August 2006 Weddings
MeredithE
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Integration ruined public schools
A friend of mine just called me very upset. Seems that her and her husband started talking about public schools in Georgia. Because of his past experiences with "busing" in Georgia( hes now 37), he told her integration ruined the public school system. When she tried to counter his point, he called her a flaming liberal.
I can't help but to take his comments personally and believe there was a hint of bigotry in his remark.
Give me your thoughts about his opinion and tell me why I should ever feel comfortable being around this person.
"HOW many US citizens and ranchers have been decapitated in Arizona by roving bands of paperless aliens, and how will a requirement that I have papers on me make that not happen?"courtesy of SueSue
Re: Integration ruined public schools
If he thinks the way the school system integrated (process, not substance) was faulty, I would want to hear more about it.
This is a total stretch, but perhaps he was referring to the overall quality of education... I'd assume there was some restructuring, more crowded-ness, etc? Like when the city & country libraries merged here, people say that the quality of the county library system went downhill because now there's significantly more demand and not very much more supply.
I'm with you, though. If I were you, I'm not sure I could ever be comfortable around that person again.
was he talking about integration in general (like schools for whites only, etc) or was he talking about... hm not sure what the term is for it but 'forced integration' (wrong connotation though) where students are bussed all over to achieve integration 'quotas'?
The former would be abhorrent, the latter... eh I am kinda with him. I dont think that is good for students (when forced widespread - no problem with programs where a few kids are bussed out of bad systems into good ones).
How do you know he is talking abut racial stuff? I think bussing in LA was a disaster. Instesd of fixing the system, they tried to take kids out of their environment, put them on a bus for hours and not put any effort in to fixing the system.
Not a brilliant idea.
A couple details :
His school bused people from the poorest black neighborhoods to his school. Then some people tennis shoes got stolen, that is the bad experience he is speaking of.
When the schools were integrated in Atlanta, a large majority of the white population fled to the burbs.
I was going to further say something like this... like maybe he meant that the way the schools were desegregised (sp?) in GA had bureaucratic implications, and it was poorly done, etc? It sounds like the guy is just an ass though honestly.
Similar deal here in New Orleans -when integration occured there was massive white flight to the suburbs.
Some whites will insist the reason the school system fell apart in the city was due to the blacks taking over -not only in the student population but with the teachers and the administration.
Who knows why the school system crumbled but it gives these type of people something to blame? Although as I type this I am also realizing that some of our best public school systems in the state are in predominantly white populated areas while the worse are in the african-american communitites. I am by no means trying to sound racist but it is an argument or a laying of blame you hear in these parts quite often.
I would guess he's unable to differentiate between normal integration and forced integration.
I was also willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until it was boiled down to stolen shoes.
Seriously, white kids never stole anything? Even if it's not necessarily racist, and he's just complaining that a bunch of poor kids were brought into his perfect cookie-cutter world, I'm not sure I could defend that, either.
My verdict = assh0le. Although I can't imagine marrying someone and not realizing they had those kinds of views.
"As of page 2 this might be the most boring argument ever. It's making me long for Rape Day." - Mouse
Mer: we debated this a lot in my urban ed masters classes. Actually there are a lot of Black experts in the field who share that opinion (not the majority, but there are a significant number). Its not because Blacks and White intermingled...its because of how Brown v Board was handled and carried out. It was executed horribly (IMO) and it caused a lot of issues. The numbers I remember seeing (its been awhile) show that it actually hurt Black students the most. Their performance, as a group, fell.
Now whether or not that is causation or correlation is a whole other issue.
I don't think I can you can feel comfortable about being around this person. His comments were bigotted and just plain wrong.
my read shelf:
the shoes bit is just ignorant.
and irish makes a good point, scholars of all backgrounds have pondered if forced integration was the answer. it's a terribly complex question.
i wonder, to those who said busing and redistricting was the wrong way to integrate schools, what should have been the right way? lord knows, many jurisdictions took their sweet time integrating schools, many not until a full decade after brown v. board was decided. so really, it's not as if this thing was hoisted on schools all of a sudden without any warning. they purposely stalled...
or, do you believe that integration alone was not the fix for the inferior public schools that blacks were forced to attend? i'm curious.
Maybe he is thinking that forced bussing seriously screwed over a lot of poor black kids? ?Bussed them to an equally bad school as the one they were in before? ?That bussing was a huge social experiment on the part of white liberal lawmakers, and black kids were the test dummies? ?That all they cared about was integrating when they should have been caring about getting these kids a quality education?
Maybe he's anti-bussing and not anti-integration.?