Thursday, September 12, 2013

the third wave - crashed and still crashing...,

NYTimes | In many northern cities, the 1974 United States Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley killed any hopes of integrating the public schools. That ruling, involving Detroit and its suburbs, said that a mandatory plan to achieve integration by busing black children from Detroit across district lines to mainly white suburbs was unconstitutional. The result accelerated white flight to the suburbs, leaving the schools in urban centers even more segregated than they had been. 

Most famously, this happened in Boston, where court-ordered integration resulted in a busing plan that wound up mainly moving children of color around the city. 

But busing had greater success in some places, particularly those where the plans were carried out countywide, reducing the chances of white flight. They included Louisville-Jefferson County, Raleigh-Wake County and Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. 

This week’s Retro Report video, “The Battle for Busing,” follows the story of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, which became a national model for racial integration for 30 years only to resegregate about a decade ago, after a court ruling lifted the mandatory integration plan.

When the Charlotte busing plan began in 1971, there were whites who threatened to go to jail before they would let their children attend schools with blacks. The open racism voiced by whites in the Retro Report’s archival footage is vicious and ugly; students were injured when fistfights broke out between whites and blacks. 

But by 1974, the district was being singled out in the news media as a national model, particularly West Charlotte High, which had previously been all black. The impact of integration was visible almost immediately at the school. When whites arrived, the facilities were upgraded, said a former chairman of the school board, Arthur Griffin. A gravel parking lot was paved, and the football stadium and the gymnasium were renovated. 

Over the years, researchers like Prof. Roslyn Mickelson at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, conducted studies concluding that children of any race who attended diverse schools were more likely to succeed, in areas like graduating, avoiding crime and attending college. 

But in the end, the same federal courts that had ushered in integration helped kill it. In the late 1990s, Judge Robert D. Potter of Federal District Court essentially said that the Charlotte district had met its constitutional duty by successfully creating a single school system serving all children regardless of race and that no more need be done.

In a few years’ time, West Charlotte High, which had been roughly 40 percent black and 60 percent white in the 1970s, became 88 percent black and 1 percent white. And it wasn’t just Charlotte. Today, nearly two-thirds of the school districts that had been ordered to desegregate are no longer required to do so, including Seminole County, Fla. (2006); Little Rock, Ark. (2007); and Galveston County, Tex. (2009). 

The New York City system is more segregated than it was in the 1980s: half the schools are more than 90 percent black and Hispanic. For more about the nation’s “steady and massive resegregation,” see this Reporter’s Notebook from Retro Report. 

This week’s Retro Report is the 10th in our documentary project, which was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report has a staff of 12 journalists and 6 contributors led by Kyra Darnton. It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle. The videos are typically 10 to 12 minutes long.

7 comments:

CNu said...

Dependable as clockwork. The impact of integration was visible almost immediately
at the school. When whites arrived, the facilities were upgraded, said a
former chairman of the school board, Arthur Griffin. A gravel parking
lot was paved, and the football stadium and the gymnasium were
renovated.

The facilities were upgraded, but the quality of the teachers and administration went completely and totally to seed, and has never been recovered in the intervening 40 years. Prior to forced busing, many of the formerly segregated black urban schools were centers of community pride and highly competitive excellence, notwithstanding the gerrymandering of resources, funds, facilities.

Tom said...

"The facilities were upgraded, but the quality of the teachers and administration went completely and totally to seed,"



Sounds like My People all right. We're currently laying off teachers here while spending $100M on brand new facilities. This is in a small rural district that has declining enrollment. We're bored of the old facilities, so those will be sold off to developers at sweetheart prices.


It's for teh children.

BigDonOne said...

Right. 'Well Enough' should have been "Left Alone."


SIDE NOTE: BD recently discovered that circa 1980, the various Yells and FightSongs performed at Seattle high school ball games (a solid historic memorable part of school tradition) were *Discontinued*. They Do Not Do That Anymore. The reason given was, over the previous few years, there had been an increase in big fights and riots during and after the games. It was attributed to a certain less-civiized element in the respective student bodies feeling *Disrespected*....

CNu said...

Folks have almost no idea how big an economic honeypot public schools are and have always been, and the extent to which they are political footballs in consequence of the power to direct those expenditures. Like you said Tom, "it's for teh chirrens....,"

CNu said...

The enforcement needed to be directed at corrupt Boards and administrations which had been gerrymandering resources and expenditures in the long-term croney capitalist exploitation of these districts, such that black schools got their fair allocation of funding and resources for operations and capital upkeep.

Instead, enforcement was pushed down to constituents who believed wrongly that the grass was greener/ice was colder and constituents who didn't want any part of integration across their established tribal lines.

Nakajima Kikka said...

The correct term for this is "strategic bombing", I believe.

BigDonOne said...

OOW Breeding, and the damage that does to society and its related poor upbringing of children, might be a better parameter to consider, i.e. 3 out of 4....(75% not .009%)

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