Skimming that post from my car, I see I have misstated the quoted piece. But I do not think I have misstated what the weight of evidence shows. Will have to wait until I am at a computer though.
I’m curious how many commenters attended schools outside of their neighborhoods because their neighborhood schools weren’t racially and/or socioeconomically diverse.
How many commenters attended schools where some portion of the student body was bussed in?
I was a “bus-see”. I had a positive experience overall, though there were some downsides that still stick in my craw. So I have a lot of opinions on the subject, and I am prepared to weigh in on the topic later when I get home from work. But I’m just curious how many people are opining about something based solely on perception and fears and how many have first-hand experiences with integration-oriented educational policies.
I just asked for test scores. I’m not sure where you get this idea that I’m looking for double blind studies. And like I said, I will try to go through your cites later.
However, I do think the methodology is critically important if we are to understand what we know and if we are to embark on an ambitious social engineering experiment. People won’t need to be convinced that if you take kids from low achieving schools and place them in high achieving schools, those kids will on average probably do better academically. Or if they don’t, they will at least have been given about as good a chance as we can give them.
But people are going to want to know what happens to kids who are taken from high achieving schools and placed in low achieving schools. If you can’t answer that question, then you’re not going to get enough people to sign up.
My experience mirrors yours. I don’t know if my education would have been better if I wasn’t. I actually for the most part got along better with the minority kids than I did with fellow white kids since I was as poor as the neighborhood we were being bussed to.
For my own children, I don’t like the idea of sending them to a school with less resources and more problems than a school in the neighborhood that is more responsive to the residents of the neighborhood.
Now, what to do about disparities in school funding, safety, parental capability, etc is a different subject. But I think that’s where efforts should be made.
Bussing is bad for the environment and unhealthy for kids.
The last thing we want are tens of thousands diesel busses spewing pollution. Even worse, having kids trapped on busses during rush hour breathing all that bad air is very unhealthy. The time they spend on busses should be spent playing and being kids. Our children aren’t tools to use in some social experiment.
I think problem solving skills are very important, but I wouldn’t consider them academic per se. I’m thinking things like STEM type subjects where racial diversity isn’t really critical. Math is math, regardless of who is doing it, and racial diversity isn’t going to make a difference there. In the social sciences, for sure it makes a difference.
I am interpreting the magnitude of benefits based on the presentation in the articles, so there is inference on my part. When they do discuss the benefits, the first topic is critical thinking, social type interaction, etc. Only one of the articles mentioned actual test scores. From the Brief #8:
But yes, mixed evidence as HD mentions. The proposal however is quite invasive so for that level of upheaval I would expect strong empirical evidence around the benefits. And since I would want the largest benefits to be academic - test scores really, I think it’s a tall hurdle to overcome. That’s the quantitative challenge. One of the qualitative challenges is the logistical aspects of transporting kids. Being far away from where you live is a burden as discussed up thread. Another qualitative challenge is the idea that for a minority student to do well, they need to be placed along side white kids. That’s a poor message to send, IMO.
In theedweek article you linked, it says this:
I agree with the assessments made here about the impacts to the educational outcomes of students. I also think efforts to reduce these poor outcomes will be circumvented because ultimately people are not willing to experiment with their kids’ education if they can help it.
The article concludes with this:
They recognize the benefit of integration, but point to a potential non-bussing solution. I’m not familiar with Wake County, but Berkeley isn’t exactly known for high achievements in academics in its primary and secondary public education in the bay area.
I sort of was, for high school. And I say sort of solely because there wasn’t a great distance involved. They changed the zoning for two high schools that were less than five miles apart in an attempt get a more racially balanced population- when I attended , the population at my school was 40% white, 30% African American and 30% Hispanic. Before the rezoning it was over 80% African American and Hispanic. I don’t know the numbers for the other school, but the white population was lower after the rezoning.
I got a good education there. Some of it was no doubt because of various other changes that started simultaneously with the rezoning , but the fact is, my graduating class was much smaller than my tenth grade class. Probably at least 25% of my tenth grade class did not graduate on time ( or at all). But that didn’t affect me , as those students wouldn’t have been in my classes. In fact, I got a better education there than my kids got in their Catholic high schools (which they attended for different, non-academic reasons and which had a much more non-white , non-Catholic population than people expect )
I am assuming your parents would have got you out of there if your education was suffering, right? But not everybody can do that.
Yet another issue with forced bussing: Even aside from whether it works, is it actually doable? For the past four years, every school district in the state of Ohio has been trying to hire more bus drivers, and I can’t imagine it’s very different in any other state. Forced bussing would mean that you’d need many times more buses, and correspondingly more drivers, to meet the need. Are there enough bus drivers available?
