When it comes to “rammed down the public’s throat”, I’d vote for court-ordered busing.
I realize I’m conflating courts and politicians, but courts are part of government. For individuals in power to decide they had the right to interfere with families and determine who their kids should associate with, was both horrifying and appalling. Perhaps it is “better” in some way for kids to hang out with a different bunch than where the parents chose to settle, but that is not for the government to decide. And (imo) the resulting stampede out of the cities to far-flung suburbia(s) indicates I’m not alone in that belief. According some articles, we are now far more segregated than before this was “shoved down our throats”. Hopefully, the PTB’s got the clear message: Don’t mess with our kids.
Quote from one article: In 1999, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA published a widely read report titled “Resegregation in American Schools.” Analyzing racial-balance percentages from school districts nationwide, the study found that our educational system made steady, significant progress toward a healthy racial composition up until the mid- to late-1980s. After that, the trend reversed dramatically. As of the 1996-97 school year, the ratio of black to white students in public schools fell below the level achieved in 1972. In 2006, 73 percent of black children attended schools with at least 50 percent minority enrollment, and 38.5 percent attended schools with at least a 90 percent minority enrollment. Since then, the numbers have kept heading in the same direction.
Interfering with families is a huge overreach of government. One of the many reasons we settled in Texas is their balkanized, largely neighborhood school systems. We wanted to maintain as much local control as possible over the value and funding of our kids’ educations. We actually had a Democrat governor in Texas in the early 90’s. She thought her Robin Hood plan for spreading the funding amongst the various school systems was a peachy idea. I will note since then, the only Democrat to get near the governor’s chair has been the janitor. Again, don’t mess with our kids.
pullin: You don’t seem to realize that the busing was ordered because of the so-called “separate but equal” schools were anything but equal. It had jack all to do with “kids hanging out with a different bunch than where the parents chose to settle”.
Pullin, do you think that impoverished and discriminated-against African American families are mostly in agreement with you that desegregation plans were appalling? Or is this more of a “Forget you, buddy, I got mine” sort of argument?
Note that busing involved a slightly different issue: “desegregation” was abolishing the de jure system of forbidding blacks to attend all-white schools. “Integration” as it was called in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the mandate that de facto segregation, resulting from the demographics of where students lived, had to be abolished. The first righted a traditional injustice, the second smacked far more of social engineering.
I’ll leave it to lawyers to interpret the ruling, but I thought it was due to the “equal protection” part of the 14th amendment. Apparently, a parent choosing to live in a school district the courts didn’t like, was denying the law’s protection for someone in another school district they did like. Or something. No matter how I look at it, I can’t see the connection. It always ends up looking like: “We don’t like the community in which you bought your house, and chose to educate your kids. So we’re going to overrule your decisions as a parent, and take them by force of law to the community we’ve decided is best for them.” To me, this type of decision is chilling, appalling, and represents government overreach so extreme that it boggles the mind. So you’re right I guess… I don’t realize…
I don’t understand the “or” in this question. To the first; I don’t know how black people feel about forced busing now. I’m really curious, and even thought about starting a thread on it. The only black people I know are at work, but with all the PC landmines strewn about the modern workplace I wouldn’t dare approach this subject.
To the second; I assume you’re referring to the bit about Ann Richards and Robin Hood funding. I don’t have cites for everything, but like the forced busing above, the end result was worse than before. Texas provided school funding statewide via the sales tax, lottery and a permanent school fund. As I recall, there are about 1300 individual school districts in the state (sorry, no cite) and they can raise additional money thru local property taxes. This allows us (as parents) to add significantly to the minimums provided via the state. Obviously, this ends up with significant differences in the schools, with some parents providing increasingly lavish buildings and sports facilities. As I understand it, when forced by the Robin Hood plan to provide their (somewhat) voluntary excess to other school districts, parents either moved or attempted to repeal the funding. Again, I apologize as it’s hard to find cites for all this and I may have some of the funding details wrong. One study has concluded the overall effect of Robin Hood funding was negative (inequality ended up worse than before).
