That was done, too.
I’ve known some of these white kids.
You might want to talk to them.
Before you do, ask yourself a question: which white kids do you think got put on the busses?
3 Likes
My experience in Texas was that, for whatever reason, White/Tejano/Hispanic forced-integrations tended to have fewer problems than white/black. In my limited experience, the economic and cultural gaps were smaller
I am glad you had a good experience.
As I said upthread, “this is a big, complicated problem, so it’s unlikely to have a single, simple solution.”
Thanks for sharing.
BTW: were you Bussed? because it sounds like you went to a “neighborhood” school with a diverse study population, rather a school in “non-diverse” neighborhood" which forced intra-classroom diversity by bussing in some kids from far way.
Interesting case in point I heard of recently, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones seem to be fighting some desegregation efforts at the Manhattan school their kids go to (that’s probably a gross simplification and unfair on them…)
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.
5 Likes
I was bussed to majority black schools for 6 of my 7 primary years. Go ahead, ask away.
Edit: To clarify, I think I was quite possibly the only white kid in my high school (possibly on my side of town) who spent that much time in the inner-city schools.
4 Likes
please, please do.
As I’ve said several times already, “this is a big, complicated problem, so it’s unlikely to have a single, simple solution.”
Most, but not all, of the white kids I know who were bussed to traditionally black schools, had terrible experiences and, as a gross generalization, feared for their personal safety (at about the same level as their black peers, as best I can tell). These were generally lower SES kids whose parents lacked the resources to “opt out” by paying private school tuition.
But certainly not all. I’ve also know folks who had positive experiences while being one of the few white kids in a “minority-majority” school. In my tiny sample, these kids had parents who, for various reasons, chose this outcome rather were forced by bussing. (eg the guy who was the the only white guy on an all-black basketball team who proudly wore his teammate-awarded nickname of “Milk”)
The world is big, complicated, wonderful place – please share your story!
2 Likes
That is not “bussing did this”. That is “white parent’s racist reaction to bussing did this”.
Stopping the practice of subsidising and tolerating defacto segregated private schools could help. No public funding for schools that aren’t open to all students.
8 Likes
I was sometimes bussed, sometimes others were bussed to my school. It depended on which school. (I was in two districts between 3rd and 9th grade, but I attended 5 different schools, just due to grade divisions and changes.) Even when bussing was an option (Yuma), I tended to walk/bike because I liked it and I got mocked for practicing my instrument at home, so I preferred to get to school when my orchestra teacher arrived and practice for an hour before school. (Remember, parents are assholes.) Yuma then was a fairly compact town, so travel wasn’t the prohibitive factor for anyone to have attended any of the schools.
Never lived in Texas. Not planning on it - I like snow. I’ve only got significant time in Indiana, Colorado, California and Arizona to go on, but my experiences in CA and CO align with yours in Texas. It’s a much easier integration. However, I’ve seen (as an adult) how poorly integrated Indiana is (on the black-white axis). By my perception, Arizona has an equal white-Lantinx dysfunction.
I use infant mortality as my baseline measurement for how well a state has integrated – the more integrated, the more likely the parents will be adult, financially stable, well-educated, have a stable social network, have insurance, etc, which are all factors that contribute to thriving children. When you compare infant mortality between the populations on a state by state basis, CA and CO and TX (now that I’ve gone and looked) all do have disparities in outcomes between the white population and the Latinx population, but even with Texas’ awful overall numbers, the three states have about equal and relatively low disparities in their rates. (Texas has relatively high infant mortality, regardless of race.) Arizona (and Indiana, on the black-white axis) have much wider disparities, which points to less integration.
I don’t know why the difference exists specifically in Arizona. (Because you can’t spell crazy without R:AZ?) My guesses are multifaceted: Corridor culture has significant differences from dominant white culture east of the Continental Divide; the early US settlement was primarily mining and rail corp funded, so the early legislation was written by and for a healthy bidniss environment, which leaves a lasting mark; the 20th century high growth was primarily snowbird driven, so the white immigrants were significantly older and wealthier than the national mean at the time, so likely to be more conservative and less interested in funding public goods, like schools; the foundational Latinx and Native societies at the time of early US settlement were extremely self-sufficient and advanced, and endured well, so both sides have been resistant to integration.
I don’t know how to fix it, either. Just do more, try more, work harder.
If you’re not aware, you might want to give Strong Towns a shot, specifically when Steven Shultis is the guest. He’s a public school teacher in a urban, high poverty school, who specifically chose to raise his children in the urban core, in urban schools. He’s got some really interesting perspectives on places to start fixing this mess.
2 Likes
Same. I remember the first Metco students coming to my grade school, and then in high school being horrified at the scenes in Southie, Charlestown, and City Hall. Boston’s most shameful era.
I generally had a positive experience, I think.
I don’t think I could really intuit what any of you want to know, so I really think you should ask me what you’d like and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.
From my standpoint, I think my parents were totally on board with the desegregation idea.
