one thing that we are not really talking about, and that very few places are doing anymore.

Ira Glass

That thing that is so effective but never discussed is not one of the tools that educators reach for normally. Can you guess?

Nikole Hannah-jones

Integration.

Ira Glass

You mean just integrating schools? It was getting black kids and white kids together in the same schools.

Nikole Hannah-jones

Yes.

Ira Glass

Old fashioned, Brown versus Board of Education, 1954 technology, loading kids on buses?

Nikole Hannah-jones

That's right. Actually, what the statistics show is that between 1971, which is where the nation really started doing massive desegregation, and 1988, which was the peak of integration in the United States-- 1988 was the peak--

Ira Glass

School integration, you mean?

Nikole Hannah-jones

School integration, yes. Well, the data shows that kind of the start of real desegregation, the achievement gap between black and white students was about 40 points.

Ira Glass

In other words, on standardized reading tests in 1971, black 13-year-olds tested 39 points worse than white kids. That dropped to just 18 points by 1988 at the height of desegregation. The improvement in math scores was close to that, though not quite as good.

And these scores are not just the scores of the specific kids who got bussed into white schools. That is the overall score for the entire country. That's all black children in America-- halved in just 17 years.

When I asked Nikole if that was fast, she said, well, black people first arrived on this continent as slaves in 1619. So it was 352 years to create the problem. So yeah, another 17 to cut that school achievement gap in half, pretty fast.

Nikole Hannah-jones

And so if you kind of picture that out, if we had kept going when we had cut it by half, I don't know that we would have eliminated it totally, because there's a long history here. But you could see where we would have been, like, so close to eliminating it. But instead, since 1988, we have started to re-segregate. And it is at that exact moment that you see the achievement gap start to widen again.

 

I'm also not sure what you mean about being lower than the Jewish kids' school. What does that even mean? Why be embarrassed by that? Because the Jewish kids were "worse" for some reason? 

Edited July 31, 2016 by Farrar

[Farrar]

For anyone who's interested but doesn't want to listen to the whole TAL series I linked (I know, it's long...) this is another bit from the transcript, also right at the start in the introduction, that interested me. The lead reporter for the piece, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is black, and was the product of busing herself. She said:

 

 

But I didn't really understand until I started covering education that we were part of a desegregation program. And one of the things that has been challenging as I write these stories is knowing that busing, for me, was actually very hard. We had to get up really early.

But also we were being taken out of our community into someone else's community, where not only was it a white community, but it was a wealthy community. And I was coming from a very black, working class community. And so socially, it was very difficult. You just never felt like you belonged or it was your school. I had friends, and I could go to their house, but they couldn't come to mine.

And there was this time when I was in middle school, there was a pool on our side of town. And there was another pool on the other side of town. And we used to always go to the pool on the white side of town.

And one day I was like, hey, guys, why don't you come to my house, and we can go to the pool on my side of town? And all my white friends were like, yeah, we're going to do it.

And then that morning, one by one, they called and said they couldn't come. And to this day, that devastates me. I'll never forget how that felt, because I knew why. I knew why they did that.

Ira Glass

What did they say?

Nikole Hannah-jones

They just said, oh, our mom said we can't come. But you can come over here-- every last one of them.

I mean, that's the thing. We somehow want this to have been easy. And we gave up really fast. I mean, there was really one generation of school desegregation.

There's a lot of data that shows that black students going through court-ordered integration, it changed their whole lives. They were less likely to be poor. They were less likely to have health problems. They live longer. And the opposite is true for black kids who remained in segregated schools.

Ira Glass

It's so funny how you say, well, how do we know that integration works? Like you're saying kind of like, well, you know from the evidence of your own life.

Nikole Hannah-jones

I know from my own life. And now being able to look at the longitudinal data on it, realizing that, yes, I am living the life that the data says you live when you have opportunity to go to integrated schools.

 

Edited July 31, 2016 by Farrar

[Farrar]

Just that we weren't rated #1. That's all. Not that they were good or bad, but that our school wasn't rated as well. We took a lot of good-natured joshing over it. Maybe you didn't have cross-town rivalry in your town. 

 

I was just stating what happened at MY school with forced busing. It didn't help the kids bused into MY school. Our school didn't do anything to ease the transition. The kids that chose to be bused that first year (when it was still optional) did not have a good senior year. And the kids who were forced to bus the next year didn't have a good year. Perhaps there were some life-changing experiences 20 years on down the line, but if you look at the test scores, etc. across the DPS now, the system is failing. 

