StickWithANose

The idea that a social structure built around the ideal of “I’m gonna get mine, screw everybody else” is somehow just or even stable over the long-run boggles that mind. However, the evidence that we’re further fragmenting along racial, class and cultural line continues to mount, and the results of this process will be just as ugly this time around as they were a century ago. One of the most successful school integration programs in the nation is coming undone, and the driving force behind it is as predictable as it is sad.

When Rosemarie Wilson moved her family to a wealthy suburb of Raleigh a couple of years ago, the biggest attraction was the prestige of the local public schools. Then she started talking to neighbors.

Don’t believe the hype, they warned. Many were considering private schools. All pointed to an unusual desegregation policy, begun in 2000, in which some children from wealthy neighborhoods were bused to schools in poorer areas, and vice versa, to create economically diverse classrooms.

“Children from the 450 houses in our subdivision were being bused all across the city,” said Ms. Wilson, for whom the final affront was a proposal by the Wake County Board of Education to send her two daughters to schools 17 miles from home.

So she vented her anger at the polls, helping elect four new Republican-backed education board members last fall. Now in the majority, those board members are trying to make good on campaign promises to end Wake’s nationally recognized income-based busing policy…

So, what we have here is movement by the wealthier side of town to keep their children close to home and damn the larger community, which the research tells us benefits from an integrated public school system.

Across the country, research shows that students of all races and backgrounds perform better in diverse schools, said Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Diversified schools typically have higher graduation rates, more college acceptances and fewer students in the criminal justice system, Ms. Mickelson said.

Some experts say that having middle-class students in a classroom raises the scores of poor students more effectively than increased per-pupil spending, more experienced teachers or lower student-teacher ratios.

Who cares if the society as a whole benefits from economic and racial integration? I’m looking out for me and mine!

Talk about history repeating itself… The first era of segregated schooling (& really society as a whole) was a human tragedy for which we paid a dear price, and this farce that we are now repeating will lead us toward yet another tragedy. The question is what form will it take?