November 14, 2007

• