Yes, the entire series was very well-done. I learned a lot from it.
I know in Houston it masqueraded as school choice. If you lived in a neighborhood, you could send your children to the closest neighborhood school. Or you could send your children to a different school that was outside of your neighborhood if it had vacancies.
On paper, it sounds like a good program that gives parents choices and holds schools accountable for their performance. But in reality, the system was used to create de facto segregation.
As Chana discussed Rob’s efforts to find a school for his child, I couldn’t help but think how different it was from my experience with public schools. I don’t believe my parents ever had any options on what school I might attend as that was always determined by geography. I went to this elementary school and that middle school instead of another simply because I was within their geographic boundaries. I can see how choice might sounds attractive to a lot of people but lead to poor results for many students. But then again, we have 13,000 independent school districts in the United States and the needs of a Texas suburb likely aren’t the same as the needs of New York.
For the second episode, I did inwardly smirk at the the New Yorkers describing themselves as so much more sophisticated compared to those backward people from Louisiana or Georgia when it came to race relations. While there are plenty of criticisms regarding race issues in the South, we do have a legacy we have yet to truly reconcile after all, I’ve long felt that our Northern neighbors have pointed at our faults in this regard while ignoring the beam in their own eyes.
I can’t remember which episode it was, but I thought it was interesting when Chana interviewed the graduates of the school that she focused on (whose name I can’t remember). All of them spoke proudly of their school and had lots of fond memories of their time there. But they had no concept of whether it was a “good” school in some objective sense. It was just a school. The fondness they had for it was not steeped in its academic greatness. It was just an experience that they shared with others in their neighborhood.
I can relate. I don’t think I had any concept about how my school stacked up until I went to college nearly 10 years after graduation. In my English 101 course, the instructor had us all write a short essay just so he could get a quick assessment of our writing abilities. Out of approximately 30 students, I was one of the only ones who wrote an introduction, paragraphs explaining my points, and a conclusion. It was then that I realized my high school prepared me for college a lot better than others.
I also came to the conclusion that I was very, very fortunate in that I went to a very large and wealthy high school that provided me with opportunities that not all students in America have. In the fine arts area alone, we had our own fine arts building with a stage and a band, marching band, jazz band, an orchestra, various choirs, drama classes, music theory courses, art courses where students could sculpt, draw, and paint, etc., etc. My senior high school (11th and 12th grade), had a little more than 2,000 students and when I graduated it was with 834 other students. This was in Plano, Texas.
Until I went to college, I just assumed everyone’s high school experience was similar to mine. But, no. I now feel as though my experience was the outlier in that I had plenty of opportunities -most of which I squandered- that would not have been available to me elsewhere.
Nowadays, the only way people would know whether they went to a good high school is if they go on to college. The jobs available to people with only a high school diploma don’t require the skills that really put your high school diploma to the test. Even retail work is automated to such a degree that it’s no biggie if you can’t make change in your head.
Before college attendance was considered a middle class rite of passage, people didn’t care so much about academatically competitive high schools. They wanted their kids to be around nice kids who shared their values, but didn’t care all that much if the school didn’t offer every single AP class and sport imaginable. Most students didn’t have to worry about having an uber impressive college application because most weren’t going to college anyway. But that’s not the case anymore.
IIRC, the decline in California’s school funding coincides with their infamous tax proposition, which passed in the late 1970s. As property owners, I remember enjoying the fact that we didn’t pay a lot in property taxes even though we were not direct beneficiaries of the proposition, which meant to protect those who held property at or around that time. But it certainly hit us and other California residents in other ways - owning a car in California was a pain in the rectum, and yet you really can’t live in the Bear Republic without one.
Property values were skyrocketing and people on fixed incomes and some blue collar workers couldnt afford the large and unpredictable rise in property taxes.
You know what, fuck this. I refuse to beat myself up over the election of that clown. In this century there will never be a clearer choice for women then the 2016 election. 39% of women voted for Trump.
28% of Hispanics voted for him. 6% of blacks.
I am a white upper middle class male so I will do fine no matter who gets elected. But Chump is a cancer on our nation and I have done what I could. If others care also, they can vote…you know, even if it’s harder now. In fact, that really should make them more angry and do so.
This is a not ‘good white people’ problem.
The majority of Americans are registered democrats. A good chunk of them presumably are good white people.
Why hasn’t anything changed?
A lot of the nice white parents perpetuating school segregation are liberals and Democrats.
This is a pretty widespread attitude in the south. I happen to agree with it, though not with every conclusion. I have encountered many northerners who lay claim to superior racial righteousness based on a war that they didn’t fight and wasn’t intended for racial equality. They condemn those who practice explicit racism while feeling free to practice it implicitly. They don’t know their actual racial attitudes because they lack enough contact with large communities of black people.