I had school friends who were black and latino, and even had a few crushes on girls who were black or latino during my time spent in school.
However, talking about this feels like I’m offering up justifications for how I’m “not racist”.
It’s probably best people ask me what they want to know. Then it can be a more honest and straightforward answer.
6 Likes
Perhaps we are measuring the wrong things. What do children gain by attending schools with students from diverse backgrounds, aside from what we can read in the results of standardized test scores?
What do children lose by attending segregated schools?
In my own experience, in a town in Indiana, not far from Indianapolis, I spent 9 years of school in an all-white environment (asian counting as white enough, I guess). The racist jokes were all aimed at the small handful of ‘Polacks’ in our school. It made me very uncomfortable, and though I did not defend those kids, I did not join in.
During my tenth year, a black girl suddenly appeared in our school. We understood she was there because of trouble at her previous school, or a pregnancy, or something. I might have seen her in the halls once or twice, but never had the opportunity to speak to her. And then she was gone. I’m sure the two or three weeks in our school were the most horrible of her life.
In my final two years of high school, I spent half a day at my home school, and the other half at a nearby vo-tech school. There were black people there. Lots of them! Mexicans, too! My lab partner, Eric, was black, and we got along well. I would have called him a friend, if we didn’t live on opposite ends of the bus routes that brought us to our common school. So we were friends in class. He and I were the only two people who ever played the hybrid tic-tac-toe/connect four game I had developed. We had coded language that existed between the two of us. He vouched for me among his friends, and I was allowed to sit at a black table, and eat ice cream during our breaks. We helped each other learn basic electronics, and went to a competition together, and didn’t do terrible.
I did learn some electronics while there, not that I retain much other than basic theory and the ability to use a multimeter. I can solder, when it’s required.
But I learned much more. I learned that people put together can get along, and often do. I learned that there was nothing to fear from people different from myself. I learned that a black kid my age was more or less interested in the same things that I was, though we listened to slightly different music. I learned to appreciate the music he did. I learned things I can’t put into words, and those things live with me today, nearly thirty years later. I may not be smarter, but I am a better person. Most of the kids from my high school are still as close-minded as they were then, and they always will be. Their kids might get ‘good’ educations, but they’ll lack that thing that my kids don’t, because they attended diverse schools from a much younger age than I did.
We are measuring the wrong things when we send our kids to the ‘right schools’. And it’s a shame.
4 Likes
A lot more than racism is at play here. Simply pointing at one group and saying “racist” does little to move a solution forward.
As discussed upthread, when a “solution” is forced top-down on a community, that community tends to react sourly. This social effect transcends bussing, education, and even racism. One sees this even with health vaccines!
Bussing can work. It was a piece of my town’s somewhat successful school integration. But the way bussing was done in many communities most certainly “burned the house down.”
1 Like
I was bussed to a majority black junior high. I started a post earlier but it was impossible to avoid saying “Why some of my best friends…”
7 Likes
This.
Besides, this article is about the education gap, and its relationship with bussed desegregation, not about how many black friends I have.
5 Likes
Such an excellent piece, can’t recommend it highly enough!
I gained a lot of understanding of America’s racial divide, how segregated much of American society is, how strong the relationship is between racist ignorance and fear.
And, once again, how educating our children remains one of our lowest societal priorities
I should have said this earlier, but the only policies that consistently close the black-white educational gap are actually small class sizes and low student teacher ratio.
There should be no more than 11 students per teacher, and no less than 2 teachers per class, if you want every single student to get the instruction they need regardless of ability and prior education.
Works on every race, gender, color, and creed.
3 Likes
Having a longer class day, regardless of the student-teacher ratio, also works miracles. Especially when 95% of the work is done in school, with only a small amount of homework to be done at home (where the parents may not speak English, know the subject very well, or even be home to help answer questions).
5 Likes
A lot of the teachers at my kids’ high school stay after hours voluntarily, without pay, to help out any kid who stays.
Of course, the kids being bussed from the inner city can’t stay, or they’ll miss their bus. So the ones who really need it the most typically aren’t even aware of the option. 
2 Likes
…and how do you get smaller class sizes? By hiring more teachers, and treating them well enough that there are a sufficient supply of qualified people willing to do it.
In other words, taxes. And focus your education funding on coalface teaching staff, not administrative cruft, football nonsense and architectural follies.
3 Likes
The United States has comprehensively proven that you can spend truly ludicrous amounts of tax dollars and still get poor educational outcomes.
That being said, we’ve also comprehensively proven that “starve the beast” simply does not work. Defunding economically inefficient programs does not make them better, and it pretty much always takes investment upfront to improve or optimize return on investment.
Some researcher said something to the effect that good schools need reliable income, involved parents, motivated teachers, and charismatic principals, and no part of that set can be missing. I’ve often been astounded by how much influence over educational outcomes the principal has; I’ve seen a school change literally overnight when the principal changed.
I guess that was a long winded way of agreeing with you 100%.
2 Likes
