'The Battle for Busing'

Here's a report on the legacy of school desegregation efforts at the New York Times, "Desegregation and the Public Schools."

There's a video at the report:

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.

Frankly, it's a strange report, almost like a time warp.

People aren't concerned with school busing these days, a program that epitomized big-government approaches to public policy. The statistics are jarring and cautionary, however, especially the data showing that in urban schools today the student demographic is 90 percent black and Hispanic. More than anything, parents need a way to get their kids away from that social disorganization, and that way is school vouchers. These would provide real choice to families who've borne the brunt of genuine patterns of racism and government indifference for decades.

But beyond that, of course, is the culture of black and minority student underachievement, which stems from cultural factors endemic to those demographics and which even school choice won't fix. I could go on about it, but the glorification of the thug culture, the delegitimization of book learning, and the generalized decline of the historical work ethic in many parts of the society account for a lot of the failures in the schools. Newfangled attempts at desegregation won't do jack to fix those problems. Indeed, the most likely outcome decades from now is more of what we're seeing today. What will bring change will be the destruction of the public school union monopoly on power and the freeing and redirecting of resources channeled to state bureaucrats to families themselves. I suspect things like this are happening in key pockets, but not fast enough for the great majority of disadvantaged students.

It's a depressing state of affairs that people aren't serious about fixing, especially Democrats, from the president on down.