Educational Atavism

I have mixed feelings about this recent report on a North Carolina school district's attempts to rollback longstanding diversity policies.  Before speaking on the matter, I need to note that I attended a small upscale private school, whose graduating senior class of 120 consisted of precisely one black student, so integration and daily interaction with the African American community isn't something I was exposed to from 7th grade onward.  We did have many Japanese and Korean students (the majority from the infamous Moon clan) though, and I would posit that while the cultural isolationism was even more severe between them and we white folk than between a theoretical black Hackley population, the asians often came from families even more moneyed than the rest of the school (rich enough to afford full multi-year and almost always multi-sibling tution, room & board, and all the imported gadgetry you could possibly want in the late 90s), so the socioeconomic schism wasn't so stark as I suspect OHS or Wake County, NC might be.  This lack of field experience might color my opinion somewhat.

I have to state that my initial reaction was "This makes sense."  In poor economic times, for cash-strapped schools, optimizing bus routes to be maximally local might help the district save a little money.  My very first reaction was from a budgetary viewpoint.  The secondary opinions on enforced diversity and, subsequently, on the larger political war over public education didn't form until much later, after I'd read Education Secretary Arne Duncan's letter to the editor, and digested the zeal with which Republican-sided commentators attacked that letter.

The partisan in me desperately wants to ascribe racial motives to the greater conservative educational movement in the various moves to end affirmative action, diversity regulations, and basically all the rules and systems put in place to try to dig African Americans out of their collective socioeconomic hole.  It would be terribly easy to just say, oh look, a slave state wants to put all the black kids in the most underfunded schools.  Those fucking Republican racist fucks.  But to go there would ignore the equally-poor rural white areas that would be forced into a similar cirumstance.  While I'm sure there are high-ranking Republicans on a mission to twist "equality" initiatives back onto themselves for discriminating against white people, I think there's an easier explanation here, or at least an easier liberal argument to make against the specific North Carolina news.

Reshuffling the demographics of school systems to purely local parameters will also reshuffle them back into purely economic castes.  Creating poor black urban and poor white rural schools, drawing only local funding, educating only local students who traditionally perform worse than their more well-to-do peers, will create designated failure schools.  I guess it's similar to the argument made against charter schools and voucher programs in DC, NYC, and other areas:  Taking funding away from public schools makes those schools more likely to underperform, which strengthens the national argument against public education as a whole, which results in more charter and voucher programs and private institutions, which takes more money from public education, and so on.  So dividing NC schools into rich-school poor-school will, theoretically, be another black eye for public education.

I can't say whether or not I received a better education at Hackley than my friends at OHS.  I have no clue.  Any possible aggregate comparisons between the two student bodies will be rendered totally pointless when factoring in family income levels, which affects tutoring, opens up doors at colleges that poor and middle-class families don't have, is a loosely correlated factor in parental involvement in student education, other cultural factors, etc.  I guess this is also an argument against charter schools, since the perceived increase in test scores can just as easily be attributed to parental involvement as school management and teacher performance.  What I can say is that, not burdened with a union, Hackley can and did routinely refresh their teaching roster when certain educators were thought to be slacking.  I can personally verify that teachers whose classes were total jokes, who were poor communicators, who let the students have free reign, were almost uniformly let go shortly after my experience.  There's some argument to be made for a market-driven educational approach, however small or insignificant you may feel it is when compared to the aims of public goals.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that the racial arguments w/r/t school segregation may not be as persuasive as the political one.  Public education has been on their to-kill list for some time.