Birth, Blood, Buses

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

Like Neil, I'd like to consider focusing more on individuals in the schools. In Newsweek's remembrance of Rosa Parks, Ellis Cose writes,

In the newly published "The Shame of the Nation," Jonathan Kozol sheds a book's length of tears over segregation in schools. He cites research that shows segregation is worsening and notes that three fourths of black and Latino children attend schools with no or relatively few whites. It is a daunting task to convince poor, minority kids they can learn "when they are cordoned off by a society that isn't sure they really can," writes Kozol.

Ezra has covered this topic before, but the questions are worth asking again and again. Is this what the civil-rights movement was for? Fighting against segregation just so it can happen again? It is hard to find opportunity in public schools, harder than ever. The wealthier and whiter families are in the suburbs, where their property taxes go to fund nicer schools.

Don't kid yourself that this is an inner-city problem, either. Rural schools are equally hard hit. Even if it is a mostly white region, you'll see the differences along class lines. We are now in an America where birth and blood mean a lot in terms of how far you will go in life, and that fact doesn't seem American to me.

The schools must be desegregated - racially and economically - so the United States, where everyone should be able to move up in society, doesn't devolve into a caste system (if it hasn't already). How can we be a United States when most of us don't know anything about, to borrow the title of Jacob Riis' book, How the Other Half Lives?

Salon has an interview with Kozol that offers some suggestions on how to solve this problem. I recommend sitting through the commercial and reading the whole piece. I'll excerpt the last lines:

We have a meritocracy in the U.S. but it's increasingly a hereditary meritocracy in which the lines are both lines of class and of race. I didn't write this book simply to provoke another incestuous and interesting debate among inert liberals. I wrote this book to ask my liberal friends to get up off their asses and deal with an injustice which is right before their eyes. There are too many books about the heroic struggles of the 1960s and the courage people showed then. Those books exempt us from summoning up the courage we need to face the injustices from which we still benefit today.

So what do we do to desegregate schools - again? Is it time to start talking about busing seriously? Or would that be too painful to discuss? What happened to Katrina, and what's happening in France is forcing us to talk about it. Is it time to start talking about Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education again? I say yes, we're at the point where it's time to start busing. I don't think schools in lower-income districts will get the money they deserve until parents in higher-income areas have to send their kids over there. Most parents worry about their own kids, and if they worry that their kid will go to a "bad" school, then they might start caring about how other people's kids are educated.

PS - I read about Wake County, but surely it isn't the only place in that nation that has tried this. Anywhere else?