I was talking to a Minnesota farmer once who asked me “why are you all so hard on the blacks?” (this was the 70’s). I reminded him that the previous day he’d spent some time sharing grievances about the Ojibwe band who lived at the end of the road, and to make of that what he would. I should have been clearer what I meant, but he was a decent guy, I like to think he’d correct his problematic behavior.
Well, that’s clearly incorrect. Even if every American who voted for Clinton in 2016 was a registered Democrat (or has become one since), that’s only about 65 million or about 20% of the total population. If there’s a political plurality of Americans, let alone a majority, it’s the cohort that doesn’t bother to vote at all.
And this is another thing that makes structural racism hard to fight. Everyone is the bad guy, including oneself. It’s why I roll my eyes when I hear someone say “I’m not a racist.” If you don’t recognize the racism in yourself, you’re not going to be able to fight racism.
Northerners are just racist in a more sophisticated way.
They interviewed one woman who had written the New York school board asking them to consider building the new school they were planning in a fringe area. A fringe school would be placed near the border of black-Puerto Rican/white neighborhoods and the belief at the time is that it would be more likely to become integrated. Meanwhile, many black and Puerto Rican parents wanted the school board to build the school closer to the heart of their neighborhood so their kids wouldn’t have to walk across too many busy streets. The school was built in a fringe area and white parents, include the letter writer, didn’t end up sending their kid their.
The woman they interviewed got cold feet. She toured the school and found the students to be rowdy, she was worried about test scores, and like any parent she wanted what was best for her kids. She believed in integration but wasn’t willing to “sacrifice her children for it.” And during the interview you could just hear the conflict between her liberal beliefs in integration clashing with her underlying racism towards the black students and it clearly distressed her greatly.
So one of the reasons it doesn’t change is because so many white parents are worried about doing what’s best for their child. Oh, sure, they’ll tell you that integration is the bee’s knees and they actually mean it at the time. But when you try to divert funding from programs that help predominantly white students into those that help black students the white parents raise a stink and they have a lot of clout.
It’s my theory that part of the reason behind this lack of introspection is that at some point we transformed racist into cartoon characters. We could look at the bigot who was loudly preaching white superiority or railing against integration and tell ourselves that we’re not like that person. It became so ingrained that we aren’t like that bigot that whenever we’re accused of racism our first instinct is to deny, deny, and deny rather than seriously examine our motivations and our actions.
Of course most racist aren’t like those caricatures we’ve made them into. They’re “nice white parents” who have some unconscious biases and fears who want to do what’s best for their children.
Ok. So. Does that absolve a perpetual history of white Southern behavior past the Civil War? Or is this some amateur deflection? I guess I can’t argue with what a group of people feel, much less you. But why do you think Northern smugness is equivalent to say, white Southern voting disenfranchisement for people of any different color…like even right now. This moment. Like things that are happening now.
While New Yorkers in the 60s were smugly satisfied that they were better than Georgians, they actively worked to keep blacks segregated in schools with barely functioning toilets, teachers without accreditation, constant faculty turnover, and an overcrowding situation so severe that students had to go to school in shifts which meant black and Puerto Rican students weren’t getting a whole day’s worth of education. One of the black parents referred to the school she sent her kids to as being worse than the ones she went to in Mississippi. New Yorkers didn’t call it segregation, they preferred racial imbalance, but segregation it was and as expected separate was not equal.
Now I did specifically mention that the South has a legacy it has yet to reconcile, so I’m not sure why you thought I was trying to deflect from the behavior of white Southerner’s behavior in the past. I’m even more perplexed that you would think I’m equating smugness to voter suppression. I was simple noting that the South has served as an outlet smug people from other parts of the country to look at and feel superior to even as they engage in many of the same behaviors.
And, hey, I get why that might make people uncomfortable. Racism is endemic to the South because of racist whites and not something we’re concerned with in other parts of the country. Sure, the Los Angeles police department has a reputation for abusing minorities since long before the Rodney King riots, New York instituted a stop and frisk policy that primarily targeted minorities and their schools are very segregated, Kenosha is burning because the police shot another black man, and let’s not forget the incarceration rate in many of areas of the country. Or, hey, let’s forget about all of that. Because we can point to the South and revel in the fact that we’re better than them and just ignore our own policies and beliefs that disadvantage people of color in our area.
One of the structural problems highlighted in this series was that parents could solicit charitable contributions to directly benefit their own children. One necessary step would be to say that any contributions go to the entire public school system and not to any individual school. That would prevent one way in which nice white parents capture resources in a way that benefits their own children.