Well, they'd have had to figure out how to outlaw the whites from gutting the public school system in their counties and using the money freed up to start their all-white seg academies.

The things are all over the place still, and the study is bogus because it doesn't even address the issue.

I could cite chapter and verse, but you wouldn't listen. Where I was, desegregation in the cities did get money to black students who otherwise wouldn't have gotten it.

The effect was much less in the rural districts.

YOUR proposal would not be accepted, because it does not go far enough in controlling people. Strategies grounded in power grabs, tend to trump strategies grounded in academic performance.

When possible, extend the influence of government.

Harry-- Err, wouldn't desegregation be just as likely (and I'd argue even more likely) to cause whites to "gut the public school system in their counties and using the money freed up to start their all-white seg academies?" After all, desegregation causes not just equalization of spending, but ALSO causes whites to have classes with blacks, which has to be more offensive to racists, yes?

Your argument seems to be one against desegregation, then.

We're not connecting, John. Yes, I'm saying deseg orders did cause whites to destroy public school systems rather than mix races in the classrooms.

Since they controlled the tax rates, they lowered school taxes, transferring to the money to private academies where they sent their children.

The blacks and poor whites ended up with less than before.

The effect differed in cities and the rural areas. There were some shifts of money towards dark students in the cities.

I don't have figures overall and don't care. We aren't out to educate averages but to educate children.

Orrin, I think you miss the key issue in Brown v. Board of Ed. The court had a long train of evidence from Plessy v. Ferguson up to the Brown decision that separate was unequal in fact everywhere in the United States.

There's no question that the majority of state and local governments in the South (and other parts of the country) strictly enforced the 'separate' part, while ignoring the 'equal' part of Plessy up to the Brown decision. Separate but equal might have worked in some ideal world that didn't include the KKK, Lester Maddox and George Wallace, White Citizens Leagues and public lynchings. Further, 'separate but equal' was tried for decades and failed to provide equal benefits or services for blacks everywhere it was tried.

With the benefit of hindsight, the court's decision in Brown v. Board of Ed may have been wrong. The outcome has certainly been less positive than the proponents of desegregation hoped. However, opponents of integration had decades to increase per-pupil spending in their school districts and refused. The public school systems were seriously and obviously broken and the people in charge of the school systems were opposed to any change. (Sounds like the public school system today!) As a hard core, knuckle dragging, right wing Republican who sincerely believes in equality of opportunity (not outcome), I would have voted the same as the nine justices.

Harry:

Exactly. They should have used the system to get the money, not to get desegregation.

So, Harry, are you agreeing with Orrin? Seems to me like Orrin is making an argument that avoiding busing and forced desegregation but requiring equalized spending would have been less offensive to the racists out there and prevented the flaw you point to, plus have saved money.

Vouchers, incidentally, would also have helped prevent the flaw you mention. Not the withdrawing to form their own schools, but the voting to reduce school spending. (Assuming that the voucher amount was tied to school spending in some way.)

Harry:

Which desegregation failed to do.

Mr. Rothman:

Separate was unequal but not because separate but because unequal. Two options were available: mixing or money. They should have gone for the money.

Orrin:

How then do you address what Harry said:

"Well, they'd have had to figure out how to outlaw the whites from gutting the public school system in their counties and using the money freed up to start their all-white seg academies."

Let's assume that the SC did in fact order the states to make the money available. What would you have recommended to prevent the two outcomes Harry posits from happening? If they do happen, we're pretty much back to square one and there's not even a public school system for black children to attend.

I hate to mention actual facts to confuse this issue, but haven't per-student expenditures on education (factoring out effects of inflation of course) increased a great deal in ALL school districts in the nation in the last 40 years.

But then again, continue with your discussion.

My wisecrack about Orrin not listening (uncharacteristic of him) refers to an AP story I mailed him yesterday about the catastrophe that vouchers have created in Milwaukee.

David is correct about the impossiblity of having equal though separate, however.

Nor can I think of a way the left-behinds (who were not all nonwhite) could have gotten at the money, but if somebody has an idea, by all means, let's hear it.

Here's an example of what was going on, in Norfolk, Va., which was probably the most advanced, in a humanist sense, public school district in the South in 1968.

There were 5 high schools, 4 almost all white, and one, Booker T., all black. Booker T. was an ancient, decayed structure surrounding by broken glass and roaring highways. Without Brown, it would have stayed that way.

With Brown, the school board drew up plans to build a nice, modern replacement. So far, so good.

Here's what happened in real life, though.

While the new school was two or three years away, the plumbing collapsed in Booker T's gym. The whites running the school board looked at it, as Orrin would, from a practical point of view.

They had already appropriated $10M for a new school for them nigs, no point wasting any more fixin' the showers in the old gym. Let 'em stink a couple years, so what?

