June 29, 2007
EMPHASUS ON THE WRONG SYLLAABLE:
Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education (JUAN WILLIAMS, 6/29/07, NY Times)
The focus of efforts to improve elementary and secondary schools shifted to magnet schools, to allowing parents the choice to move their children out of failing schools and, most recently, to vouchers and charter schools. The federal No Child Left Behind plan has many critics, but there’s no denying that it is an effective tool for forcing teachers’ unions and school administrators to take responsibility for educating poor and minority students. [...]In 1990, after months of interviews with Justice Thurgood Marshall, who had been the lead lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund on the Brown case, I sat in his Supreme Court chambers with a final question. Almost 40 years later, was he satisfied with the outcome of the decision? Outside the courthouse, the failing Washington school system was hypersegregated, with more than 90 percent of its students black and Latino. Schools in the surrounding suburbs, meanwhile, were mostly white and producing some of the top students in the nation.
Had Mr. Marshall, the lawyer, made a mistake by insisting on racial integration instead of improvement in the quality of schools for black children?
His response was that seating black children next to white children in school had never been the point. It had been necessary only because all-white school boards were generously financing schools for white children while leaving black students in overcrowded, decrepit buildings with hand-me-down books and underpaid teachers. He had wanted black children to have the right to attend white schools as a point of leverage over the biased spending patterns of the segregationists who ran schools — both in the 17 states where racially separate schools were required by law and in other states where they were a matter of culture.
If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.
The tragedy of Brown was the emphasis on separation rather than equality. Had the Court simply ordered school systems to equalize the per pupil spending for black and white pupils it would have truly empowered black pupils, parents, teachers and administrators while using the racists' own defense against them.
Posted by Orrin Judd at June 29, 2007 7:02 AM
At the risk of being redundant, the ONLY way to equalize spending is to equalize spending. Not only do you not NEED the ficticious construct of a school district, but having such a construct impedes such equalization - intentionally, IMO.
Though focused on Illinois, my plan would work almost anywhere.
The sad thing is that the "equal protection clause" of the 14th amendment would be viewed by any rational judge as nearly a mandate for funding children directly, and not systems.
Posted by: Bruno at June 29, 2007 7:30 AMThis shows one again the fundamental thinking error of liberals. They think that the result of a policy will be only amd exactly what they *think* the result will be. They never consider that other people have a say and that the actual result might be different than their desired result.
And the sad thing is that they keep making this mistake over and over again.
It's as if the phrase "unintended consequences" never exists in their minds.
Very discouraging. After all these years, laymen still do not understand Brown vs. the Board.
The Court in Brownwas careful to find that the segregated schools in Topeka were substantially equal in the material sense. The gravemen of the decision is that state-imposed school segregation injures Black children by screwing up ". . .their hearts and minds in a way likely to never be undone." The idea is that be treating Black children as a form of ground pollution, the state was damaging their psyches.
Not a bad basis for the holding, actually. If lo Statois running the schools, it shouldn't be stigmatizing anyone by ratifying the invidious prejudices of the majority.
Posted by: Lou Gots at June 29, 2007 5:17 PMTheir problems weren't psychological, just economic.
Posted by: oj at June 29, 2007 6:22 PMSo what happened w/KC, MO, c. 1984-1991 if the problems were just economic?
Cos it wasn't economic.
So what happened w/KC, MO, c. 1984-2001 if the problems were just economic?
Cos it wasn't economic.
Yes, it was economic, they tried solving it via racial gerrymandering.
Posted by: oj at June 29, 2007 9:13 PMBeyond discouraging, hopeless.
The case has been mistated, The "economic" interpretation is simply wrong. Read the opinion; it's short.
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0347_0483_ZO.html
The case says what I had earlier put forth. Not economic, psychological. Read it.
By now that card has been played out, which is why the plantation overlooker class is floundering around for new bases for their regime, such as so-called "diversity," and entitlement to preferences in perpetuity.
Now Mr. Justice Marshall may have told us years later that Brown had had to do with economic equalization; that is not what he had argued and it is not what the Court held.
Posted by: Lou Gots at June 30, 2007 1:02 AMNo, they quadrupled prop taxes, these kids were fencing in Africa, amongst other countries, had the pools, theaters, had money for everything, yet the schools couldn't get accredited after 15 years - they couldn't get the grades. They had building most of this country would salivate for.
It wasn't economic.
Just like the new problems at one of the local middle schools, it isn't economic - unless economic is defined as "poor."
Approximately 60% of their enrollment changes each year.
One's living in a $700K house and the school has "inner city Chicago" problems and the whites/indians/orientals are leaving - I refuse to write "Asian" to cover everyone. that's one of those blob words trying to obfusicate(?) (sp) localities.
If the parents hang around for 2 years, the kid'll be at the grade level he/she should be.
Burr Ridge isn't Dalton.
Posted by: Sandy P at June 30, 2007 3:34 AM