I was quoting an earlier poster.
Ok. So then you agree that if it were your choices that disadvantaged them, then you would owe them a duty? Do you owe them a duty if someone else’s choice to benefit you disadvantaged them?
Obviously we can debate the conservative bromides that black people created their own poverty, but that’s a different thread. I’m interested in whether, even if you were persuaded you have the empirical premises wrong, you’d change your mind on the moral calculus.
The situation we are talking about, largely, is that other people have made choices that disadvantaged their children and didn’t help mine at all. So the question is what duty I owe to those children in contrast to the duty I owe to my own?
Dysfunctional schools aren’t dysfunctional because they aren’t integrated - they aren’t integrated because they are dysfunctional. Nobody in their right minds wants to send their kids to a bad school. So the only ones who do are the ones who don’t have the resources to send their kids elsewhere. And unfortunately there aren’t enough who are in their right minds but don’t have the resources to overcome the subculture of the bad schools, and the bad communities in which they exist that create and are reinforced by the bad school.
ISTM that the idea is “here’s a school. It sucks. Most of the kids are failing everything, the teachers want to go somewhere else because teaching kids to fail sucks, the administrators can’t fix it, we can’t do fund-raisers because everybody is poor. So let’s import some white kids, and they and their parents will fix the school that we couldn’t fix. In return, they get to ride the bus for an extra hour a day, and diversity.”
People don’t seem to be clamoring to sign up for that deal.
Regards,
Shodan
to manson1972
that’s what i mean - they (potentially) sacrificed some future earnings of their children for a better quality of life for them. Plenty of people concentrate on well rounded experiences in their children’s education, with little regard to future earnings potential. For example placing more importance that the school was (already) racially diverse, or had a marching band, or was within walking distance; they were willing to accept a (somewhat) lower academic standing if it meant the child got more out of the experience than just multiplication and American history. Which directly relates to iiandyiiii’s premise.
This was, of course, their own choice, they might come to a different conclusion if the school district made that decision for them.
You insist on debating the factual premises. I think you’re wrong about most of your claims, but it’s a tired debate and I am fully capable of sketching out your position on the matter–as indeed basically every person in America is capable of doing because it has been the standard line in white culture since 1870. What I wanted to pursue in this little tangent was the questions of moral duty, because I suspect that, even if persuaded that you were wrong on the facts, you wouldn’t actually change your mind on the question of moral duties. But what you’re interested in discussing may not match up with my interest, and if so, that’s just fine.
Yeah, I’m funny like that.
Regards,
Shodan
Trying not to distinguish between quality of life and earnings, and speaking generally about some form of utility, there is no value of X and Y that I would accept. Perhaps there is a longer term net benefit that my kid will experience as a result of the rising tide, but then the hypothetical no longer holds the reduction is no longer true.
I think the choices made that disadvantaged them would have to be fairly direct for a significant duty to be owed. Things like voting against school bonds wouldn’t be sufficient. I do think everyone in general has a duty to provide for their fellow humans as part of the social contract. The duty to one’s own children is of such greater magnitude that it will often crowd out other duties - and I think that reasonable.
Again, that may be. But what is being discussed here is sacrificing some future earnings and/or better quality of life for OTHER children who aren’t their own.
If I decide to sacrifice some future earnings of MY children so that MY children may have a better quality of life, then so be it, they are my children.
What I WON’T do is sacrifice some future earnings of MY children or the quality of THEIR life, so that OTHER children, who are not mine, may have a better quality of life or higher future earnings, especially if it’s based on guesses or “probably will work”
There are two things here, and they are not the same. One thing is making sure your kids get an education, another is not raising them to be racist.
The public school my kids would have gone to was just not very good. The private school, where, interestingly enough, the teachers were not paid very much, was good, by virtue of having people who cared about educating kids and by having a low ratio of teachers to students. And other things. It was not about having an all-white school, because it wasn’t by any means. It wasn’t just white people who objected to bussing and wanted their kids to get a good education.
I don’t buy that. If Y was “thousands of very sick children are healed” (or equivalent), and X was “your kids will have a slightly reduced chance of becoming multi-billionaires”, you really wouldn’t accept it?