As it worked out, the black community managed to shame the board into fixing the showers anyhow, thanks in part to pressure from the newspaper I then worked on (though I didn't have any part in that, aside from making snarky remarks to the segs on the staff).

But you can understand, can't you, why the black students learned to despise the white establishment?

Orrin, not to nitpick, but the segregationists had 58 years from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to Brown v. Board of Ed (1954) to show that separate but equal could work. By not making that effort, segregationists proved they were both bigoted and fools.

If their main concern was to avoid racial mixing and miscegenation, then they should have bent over backwards to assure that blacks enjoyed equal or better schools, health care, public transportation, and police and fire protection to show that separate but equal could work.

I'm sorry that I can't provide the citation, but I remember reading about one segregationist state senator in the early 20th century who wanted black schools in his state to provide excellent education. He said it was a small price to pay, because the educated blacks would emigrate to northern states for better jobs and reduce the number of blacks in the state.

I ridicule leftists who claim that true communism hasn't been tried. The bottom line is that communism was tried in many countries over many decades and it has failed everywhere. Regardless of theory, communism failed spectacularly in the real world. Unlike theory blinded leftists, I like to believe that my politics are based on observed facts and when conservative theory runs counter to facts, it's the theory that needs to be modified. If separate but equal segregation could not be made to work anywhere in the US in 58 years, then it is a useless theory, just like communism. Further, I'm not aware of it working (providing equal opportunity) anywhere in the world at any time in history. The closest analogy I can think of is the Austro-Hungarian Empire which allowed ethnic groups to maintain their identities, but Magyars, Bohemians, Italians, Serbs, and Slovaks would all claim that there was no pretense of equality of opportunity in an empire run by the Hapsburgs for the benefit of the Austrian aristocracy.

Obviously, forced desegragation of schools has also not worked over the last 50 years. There are still huge disparities in average academic performance between whites, blacks, hispanics, and asians (and between subgroups within each of these groups) and overall performance has seemed to decline as well. There are probably many factors in addition to desegregation contributing to these problems including family breakdown, TV, declining teacher skills, unions, decline in the work ethic, consumerism and God knows what else. I also don't know how much an effect each of these factors has on academic performance.

Are vouchers the answer? How about home schooling? Charter schools? Is there some other, better solution? I wish I knew. But I do know that that proposing a system that has always failed in the past is unlikely to be an effective solution today.

Mr. Eager;

I presume you mean this story. I would note the key difference - the fraudlent schools were shut down and the perpetrators subjected to criminal investigation. When you show me that happening to a public school, I'll see your point. It's the same thing as Enron vs. the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Which is the bigger rip off? Which one has lasted over a century and which collapsed in just a few years?

Annoying Old Guy has an excellent point. Harry, no one has ever argued that the market doesn't create failure. There are failed public schools and failed voucher schools. With the latter, they get shut down. With the former, well, kids (especially poor kids) just suffer for years.

Harry, I still don't understand your point. You correctly note how racists would and did respond to desegregation. Great. It's obvious that racists were going to destroy the promise of desegregation just as they destroyed and made a mockery of any concept of "separate but equal." The question, as with any public policy one, is how to deal with reality.

You yourself admit that so long as racists and racist attitudes existed, then they would frustrate attempts at desegregation. (And actually, it's not just desegregation. It's a natural reaction to failing schools of any kind, even if it has nothing to with race.) You admit that you have no idea how to prevent it.

Since that reaction heavily dented the effectiveness of desegregation, it's appropriate to wonder if it was the best thing at the time. You can't compare the reality of the fake "separate but equal" to the hypothetical perfect desegregation, not in the real world. You have to compare the reality of "separate but equal" to the imperfect reality of desegregation. Still, probably its greatest long-term benefit was in changing the attitudes of some, although not all.

David/Harry:

Perhaps I'm not expressing this clearly. At the time of Brown schools were separate and not equal. Blacks went to court and demanded unseparation. They should have demanded equality. If your position is that the federal government could force desegregation but could not have forced states to distribute money more equitably I sippose that's a possibility, but it seems dubious.

Joe:

We sent federal troops to desegregate schools--are you saying we couldn't move money around?

oj,

Your point was perfectly clear the first time you made it. The problem is there's no way to honestly refute it and stand on a soapbox proclaiming your superiority to southern whites at the same time.

AOG:

Thanks, Harry didn't include a link.

As I wrote to him: "Didn't you learn anything from Willie Sutton? Where there's money there're crooks."

We need to distinguish between de jure and de facto discrimination. It is the only proper understanding of the Civil War amendments that the state and federal government can not discriminate on the basis of race. Plessy, in saying that providing equal public accomodation meant that the states were not discrminating, got it wrong. Brown should have simply overturned Plessy and said that distinguishing between races was discrimination.