I know you didn’t address this to me- but why would you assume that, since you’re absolutely correct that not everybody can do that.
The program I was in was voluntary, so yes, I could have been pulled out.
But people see their kids suffering in their neighborhood schools and they can’t do anything about it. At least a model that assigns kids to schools outside of their neighborhoods makes it so that everyone has a vested interest in maximizing the quality of a school system. Maybe if your kid has the same probability of being assigned to MLK Middle School as JFK Middle School, you will care more about making sure that both schools get the services they need.
I think the problem is that a lot of "social science" studies are fairly crappy, lacking a clear strategy for distinguishing true causal effects from co-relations. There is also a major problem, which has only recently been acknowledged, of the lack of replication of even well-known results. All this is accentuated by a [lack of political diversity](https://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/) in many social science fields.
I have only had time to glance at your cites but they don’t seem terribly impressive in terms of the research cited particularly on the crucial issue of whether busing benefits white students in terms of academic performance. Is there a single high-quality study, or even better a good meta-study, which you think provides strong evidence on this issue ?
I suppose I assumed that because Monstro sounds like an educated person. And that kind of indicates her parents cared about her education.
Well, that may be true if you’re a person who has kids in the system. But the people who are in a position to make those changes happen…are also the people who have the wherewithal to get their own kids out of there. Like, before I had kids I would have said something like, “If people see their kids suffering in their neighborhood school, they should get to work to improve their neighborhood school.” Because that can happen with parental involvement. But if they’re bussed to a school so far away that getting there for PTA meetings or classroom volunteering is impossible, or really a hassle, then that’s out the window.
I’m sure they did, as did mine. But mine still couldn’t have gotten me out of my high school if my education had suffered - that would have taken money that they didn’t have.
I know, right?
Yes, Hilarity, my parents were educated. But they weren’t wealthy. There was a reason we lived in a neighborhood with less-than-stellar schools. My oldest sister was sent to a neighborhood school and suffered greatly on the social front, but my parents didn’t pull her out of it because they didn’t have an affordable alternative. (They were also typical Boomer parents and didn’t care about giving us the “best” of everything. They probably thought the school was “good enough”, and they didn’t have a problem with giving us “good enough” stuff.)
And while it probably would be ideal if all people worked on building up their neighborhood schools, that too is unrealistic. How is it supposed to work? Let’s say you are one of the few middle class families living in a low-income neighborhood. You are frustrated that your kid’s teachers aren’t the best, the curriculum isn’t challenging enough, and you are simultaneously unhappy with the too-strict discipline the kids are subjected to by administrators and the poor classroom behavior you have heard about. How do you change these things? It could take years before you can find like-minded parents like yourself and you are able to form a coalition strong enough to affect change. But by that time, your kid is about to graduate to middle school. And besides, it’s kind of unfair to expect parents with students in low-performing schools to naturally want to work extra hard to fix those schools while parents of students in high-performing schools can focus their energies solely on their children. I think it’s unfair to put the burden of remedying the effects of high-density poverty in a community on the people living in that community. It should be spread out over the whole jurisdiction so that the responsibility isn’t just on a few.
Here’s an interesting story about what happens when middle-class people have their say in school planning (hint: notice how few of their comments are focused on the “greater good”): Race and class collide in a plan for two Brooklyn schools.
This is the kind of thing that causes parents to be concerned when the subject of bussing comes up -
This is a wonderful learning community where four out of five students fail the math test and almost nine out of ten fail at reading. And you want me to send my kids there.
Regards,
Shodan
The veil of ignorance leads to more just results. But imposing the veil seems like it has costs in this case.
The whole idea is RACIST.
Yes I said it. What you are telling black parents is their kid isn’t going to learn a damn thing unless they are sitting in a classroom next to a white kid! Its a racist insult on par with something a klansman would say. I know because I worked with many black families years ago who were disgusted and insulted by this attitude.
Their isn’t a damn reason black schools cant be just as good as white schools PROVIDED they get proper funding.
Matter of fact years ago black parents in Kansas City started an all black school called the African Centered Academy. Looking online Pittsburgh started onealso. Do a Google search for Malcolm X Academy and you will find more.
Think about it.
We have all black colleges in this country.
Top black leaders like Jessie Jackson went to all black schools.
Black people are perfectly capable of running good schools.
And there is nothing wrong with that. Remember the saying “You don’t sacrifice your children on the altar of your values”.