Where as much of the rest of the country has had children in schools just fine for months.
You can damn well place a lot of blame on the unions because they are not there for the welfare of students and no action they have taken shows otherwise. If anything they guarantee the least needed teachers will ever end up in schools desperate to have them. They will go after any alternative means of education which includes home teaching, something they have effectively now forced on many minority families in our largest cities.
I think it is funny that outsiders on an anti-union crusade will continue dismiss what students & parents who actually go to schools like these say many of the problems are.
e: And I'm not saying unions are entirely unproblematic. I had a few (2 or so) teachers who were protected. But they are so far from the root cause of the dysfunction in our urban schools. Informal segregation is a much bigger piece of the puzzle.
If all media could list facts and stats, and lay out all kinds of reasons and assumptions. Unfortunately, both left and right media are doing the opposite. For instance, some right labels NYC teacher's union as a woke entity. The teacher union said that reopening school was racist. And Twitter, oh, the almighty righteous Twitter, simply bans the accounts who are opposing CDC's guidelines. It's just so hard to see influential medias and platforms to engage nuanced discussion.
* Randomly assigned poor & black students to socioeconomically diverse and non-diverse schools, found rich-poor achievement gap was halved in math (https://production-tcf.imgix.net/app/uploads/2010/10/1600543...)
* Systemic benefits in national tests for students in socioeconomically diverse schools, regardless of family background (https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomica... along with a whole laundry list of other evidence).
* Evidence that minority parents in my school district favor distance learning while the pandemic continues. I couldn't find the original stat because the thread was deleted, but here is a similar poll showing the same thing (https://www.the74million.org/article/as-more-dcps-schools-op...)
Beyond the oblivious benefits of having different communities of students commingle, how does desegregation help poorer performing school? I was under the impression desegregation was more about providing more equal access to better run schools than improving poorer preforming school.
1. There are studies showing that socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools (which often go hand and hand in urban contexts) have huge measurable positive impacts on people from less advantaged backgrounds, and no impact on people from more advantaged backgrounds.
2. Affluent families often have more time to devote towards advocating for improvements in their school. Incompetent administrations get shielded when there aren't parent watchdogs.
3. Hate to say it, but high-quality teacher retention is very difficult in schools that are close to entirely black &/or poor.
It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students.
I definitely do not have all the solutions though. I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain. White private school attendance is very related to school system diversity.
It's not just a problem of private schools - it's families having the ability to move to a different district.
If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school. They want to bus your kid? Move to the suburbs. They want to bus from the suburbs? Send your kid to private or religious school? Ban those? Hire a nanny/tutor. So forth and so on. As you pointed out, there's not benefit academically for these advantaged kids, so this understandable why there's push back. Some people aren't going to value being exposed to other communities enough to outweigh the inconvenience of busing their kids.
We could try to make these communities more desirable to live in, but 1) we're assuming we haven't tried making them desirable (and if not, why not), and 2) we risk pushing out the poorest of the community and negating the benefits for those families. It's a big, hard problem - how do you go about improving a failing school in a poor neighborhood without changing the neighbors in the neighborhood?
I was too young to remember the 70s, but, from what I understand, busing occurred mostly between neighborhoods in the city, often moving kids from one poor community to another. If you were in a neighborhood with nicer schools and busing was enforced, you moved. And the politicians and judges enforcing busing certainly didn't send their kids to these schools - if they lived in these communities at all.
Unless we start telling people where they can live and how they can raise their children, I don't think this path is viable.
Hm. It's not understandable to me - if there is no harm academically, why the pushback? If you look at recordings from Boston parents during the busing protests, they're quite clear about what their issue is ("n*****s").
> If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school
This sounds intuitive when you hear it for the first time. And I did alude to it in my previous comment. But I don't think we should overstate the effect. From 21st century data, at a macroscale, enrollment does not really drop when you integrate, even when that integration involves sending kids to schools that are not the closest neighborhood one.
Cambridge, MA has implemented a '21st-century busing' controlled choice approach and saw no decline in enrollment. [0] Parts of Brooklyn recently did the same and saw no change in the enrollment of white students. [1]
It's hard to say exactly why this is the case - perhaps racial animus has declined, perhaps there is a growing awareness that attending a racially diverse school is not actually harmful for educational outcomes, perhaps white flight in the 80s and 90s wasn't caused by busing in the first place, perhaps the benefits to remaining in cities are increasing, etc.
Moreover, busing didn't fail. By the 1980s, after concerted efforts to integrate, schools were more socioeconomically and racially diverse than ever before. Since about 1990, however, schools have re-segregated to the amount they were in 1974.
I don't buy that de facto segregation is an inevitable result of freedom of mobility. The evidence strongly suggests that it is related to policy choices and that it can be changed. Given the massive impacts that it seems to have on overall quality of education, shouldn't we try?
[0]: tcf.org/content/report/cambridge-public-schools/ [1]: https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/11/14/21121770/a-push-to-integ...
>Hm. It's not understandable to me - if there is no harm academically, why the pushback?
Not wanting to send your kid to a bad school in a bad neighborhood? Let's be specific here - these were parents in South Boston worried about sending their kids to Roxbury. (Yes, ironic given Southie was also a bad neighborhood.) Sure, plenty of them were racist as hell on top of that.
To the larger point - were these privileged kids living in Southie? No - they were also poor and working class, just like the kids in Roxbury. So where are these privileged kids living? In the suburbs. Which didn't have busing into inner city schools. And where affordable housing means paying half a million dollars for a condo instead of a million dollars. And there's very few POC who can afford living there. Are these families racist? Maybe not overtly, but they certainly aren't challenged to living along side POCs.
> Moreover, busing didn't fail. By the 1980s, after concerted efforts to integrate, schools were more socioeconomically and racially diverse than ever before. Since about 1990, however, schools have re-segregated to the amount they were in 1974.
So it failed in the 90s instead of the 80's. Roxbury and South Boston still have bad schools (although both are less crime-ridden than the 70's)
Interesting enough, Cambridge and Brooklyn have grown in affluence starting in the 90s, which more affluent families moving in. Lo and behold, the schools improve across the board as the city can bus kids and resources around to poorer preforming schools.
> "It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students."
I could not disagree more, not with our current approach to inner city schools. Desegregation through busing among bad neighborhoods didn't improve bad schools. Affluent families moving into those neighborhoods did.
> Given the massive impacts that it seems to have on overall quality of education, shouldn't we try?
Given the current trends, I'm not seeing the interest in making these poorer communities less poor. It would be bold to see an attempt to bus kids from affluent communities into the city, but that is very unlikely to happen.
I went to a very similar school system as the one in Waiting For Superman and there are a whole litany of issues I would put before teacher unions in terms of what is afflicting our urban schools, top on the list is:
a. incompetent administration
b. failure to desegregate our schools.