Posted on 06/28/2019 1:08:54 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
My memory on forced busing for school desegregation is a bit foggy, but I believe this big government statist social experiment was unpopular among parents (black and white) of children forced to be bused sometimes miles away to unfamiliar schools and neighborhoods. I don't think it lasted very long, nor was it successful, and may have eventually been ruled unconstitutional.
Guess it was good for little Kamala, though.
Anyone remember the details of this program?
It was so unpopular commentators at the time thought Congress might restrict the jurisdiction of the federal courts so they would stop ordering busing.
It was just horrible, forcibly bussing inner city kids to the suburbs and visa versa.
I was bussed starting in 1976. I lived 3 blocks away from the neighborhood junior high but had to be bussed to the junior high in the low-income, predominantly Indian neighborhood.
I went from getting A+ in every subject to running for my life every day. I was beaten, spit on, gum in the hair, and burned with cigarettes daily. I flat out stopped going to school early in 8th grade.
When my mom found out she took me to a Catholic school we couldn’t afford and my dad moved us into the far suburbs.
Forced bussing changed my life in a major way. For the worse.
It was a social experiment that went too far to equalize educational outcomes.
Nobody liked it, as some kids had to endure an hour or more bus ride to an unfamiliar neighborhood, far away from home.
The plan was to put black kids into all white schools and white kids in all black schools.
You can guess what happened.
The courts eventually discovered that forced busing was making things worse, not better...........
Busing was imposed by federal judges. America woke up to the danger of judges legislating from the bench. Democrats abandoned busing because they got their butts kicked in elections.
In the San Fernando Valley they bussed a bunch of middle class whites to the predominantly schools in Sylmar and brought 3 busloads of the most incorrigible thug type blacks to my Junior High School that was all white. in High School it went to 30 buses! Needless to say. shit went downhill fast.
The way I see it, this was all intentional in an effort to create racial strife where there was none. And it worked very well.
They've only begun to recover from it in the last ten years.
No one liked it.
- Lots of violence @ South Boston HS and Roxbury HS . . .
- Lots of violent protests (recall the soiling of Old Glory photo)
- Accelerated the "white flight" from the city to the suburbs
- Public school enrollment in Boston was halved, from 100,000 to about 57,000
- Many schools still remained segregated due to demographics, anyway
- There's still a lot of debate if it improved educational outcomes at all. For example, SBHS and RHS were two of the worst performing schools in the system anyway; it's not like anyone's education improved by desegregating by force
And of course the children of the judges and the politicians were exempt from busing. If they want to bring busing back, make a rule, anyone collecting a public salary will be required to bus their kids to another public school miles away.
It was court ordered to end de injure segregation. Started in the mid sixties. I know parents in Denver brought suit ...there may have been other states involved that I don’t recall. That case was decided by SCOTUS in 1976 in favor of the parents
I lived very close to the Washington D.C. border and they bussed whites into my high school from a rival school. There were more problems with school rivalries than with race.
Forced integration never works.. but leftist don’t care about harming your kids.. only advancing their agenda.
As a victim of busing it was almost 95% bad.
They bused the black kids from the inner cities into our suburban schools.
Fights and gangs broke out immediately along with the focus on education from learning how to be good citizens where we had free reign of the school during lunch period to assigned seating and lockdowns and then, of course, the airing of aggrievances started that the bused in kids were being discriminated against and in school riots which were always covered up by the school or if word got out blamed on the white kids.
Instead of appropriating funds to increase school value and support in the depressed communities they overloaded the school systems of the wealthy schools while downfunding the poor ones (because they didn’t need the money anymore with fewer students) all for their socialist utopia.
The black neighborhoods were destroyed. Lost was neighborhood cohesiveness and a sense of belonging. That horrible decree, combined with forcing fathers to leave their families in order to get the family on assistance, destroyed them. And the really stable families suffered the most.
Wow, I feel sorry for you. An ill-conceived social engineering experiment changed your life for the worse..
Yeah it was never a race problem at my school so much as a class problem as my “white” school (which it wasn’t - it was a rural farming community that was predominantly white) was actually poor as the “rich whites” schools had lawyers that fought the busing to the poor white areas.
You address things that politicians would like to pretend never happened. The most serious victims of Leftist ideology are often those they deceptively pretend to be helping.
Here in St. Lucie County Fl we were under a court order that required busing so that the schools reflected the countywide demographics on race As the city of Port St. Lucie grew this often meant that children changed schools every year to keep the balance. There was supposed to be some choice but the reality was many parents did not get their first or even second option. Little ones would sometimes have to catch the bus before 6 in the morning to be bused to the other end of the county. Even getting siblings in the same school could not be guaranteed. We were lucky that the neighborhood we lived in kept the same school zones throughout our children’s school years.
There wasn’t any violence associated with the busing. But the first year the high school was fully integrated there were riots and the National Guard was called in. Fun times.
The order was lifted some years back and economics is the new standard to make sure schools don’t become segregated again. And parents have more flexibility in school choice.
Once upon a time, parents were involved in their children’s public school education. They had power to influence what happened there and were easily able to participate since the schools were close to their homes.
Busing changed that. It dumped kids into schools far from their homes, essentially removing the parents of the kids who needed the most support from the equation.
Parents not being involved was suddenly the norm...don’t worry about your kids’ education, the government will handle it for you. Unfortunately this attitude remained after busing was stopped.
I believe that is the direct cause of the fiasco that is (most) public education today.
Just my $0.02
Love,
O2
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