The problem is that the plaintiffs, because they felt they had to distinguish Plessy and the Court, for no good reason but probably feeling it made the decision more palatable, argued, in effect, that mixing black kids with white kids provided an inherently better education for black kids. There are lots of problems with this formulation, both theorectical and practical. We've been dealing (or not dealing) with the consequences of that holding since 1954.

Among other things, the idea that mixing blacks and whites was uniquely beneficial to blacks, when it is entirely possible that neither "uniquely" or "beneficial" is true, has led to the attempt to rectify de facto segregation, which has been both a miserable failure and has been particularly harmful to black kids.

So, absolutely end de jure discrimination, which was an abomination, and then worry about educating kids and do what is necessary.

David

Precisely. You sound like a lawyer, but of course there was an entire "industry" of lawyers in the area of specifically school busing.

Even if school busing was necessary for the first few years, it was extended for at least two decades beyond a reasonable point. (I might add that busing was extremely expensive, and disruptive of education and only now are cities in the South working their way out of it)

Hello. My name is David and I am a lawyer.

Well, I was there, and although I did not have the advantage of even the lousy public schools pre-Brown, my kids did.

Where desegregation occurred, it had, on balance, good effects on everybody. It was mighty expensive, but not as expensive as what preceded it.

A couple years ago, my hometown, Chattanooga, was rated best place in the country to live. That sure would have surprised my father.

As for Orrin's theory that equalization of money would have answered, we have Hawaii, with a statewide public school system (only one in the nation), so we've got that. And the Orrins of the world can't wait to dismantle it.

And, in sooth, equal spending does not result in equal -- or even approximately equal -- outcomes.

Harry:

People aren't equal.

As near as I can tell, Harry, per student spending and quality of education are, at best, uncorrelated.

>>Harry:

People aren't equal.

So:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."

is a lie???

Joe:

That's moral equality. All are born with the same rights and obligations. But you could spend the entire GDP and not make Rodney King the equal of Martin Luther King.

David,
Yes I know you are a lawyer. I like the way lawyers express their opinions, and thus I was trying to compliment your ability at getting to the essential issues, when I said you sound like a lawyer.

H --

I've been told that I sound like a lawyer by my father, my mother, my best friend, business associates, siblings, my wife and other lawyers. None of them have ever meant it as a compliment.

David, Orrin is arguing for equalized spending, not for some absolute amount of spending.

We know, now, that equalized spending doesn't do the job.

Excessive spending does not either, but on the other hand, do you think it wise to spend so little the kids go to a school without plumbing?

Nobody was spending excessive amounts on educating black kids in the South in 1954.

Harry:

So now it's your argument that whites would have lowered the spending on their own kids until they had no plumbing?

Harry --

OJ wrote: At the time of Brown schools were separate and not equal. Blacks went to court and demanded unseparation. They should have demanded equality. If your position is that the federal government could force desegregation but could not have forced states to distribute money more equitably I sippose that's a possibility, but it seems dubious.

It is a little ambiguous, but I understand him to be arguing that equality of education, not integration or education spending, should have been the goal. I have a slight disagreement. The first priority was getting rid of racial discrimination by the state. Then comes education. It is unfortunate that getting rid of discrimination led us to screwing up education.

OJ:

I think Harry is arguing that rich whites could beggar the public school system, then spread what little was left equally.

The only way around that would be to include the money spent on the seg acadamies in the overall spending level, and ensure all students got the same amount.

Fat chance in the Jim Crow south.

David:

As usual, very insightful.

Jeff:

If that's his point it's idiotic. Southern politics was populist, not driven by rich whites.

OJ:

No, it isn't. The rich can put on a populist pose. The whites were both wealthier than, and had succeeded in disenfranchising, most blacks.

So they could rig the system anyway they wanted.

Jeff:

Then why didn't they stop desegregation? Oh yeah, they weren't particularly powerful once the Feds were involved.

I'm not trying to defend the way it turned out.

The way things were, it was probably a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.

In retrospect, providing adequate resources to black schools appears a better course of action than all that busing nonsense. On the other hand, the DC (and Detroit) school districts show what happens when you funnel lots of money to a polity that has been rendered dysfunctional through the helping hand of government.

There was a bit on NPR last week about how hard it is for San Francisco schools to maintain "diversity" (a word, and concept, most foul) despite housing patterns.

The whole thing would have been a parody of left thinking. Except that it has gone beyond parody.

Yes, we destroyed decent but underfunded black schools then shoveled money at them once we sent the students back. Then people wonder why the money doesn't help.

OJ:

What, you mean precisely the same thing we did, albeit with the best intentions, to black families?

Jeff:

Now you get it.

Caught a factoid at Joanne Jacobs' site which says the after factoring out inflation, per student expenditures on public education has tripled between 1960 and 2000.