In a message dated 8/30/2002 7:26:46 PM Central Daylight Time, lynnell mickelsen writes:
> Lynnell sez: Darling, we've been there. Done that. It was > called court-ordered busing and we did it for almost 20 years in > Minneapolis and around the country. It was a noble effort in theory > that proved to be a colossal failure in practice. Nearly everywhere > it was tried, the white middle-class left the system in droves; black > test scores continued to lag or even go down. And parents of all > colors hated having their kids on buses for hours and hours. > Especially when there was often a school within a few blocks of their > home. I did not like the control-choice desegregation plan that was replaced by the Community School Plan because of the long bus rides and the fact that most of the students who attended a particular school were scattered over a large part of the city (I was a custodial parent of 2 MPS students in the 1980s) I have always had a preference for a desegregation plan with defined attendance areas, very much like the Community School Plan, except the goal should be to integrate, not segregate a diverse student population. I think that parents of all colors, tax brackets and levels of educational attainment want their children to get an education which maximizes their intellectual development and opportunities for employment and further education after high school. By and large, parents from high poverty neighborhoods on the North side and parents from low poverty neighborhoods in SW Minneapolis want the same educational outcomes for their children. Did "force bussing" and other policies designed to close the test score gap significantly reduce the gap during the 1970's and 1980's? The answer is yes, at least if you are using data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress as your yardstick. Differences in average NAEP math and reading scores between black and white students declined from 1971 until the late 1980s. Since then the NAEP test score gap between has steadily increased. I don't think that "forced busing" (race-mixing) was a big factor in producing white middle-class flight from Minneapolis and other cities in the Northern US. Blacks were moving in and middle class whites were moving out of the inner cities during the entire post world war 2 era. You can't attribute the migration of anyone to "forced busing" prior to the 1970s because there wasn't any. White flight happened prior to "forced bussing" because middle class whites had access to housing in the suburbs and in the better neighborhoods in Minneapolis, and blacks didn't. And white middle class flight from certain neighborhoods in Minneapolis continued since the early 1970s because whites had much better access than blacks to housing outside of the city's low-income ghettos. I suspect some white parents moved out of Minneapolis so there kids wouldn't have to go to school with black kids. And other whites stayed in or moved to Minneapolis despite their racial attitudes, and in some cases because they actually want their kids to see something other than white faces at school. However, I think that the biggest factor that motivates a parent to keep their children at a public school or withdraw them is the quality of instruction and classroom climate. -Doug Mann, King Field, the new 8th ward Mann for School Board Web site: http://educationright.tripod.com _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