I want to reiterate what I said in the first paragraph; It may actually be better for kids to have mix of friends and more diverse viewpoints than that provided by their parents. But I don’t think it is the government’s or the court’s business to enforce this by taking the kids where the parents haven’t chosen. And based on the massive white flight which followed, many millions of parents seem to have agreed. And they felt so strongly they sold their houses and moved. For the OP, I can’t imagine a better example of something “rammed down the public’s throat.”
How wide was the opposition to mandatory schooling? You hear about neanderthals who strongly opposed it in the 19th century, and I hope it had widespread support, but I don’t know.
Then your problem isn’t with busing, it’s with compulsory education. Once a government says, “Your child must attend a school, and here’s the school we’re assigning you to,” busing is just a different way of assigning a kid to a school. It’s deeply problematic to focus on the desegregation plans, rather than on the compulsory nature of school assignment in general, as the undemocratic part.
This is unmitigated malarkey. If you went to school in the US at any time since the 1960s, you should know the whats and whys of the court-ordered decision.
There was the Wilmington coup d’etat in 1898 that violently overthrew the legitimately elected government of the city. And in general the violent actions across the South that ended Reconstruction and established Jim Crow. Say what you will about the legitimacy of busing, people weren’t murdered to enforce it.
In the context of segregation, de facto and de jure are terms of art. It was generally only in the South that school systems admitted to operating separate schools, and busing could be ordered only to correct de jure segregation.
Your high school history teacher needs to be hung, drawn and quartered. The reason the students needed to be bused is because black people couldn’t buy homes in areas zoned for white schools, because white people couldn’t or wouldn’t sell to them or because of laws forbidding them to live there.
Michigan’s Emergency Fiscal Manager law (you know, the one that is currently being blamed for the Flint poisoned water situation) has to be up there. The law allows the governor to appoint an Emergency Fiscal Manger to take over administration of any city whose finances are deemed dire enough. Said manager can rip up union contracts, override city councils, and dictate what local government can and can’t do. So, under criteria decided by the governor, he can appoint someone answerable only to him who can override the rule of the local city government in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”
But that’s not even the most disgusting part. The citizens of Michigan did not like this law and once it was passed, succeeded in getting enough signatures to get it on a ballot referendum, where it was voted down. The legislature then resurrected it and tacked it onto a spending bill, which is not subject to referendum. Thus the State of MI pretty much said to its citizens, “screw you…we’re going to reserve the right to override your local elected officials whether you want it or not.” I have been amazed, quite frankly, that this didn’t provoke the national uproar it deserved. After all, if this is deemed constitutional (and I don’t know if it has been), it’s a tactic that any state legislature could use. Perhaps because it was aimed mostly at Detroit, or because Rick Snyder is not as personally confrontational as, say, Scott Walker, it seems to have slid under the radar. But that doesn’t make it any less despicable.
The current Emergency Fiscal Manager of Flint is the person who decided to save a few bucks by using water from the Flint river, rather than Detroit-treated water, with catastrophic results for the citizens of Flint. Now there are calls for the governor to resign, Flint has been declared a disaster area and the EPA is investigating. I can only hope the implosion takes the EFM law with it.
FWIW, it’s long been held that municipal governments are subordinate to the state, due to the state’s power to control incorporation. Flint and slightly better off Detroit, are such fiscal basket cases that even a heavy-handed law like this seemed the lesser of two evils. The legislature resurrected the law because no one knows what else to do.
The topic of the OP is undemocratic things governments have crammed down our throats. A legislature enacting by stealth a law the people have voted to reject is undemocratic (and I think fits the description of “cramming down our throats”). An unelected official having the power to override the actions of the people’s elected representatives is certainly undemocractic. Whether or not their intentions are good, this is not democracy.
The criteria of “fiscally sound” is pretty slippery also. What municipality doesn’t have holes in its budget somewhere? But because this was aimed at Detroit, Flint and Benton Harbor, which are poor, mostly black cities, there seems to be an attitude of “Eh. Whatever.” Let this provision be enacted toward a middle-class majority white city, in Michigan or another state which borrows the tactic, and I would bet the outrage quotient would be higher.