A study by Harvard's Civil Rights Project shows that the proportion of blacks in the South's white-majority schools has dropped markedly over the past 14 years, from an average of 43.5 percent to 32.7 percent.
....
The most segregated schools in the nation are still in the North: New York, California, Michigan and Illinois have the lowest percentages of black students in majority-white schools.
But the 20 most rapidly resegregating school districts are concentrated in the South, the Harvard researchers say. And the South was where the federal courts had to drag whites kicking and screaming into integration.
The fact is, the courts have stopped dragging.
"Racial balance is not to be achieved for its own sake," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a seminal opinion in the case of a Georgia school district. "Where resegregation is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications."
posted on January 3, 2003 11:39:50 AM new
Justice Kennedy is right. If court visits the current segregation situation, they will conclude that the separation is due to economic/social reasons rather than government policy. They will not touch "economic" segregation/prejudice with a ten foot pole, even if the result is racial segregation. They will not go there and many will persuavsivly argue that they should not go there.
posted on January 4, 2003 06:38:11 AM new
Another issue to look at is what the parents want for their children and if they judge bussing has made a difference in their child's life.
In San Jose Unified, when our sons were in school, they started bussing. The SJU school district is 26 miles long and [very narrow]. After years of the children spending time on busses, so things would be more racially equal, what happened was that few of the parents liked their children being bussed out of their neighborhood. Parents of all races. And when given the choice, they preferred to keep their children closer to home.
posted on January 4, 2003 02:22:16 PM new
I've seen news stories where black community leaders are for resegregation. They complain that the schools that their kids get bussed to do not get adequately funded and that the white kids who get bused to their schools end up influencing other black kids and destroying Black Culture. They state that they want resegregation in order to keep Black Culture intact.
