That’s exactly how it worked in Delaware. The inner city kids were shipped out to the suburbs, to formerly better schools, and the suburban kids were shipped into the city, to the still worse schools. Culture clash and violence ensued.
And the rich kids went to private school, to get out of the firing lines. (Regardless of whether their parents were racist or not.)
Eventually Joe Biden heroically led the charge to eliminate that bussing white kids into the city part, and the private schools were augmented by magnet and charter schools, paid for by taxes of course, and the inner city public schools in less affluent neighborhoods were closed down, and replaced by private academies with policies that exclude poorer students who live next door.
So weirdly the bussing has never really stopped, except on paper. Now, the poor kids are bussed from inner city Wilmington to the 1960s era high school my kids attend, in suburban Newark. Some of them riding past the ultramodern Cab Calloway, Newark Charter and Wilmington Charter buildings en route! Meanwhile, more affluent kids take the “mom bus” to Cab if they can pass the entrance exams, or to Charter where there are no food preparation facilities (because that would mean they’d have to take kids on the School Lunch Program, which would let those underperforming poor kids in). If they can’t get past the entrance essay requirements, the rich go to Catholic schools (Archmere, in the case of Joe Biden’s family) even if they aren’t Catholic.
There’s a few outliers like my family (and heroic people like Principal Byron Murphy and the Red Clay School Board’s Adriana Bohm) who won’t conform on ideological grounds, but most people here who have any money send their kids to the privilege schools. Write a good essay or pass a math test and you’re in.
It’s open, state-sponsored discrimination against the poor, which is of course completely legal. The fact that it plays out as structural racism and actually provides a terrible educational outcome per tax dollar spent seems to generally be of no consequence when a parent is provided a choice between sending their kid to the best school or fighting educational and economic disparities that disproportionately harm people of color.
And now you know what “vouchers” is about, BTW, at least in my state.
