BinghamptonNed
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RE: The Mayor says no more annexations
(01-26-2018 11:56 AM)Latilleon Wrote: (01-25-2018 02:11 PM)macgar32 Wrote: What was wrong with the bussing plan?
What was the solution for people who couldn't afford private schools or moving?
I grew up North of the Mason Dixon so I really never knew anything about it.
Let's start with John Branston.
Quote:How We Got Here
From segregation to integration to disintegration in 40 years.
POSTED BY JOHN BRANSTON ON WED, DEC 1, 2010 AT 10:31 AM
The current brouhaha over city and county schools can be better understood by going back about 40 years.
By 1970, school integration had been the law of the land for 16 years, thanks to Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. But in the South, integration "with all deliberate speed" meant "slow." Memphis began integrating schools one grade at a time in 1961, but housing patterns and a liberal school transfer policy confined most students to de facto segregated schools.
Memphis City Schools reached an all-time high of 148,015 students in 1970. The black-white ratio was 52 percent/48 percent. The next year, two things happened: The U.S. Supreme Court approved busing as a desegregation tool, and voters rejected consolidation of city and county governments.
Two years later, all hell broke loose. U.S. district judge Robert McRae ordered Plan A, which was designed to bus 13,789 students to new schools. About 8,000 white students left the city system. Residents of Frayser buried a school bus. Private religious schools popped up. Determined that there not be a succession of Plans B, C, D, and so on, McRae ordered up Plan Z, which called for busing 39,904 students. Another 20,525 white students left the system, and an untold number fell through the cracks or avoided busing by temporarily moving in with friends or relatives.
The Memphis NAACP argued that Plan Z didn't go far enough, but the Supreme Court upheld it and refused to hear an appeal seeking further desegregation.
In a dissent from one of the federal court rulings, Federal Appeals Court judge Paul Weick wrote, "The average American couple who are raising their children scrape and save money to buy a home in a nice residential neighborhood near a public school. One can imagine their frustration when they find their plans have been destroyed by the judgment of federal courts."
Weick was right. After busing, the Shelby County Schools system, which had only 17,000 students in 1975, began growing to its current enrollment of about 47,000. Memphis City Schools began declining to its current enrollment of about 104,000. DeSoto County school enrollment rose to 31,000.
White enrollment in the city schools went from 48 percent to 7 percent, most of it concentrated in a half-dozen optional schools. Black enrollment in the county schools went from next to nothing to 37 percent. But if Southwind High School and its feeder schools in southeast Shelby County are absorbed by the city, as they are scheduled to be, black enrollment will fall below 10 percent because those schools are nearly all black.
The anomaly of nearly all-black schools in a 37 percent black system was not lost on U.S. district judge Bernice Donald. In 2007, she ordered the county schools to rebalance, but in 2009, she was overruled by an appellate court. The court said the school district has no duty to remedy imbalance caused by demographic factors, annexation, and "voluntary housing choices made by the public."
So school desegregation is against the law, but school self-segregation is not against the law. And self-segregation can be aided and abetted by the careful selection of school sites and the drawing of district boundaries, such as the eastern boundary of Southwind High School at Hacks Cross Road.
Southwind High is an outlier. There are black students in every county school, indeed in every private school. It is a very different world from the 1960s. The proposed Shelby County special school district would set firm boundaries but not exclude anyone from attending the school of their choice by moving around. Without a voting majority, however, there are few if any blacks on the county school board, suburban elected positions, or suburban districts on the Shelby County Commission.
The city system has a remnant of about 7,000 white students. An uncounted number of well-to-do Memphis residents with school-age children, including most of the movers and shakers, send them to private schools in Midtown, East Memphis, or Shelby County. They support the system and the growing number of charter schools with their tax dollars and, sometimes, their philanthropy but not with their children. As school board member the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr. has noted, the system is awash with money, more than $1 billion a year from all sources.
Forty years after busing was approved, we have resolved the issue of school desegregation as a legal and practical matter. We have a black system getting blacker and a white system that will get whiter when it sheds its black schools. With special districts and surrendered charters, all we're talking about is who gets the bills.
