owlectomy: A squashed panda sewing a squashed panda (Default)
[personal profile] owlectomy
By way of a former classmate I found out that the school district where I went to middle/high school is dropping its diversity policy in favor of "neighborhood schools." The NAACP is protesting. From an urban planning perspective I'm yelling, "If you wanted neighborhood schools you should have built NEIGHBORHOODS, not cul-de-sacs where you can't even walk to the grocery store, never mind the elementary school!" Raleigh could be a poster for white flight and suburban sprawl, and there's a lot of racial division in housing (I haven't researched this myself but I would be unsurprised if redlining was an issue), and these things are all connected. I'm not pretending that getting up at 6 a.m. to catch a bus, as I did all through high school, is a good time, but this is not how you fix the problem.*

For all that I'm not a huge fan of the Wake County public schools I felt like they had less educational inequality than NYC does. In Raleigh and in NYC, I've worked in poor neighborhoods, I've worked with kids whose families didn't have a lot of resources, and I think the diversity standards of Raleigh's schools ultimately made a big difference. There were "better" schools and "worse" schools, but you couldn't guarantee by moving all the way out to the suburbs that your kid would get into one of the "good" schools... and sadly this is what people are all mad about, I think, more than having to get up early for the bus.

In a lot of cities, schools are becoming more segregated rather than less. And it's a real shame that Raleigh is jumping on that bandwagon.

*I should specify that in my case it was at least semi-voluntary. 7th grade was so bad for me that I applied to one of the magnet schools, and continued because they had more interesting electives, more AP options, etc. But spending 45 minutes to an hour on the bus every morning was very typical for people I knew.

ETA Oh dear. A Wake County parent was quoted in the News and Observer article saying: "I'm against forced busing. This is the United States of America. People should not be forced in Wake County to do anything they don't want to do."

Lady, where were you when they were making me run laps around the track? Making people do things they don't want to do is the entire premise of schooling!

Thoughts

19/7/10 21:40 (UTC)
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
Posted by [personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
I don't believe in forced busing; it robs children of their time which is often in short supply. That's time they don't have to sleep, study, or cultivate a healthy family life. If children want to travel to a distant school, however, that should be okay.

I don't really approve of segregated neighborhoods. That causes a lot of problems. The best place to deal with school segregation is neighborhood segregation.

Another big issue is funding education out of property taxes. That mostly screws the poor kids, ensuring they will get a lousy education and thus continue to be poor. Small, thoroughly funded schools are better than big shoddy schools -- but people usually don't want to spend the money.

(no subject)

19/7/10 21:44 (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] meaghanchan.livejournal.com
Wake County has, IMHO, done a pretty terrible job in the past of implementing their diversity policy, though. Changing where kids are going to go to school every couple of years, splitting up siblings as neighborhoods change, etc, wasn't the way to deal with the problem, and I can sympathize with people who didn't like that. But until there is less income inequality and less racial division of housing, there must be some policies in place to ensure that the entire county doesn't go back to what is in practice, if not in policy, segregated schools.

Magnets were, to me, the best way of fixing that, but in my experience, most of the academic classes ended up pretty segregated anyway... Most of my classes only had a few non-white students, but at least all the students got the benefits of the magnet school's resources, which were at least equal to and in some cases better than the non-magnet schools in the middle to upper income neighborhoods.

(no subject)

19/7/10 22:35 (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] bnharrison.livejournal.com
I don't want to make you hate me or anything, but I managed to get out of running both semesters by breaking my ankle in September. It's one of my fonder memories of high school.

(no subject)

19/7/10 23:26 (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] lordameth.livejournal.com
I just hope that this diversity policy they're moving away from is (was) based on socio-economic status or the like, and not on race or ethnicity. The color of one's skin should not be a determining factor in anything - it's racist, it's illegal, and it is, in my opinion, morally reprehensible.

As for the comment about building neighborhoods, I think you are spot on. I hate what American suburbs (speaking very broadly and overgeneralizing) have become, so reliant on cars, so disconnected from any real sense of neighborhood unity or community. I grew up in the same house my entire childhood, and I never knew half the neighbors at all.

(no subject)

20/7/10 15:14 (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] takumashii.livejournal.com
I think it's been fairly clear for a long time that we're on opposite sides of the issue, and I don't really have any interest in arguing about it. If you only want to comment on my journal to pick fights, don't.

(no subject)

20/7/10 22:24 (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] lordameth.livejournal.com
Oh. I apologize. To be honest, I'd largely forgotten about any previous disputes. I wasn't looking to pick a fight; I rarely am. Controversy and arguing make me sick to my stomach.

Rather, I was just trying to show my support and agreement for your comments about what suburban society is like in the US...
(deleted comment)

(no subject)

21/7/10 17:00 (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] takumashii.livejournal.com
I think there are so many different answers for "What is the damage that gets done with segregation?" and it's probably impossible to try to pin down all the arms of that octopus at once. There's what happens when black students and white students form mostly separate cliques -- there's also the fact that schools in black neighborhoods tend to not get funded as well (because school funding comes from property taxes) and tend to have fewer extracurriculars, fewer AP classes, more trouble attracting good teachers, etc. And even though I know that students end up getting tracked mostly along economic and racial lines, I think it's important that we not let any students get into the kind of schools where it feels like their failure is predetermined and nobody cares.

What I have noticed in working with kids is that you don't get a big window of opportunity before they can get turned off schooling entirely. There is a light in their eyes that starts going out maybe around 3rd or 4th grade. And nobody should be tracking students into separate classes based on their test performance that early, no way. In a classroom where everybody comes from a low-income household, you're going to see less parental involvement (not to blame the parents, but they probably have less free time), more unaddressed behavioral issues, they might need more individual attention than the kids who are getting drilled on flash cards at home -- that's when kids start being failed by the system. So that's the kind of situation where I believe busing can make a difference, just so you don't have a few schools getting hit with the biggest problems. We get segregation by classroom because by middle school or high school a lot of damage has already been done -- so we need to do more, and EARLIER, but that doesn't mean it's failed.

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