I’m trying to address the hypothetical in terms of realistic scenarios. If we want to posit unrealistic scenarios, then the answer may be different. If X was $0.01 and Y was 1 billion people will not die, then sure that’s worth it. But here we are talking within the context of bussing, maybe expanding out to districting, or educational outcomes and systems and methodologies, maybe even funding levels.
Comparing very sick children to multi billionaires doesn’t seem to fit in the realm of realistic scenario.
Indeed, it’s not realistic. But I think your “never” was hyperbole. There may be trade offs that you haven’t considered. In more realistic terms, if the harm to your kids was tiny, but the benefit to other kids would be enormous if this became law, would you dismiss it immediately or at least consider it and think about it? What if the harm to your kids was tiny but real, but your grand kids would be living in a much more equal and peaceful society?
One of the problems with bussing years ago is they would go into the black schools and find the 10% or so who were not only the smartest, but also those from stable families and send only those kids to the white schools. They did this so they would get along at the white schools the best. Ex. Ruby Bridge. Ruby was also very cute.
So the black schools were left without their best students and went further down.
When did it become the government’s responsibility to “develop empathy”? Isn’t that the purview of parents and families?
I think there are schools out there where most races are represented. My sons school is. However you might think twice about a school where your kid is the token white.
Let’s spell it out a little then.
We could start the story further back, but let’s just start with my living family. My grandpa grew up poor on a farm. He went to college on the GI bill. He got a job at an oil refinery with no black employees. My grandmother, who got a great public school education, also worked part time. Together, they saved up money, and with the help of a VA loan, bought a nice house. That home was their principal asset, and it appreciated significantly over the decades they owned it while raising my mother and her siblings. They sold the home when the kids moved out, reaping a huge profit. They were able to help my Mom when she got divorced shortly into her marriage (in no small part over money troubles), so that we weren’t thrown into poverty. My Mom eked out a lower middle class lifestyle in a safe mostly white neighborhood where the city repaired the roads and no one went to jail for doing (or dealing) the drugs we did as teenagers.
Now consider the story of the kind of person I’m saying I might owe a moral obligation.
The grandparents of “Nathan” were refugees from terrorism and oppression in the Second Great Migration. His grandpa also served in WWII, but like most of his cohort could not benefit from the GI bill. Indeed, the New and Fair Deals would not have existed if the federal government had insisted that they be designed to also benefit people like Nathan’s grandparents. They arrived in a new city with no family network and no wealth, having either left it behind or spent it to get there. They worked hard to make a better life for their kids.
But they weren’t able to buy their way into the white suburbs like my grandpa did. Government policy meant they couldn’t get credit. And they also faced racial covenants and other race-based obstacles. Maybe they did buy a home in the city, with cash, but their neighborhood declined as the tax base dropped off. Or when a sewage processing plant was built there. Or any of a dozen other causes of urban decline in areas fled by white people with wealth. They weren’t able to pass any wealth to their kids, or cover for any major bumps in the road that their kids experienced. Nathan had an even harder time escaping their crumbling neighborhood even as the formal limits on that escape also crumbled.
Nathan’s kids now go to a school that has roughly the same demographics and is in roughly the same condition as the all-black school that it was before 1955. If you like, you can posit that many of the kids go to that school not because they share Nathan’s family story, but because their parents (or parent) made a lot of mistakes.
Now suppose I live in that same urban school district. If all the comfortable, highly-educated parents like me, of all races, move to the suburbs (or even just send our kids to private schools), then that school’s prospects of getting better are slim. Among other things, our tax money follows us. The more of us who stay, the higher the chances of Nathan’s kids getting a fair shot of escaping from poverty.
Am I morally permitted to just ignore the circumstances that led to this situation when making the choice to flee to the school districts in the suburbs? Am I free to ignore the way my choice, or my part of the collective choice, affects the neighborhood school?
I don’t mean those questions rhetorically. I don’t have the answers. These aren’t the kind of moral questions our chimpanzee brains were made to answer, I suspect. But to my way of thinking, there is something wrong with ignoring that history and those facts. Maybe it isn’t enough on its own to compel my decision. But it would be wrong to ignore entirely the substantial moral component–which is the point I’m trying to make on this long tangent.