 

I know that my school was turned into an IB school (not sure is still is) but looking at their test scores, it's not working. 5% of the kids are testing as proficient or better in Algebra I. That indicates to me that the school is not doing well. For all the money spent years ago, the school is just as segregated as it was. Only instead of being 90% white, now it's the other way. I know there was some talk (years ago) of forcing busing across school district lines. I'm not sure they could have gotten away with that, but it all went down in a lawsuit anyway. Denver's a hard town--it's so sprawled out that it's not feasible to bus to another school because it would mean so many hours on a bus. Denser cities are easier--not as far to travel. 

 

I see.

 

I guess my point though is that we all said, because people were uncomfortable and there were battles and people pulled their kids out that "it didn't work" but the data suggests that that's an emotional reaction. You think it didn't work in your district, but the reality is that your district probably wasn't some big exception. It probably did work. And it probably was uncomfortable for everyone. And then they pulled back. And in pulling back, they said, "it didn't work." Because that's the narrative of school integration everywhere in America. Yet, the statistics seem to belie that. They tell us that our emotional reaction is wrong.

[kubiac]

Could someone please point me to the original charter school thread? Thank you!

 

Also, signifying nothing, apparently the most "ideally" diverse school in all of LAUSD is a school in West L.A. that's a Mandarin immersion charter, but apparently the "average kid in LAUSD goes to a school where 83.9% of students are of the same ethnic background."

 

https://schooldatanerd.com/2016/06/22/how-diverse-is-your-school/

Edited August 1, 2016 by kubiac

[Bluegoat]

I find the whole idea of bussing kids in order to create desegragated schools really odd - I mean, I understand how it came to be historically in the US, but it seems a$$-backwards to me, and so likely to be counter-productive. 

But - I am a strong believer in community schools being an important part of education, especially through the elementary school years, and I'm not convinced that more racially diverse schools actually mean the kids in them will be developing better attitudes about race.

 

What might be the closest similar thing in Canada is integrations of some First Nations communities with local schools, where it was possible to do so.  THis actually seems to be something that has become less popular - many of the communities where that happened  have returned to local schools within the First Nations community in question.

 

[Farrar]

I attended a "neighborhood" school for one year of my thirteen years of schooling. It was okay, I guess. But it ranks pretty low overall in my schooling experiences. And it didn't help the "neighborhood" feel more friendly or welcoming to my family. Or more together and community oriented.

 

My parents sent me to a private school so we could avoid the "neighborhood" school when I was in most of elementary school. That's because the "neighborhood" school was full of racists. It was an all white county.

 

I have just never quite become enamored with this whole American "neighborhood" school business. You know what was awesome? My diverse, well-funded, academically challenging, classically influenced, bused kids school where I met kids from all over the county and got up at the crack of dawn to attend.

[idnib]

The other unacknowledged elephant in the room, that again isn't "easy" but which strangely virtually never comes up in discussions about differential school outcomes, is how schools are funded.  This is really stark in my state, which mostly funds education through local-level property taxes (see the third column here; which actually significantly understates the per pupil discrepancies since the wealthier towns also have 501c3's alongside the public budget, which literally fund whole salaries and whole programs but which do not run through the public budgets).  In other nations, education is funded at more aggregated (national or provincial) levels, so there is much less school-by-school variance in -- for example -- how much teachers are paid (as one starting point from which many other factors follow).

 

It varies by state, you can read about CA here. There are definitely districts in CA where they residents pay more in property taxes but receive less money. Robles-Wong v California was a lawsuit related to this topic, although it was later combined with another lawsuit and in the end the plaintiffs lost earlier this year.

 

To the point of the OP, I really enjoyed the book Marva Collins' Way, which is another example of an AA-run school for AA children in families that seek excellence.  Unfortunately that school also eventually failed due to lack of funding IIRC.

 

I agree about the book. I read it every few years.

[Bluegoat]

I attended a "neighborhood" school for one year of my thirteen years of schooling. It was okay, I guess. But it ranks pretty low overall in my schooling experiences. And it didn't help the "neighborhood" feel more friendly or welcoming to my family. Or more together and community oriented.

 

My parents sent me to a private school so we could avoid the "neighborhood" school when I was in most of elementary school. That's because the "neighborhood" school was full of racists. It was an all white county.

 

I have just never quite become enamored with this whole American "neighborhood" school business. You know what was awesome? My diverse, well-funded, academically challenging, classically influenced, bused kids school where I met kids from all over the county and got up at the crack of dawn to attend.

 

Neighbourhood schools isn't a particularly American thing.  Rather the opposite, I'd say, it seems to be much less emphasised there than in some other places.