!Stopping the Liberal insanity in Boston
Pet...@hotmail.com
THE END OF BUSING
The Boston School Committee's vote this week to
eliminate race as a factor in deciding which school
students attend marks the historic end of one of the
most ill-conceived exercises in American education:
the use of forced busing to achieve racial integration.
Nearly 30 years after the concept was first
introduced, it has become abundantly clear that
integration in and of itself - with busing its most
visible
and divisive symbol - has not been an educational
panacea.The notion that forcing students, black and
white, to attend schools miles from their homes
against their will solely to achieve racial "balance"
would foster higher learning standards has been
thoroughly discredited.
Boston was the flashpoint of urban busing to achieve
integration. The often-violent resistance to busing
captured the nation's attention and even elected a
leader of the opposition, Louise Day Hicks, to
Congress.
Once the dust settled, it became clear that busing -
and other academic formulas in which race was the
most critical factor - was a short-sighted solution
that
may have solved one problem but ended up creating
many others.
As in New York, the public-school system in Boston
has changed dramatically over the decades. When
busing began in 1974, more than half the students
were white; today, the figure is less than two out of
10. Court-ordered busing ended in 1989, replaced
by "controlled choice," in which stu-dents could
attend schools in one of three zones closer to their
homes - provided all schools remained adequately
integrated.
But parents who sued to end the system argued that
since race was still an important factor, schoolkids
were being ethnically coded in an eerie parallel of the
Jim Crow ideas these policies were supposed to
address and attack. "It's discrimination," one lawyer
argued, "on the basis of the awarding of a benefit or
the withholding of a benefit on the basis of color."
The impetus for this week's decision was the
important U.S. Court of Appeals ruling last February
that declared unconstitutional the race-based
admissions policy at Boston Latin School. The
prestigious public school had admitted students in two
different ways: Half were chosen strictly on the basis
of merit and the other half on a combination of merit
and race.
When a student challenged the two-tier system,
saying she'd been denied admission in favor of
less-qualified minority applicants, the courts
ultimately
agreed. The Boston School Committee - like
education officials across the nation - read the
writing
on the wall.
The overwhelming, nationwide parental support for
charter schools demonstrates just how badly social
engineering has hurt urban school systems. Happily,
the courts and school officials are starting to
recognize - and to rule - that race-neutral
public-education policies are not only the fairest way
to go, but also the smartest.
--
-------------------------------------------------
http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Stands/6475
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.