What was wrong with the busing plan? In my personal opinion, it hurt in two ways as the solution to ending segregation. Firstly, it took black kids from their neighborhood schools which had the problem of being underfunded and didn't provide the quality education that was given in white community schools. In theory you were sending kids to better schools instead of making their schools better. By taking kids from their communities, you had the effect of taking community pride away and neighborhood participation in the educational process. If your community is seven miles from the school the community's children go to, will people from the neighborhood go to football games, carnivals, and Honor Society ceremonies? The other side of it was causing white people to leave the schools where black children were going to be bused. This is why there was "white flight."
What's wrong with the busing plan? If the objective was to get diverse student bodies, why weren't white kids bused to schools in black neighborhoods?
Personally I believe to overcome segregation, the laws should have been removed that disallowed black children from attending all white schools, and funding should have provided to ensure black community schools had the exact same classes and programs that were offered at white schools in more affluent neighborhoods. They should have been required to build the same types of facilities (like gyms, cafeterias, and football stadiums). Take out the separate, but make them legitimately equal.
I don't know what poorer white folks who couldn't afford to move or send their kids to private schools did. My guess is they just went to their neighborhood school, or they sent them to live with family/friends. Maybe some where just home schooled if it was that bad to them. In the initial years of busing, there was diverse student bodies at the schools. But for future generations, white families wouldn't move to the communities where the neighborhood schools had black kids bused in.
BTW, I benefited from busing. I went to a school with more resources than if I had gone to the neighborhood schools. But though I benefited, I have ten peers who were not helped by getting more resources and were still separated from white students because our elementary school changed classes like high school and they separated by assessment test scoring. Because we were bused across town, it was difficult to participate in after school activities. And when we finished with elementary, the junior high was in the community so we ended up back were we started in the first place, at an all black neighborhood school that didn't have as much "stuff" as the junior/senior high school our elementary school fed into. Unless, like me, you transfer into an optional school.
Busing had another effect on me that I never really thought about. A subconscious effect. My habit when school was over was to hit the road as soon as the bell rang. I always left immediately because I had a bus to catch. Now when it was junior high, I was riding MATA, meaning I didn't have to immediately go. But I did. For the rest of my academic career. If I never had been bused, I would have probably gotten used to staying around school taking advantage of programs that I might have enjoyed.
(01-25-2018 04:30 PM)BinghamptonNed Wrote: Whatever happened to the proponents of busing? We they ever punished for the destruction they caused?
Were they in cahoots with developers?
How many went to jail?
How many lost their jobs?
I've always wondered but never heard the facts.
So you are talking about the people who sued so that nefarious proponents of segregation were forced to actually do proactive things to ensure black students received equal opportunity? So you want those people to go to jail?
You tell me Ned, should separate but equal be the legal standard, and not just the current(unofficial) standard?
(01-25-2018 05:52 PM)geosnooker2000 Wrote: But strangely, Fayette County did not. I mean, it grew, but not nearly to the extent that Desoto and Tipton did. I wonder why? Well, I think I might know why. Schools. The public schools in Fayette are horrible. Also, nothing of culture to attract those from the city who "wish" they could have stayed in the city. If you move to Fayette, it is because you love the countryside. At least, that's my impression.
Because Fayette County is far away from Memphis. Crittenden County had limited growth too because of having to deal with that bridge and the towns not being close to the river. I think Tipton County got people from Millington, Frayser, Raleigh, and Bartlett who were trying to escape property taxes and maybe consolidation.
Schools are what you make them. If people with money who worked in Memphis moved to Oakland to the extent that Oakland needed its own high school, I bet it would be flush with resources to make it an attractive school. It would probably be just like Arlington High School.
Money is really what makes a difference. No only can you pay for the school, you also have more influence on the elected officials who make the decisions if you can afford to fund an opposition campaign as well as move somewhere else.
Fayette County grew 33% between 2000 and 2010. And 13% between 1990 and 2000. It was flat 1980 - 1990. (For comparison, Tipton grew 37% 90-00 and 19% 00-10/Desoto grew 58% 90-00 and 50% 00-10).
so you think busing was a good idea?
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The Mayor says no more annexations
Excellent! Spread that word as far and wide as you can.