I wouldn’t say ignore the circumstances, but deciding for yourself and your family, that moving to a better neighborhood because you are fortunate enough to have that choice, would not be a difficult decision for me. It is unfortunate and a travesty that there are schools where they are essentially failing and failing their students and communities. But what of the alternative? Stay, try to make the school better, in a process that could take years or longer or never happen at all, when your child has one chance to go through the educational system? I wouldn’t say to ignore the impact those choices may have, but responsibility for one’s own family so vastly outweighs any responsibility for others’ families that I would make that choice with a clear conscience.
When we talk of moral duty, there are degrees. While I think we all have a duty towards our fellow humans, the form of that duty can differ. In this example, maybe it’s working towards bettering the school, but not necessarily subjecting your kids to the trials of it.
I think a lot of people have made these choices, and continue to do so. I have friends that are of the age where they are having children. For those that live in the city, it’s not a question of whether or not they will move, but when. Some people can make it work, but I think for a greater number of people, raising kids in that kind of environment is not desirable and if they have means they can choose not to. This isn’t based on race either, it’s across all demographics I can see. I do think it is probably correlated with income though.
It’s not necessarily the segregation that’s a problem for Nathan in your example, but I don’t want to gloss over the racial implications and abuses of the past and present. That these suffering schools are essentially segregated is more a symptom of the problem, not the cause. Parental, and the entire universe of the support system for these kids has to be more important than whether their school is racially diverse. Bussing and forced integration doesn’t address any of the other potential causes, and targets one particular symptom
It just seems to me that this both overstates the harm that accrues to a rich kid attending a poor school, and understates the ways in which (for me at least) our rich status was partly a result of the forces that made it a poor school.
Obviously, that moral calculus is going to be very different for different people, which is why I gave a short history of my family. For people like me, and for people that benefited from white supremacy even more than I do, it’s not so simple as talking about duties owed to strangers. There is a closer connection between our benefits and their harm than that.
Unless that’s your child’s first name (there was a young man with that name on a television series, IIRC).
Would the other kids appreciate the irony?
Even though I went to private school we legally still got bus transportation from the public school system. For high school I lived the down sides of bussing. It was a 25ish minute drive with rush hour traffic in the morning. In HS they saved money by transferring us part way to keep buses fuller. The effect was my round trip transportation time was 3.5-3.45 hours a day. With school hours it was an over 11+ hour day from going out just before the bus until I was dropped off back at home. Pulling sleep recommendations for kids, 6-13 is nine to eleven hours and 14-18 is eight to ten. Kids need more sleep. With 11 hours dedicated to being in school plus transportation and those sleep numbers that commits 20-22 hours for the younger kids and 19-21 for the high school age. That’s before we start adding in basic life support, like eating, bathing etc.
Even just adding homework* starts to encroach on sleep time. Extracurricular activities come under the gun (and those have an impact on college admissions if just cut out.) Extracurricular activities also become more problematic for the poor since that longer distance transportation following after school activites is now not the school’s responsibility. Other social/play activities that we associate with being a kid and are important are also being made with implications on time for required sleep. Taking a bus for that long meant sleep debt growing throughout the week.
There are real costs to the kids being bussed as well as benefits to them. If that was the only way it might be worth the trade off. IMO It’s mostly treating the symptoms not root causes, and requiring that treatment with the costs, for the long term. Fixing issues like unequal funding between districts and continuing work on portability of social safety net benefits, begun under the Bush administration and continued under Obama, offer the possibility of mitigating some of the root causes. Urban planning and zoning issues may be boring but can create or reduce conditions that lead to more economically stratified areas. Even if bussing still makes sense as part of a total solution set focusing on root causes first minimizes the number of kids trading shoved onto buses.
You’re wrong because you don’t seem to understand the situation in general or the problem to be solved. You’re trying to apply a scenario that existed in 1950 to one that exists in 2017. Times have changed but your argument has not. In 1950 there was a prominent divide that separated society based on race. In 2017 the divide is cultural.
While inner city schools are often predominately black the issue with scholastic failure is based on social failures and not skin color. the failures affect all races. It’s the collapse of the family unit that created an environment of willful rejection of scholastic achievement. If you increase expenditures per pupil or relocate them that doesn’t address the real problem and that is a deficit of skilled parental guidance.
The problem is the loss of skilled primary care givers. Busses can’t fix that.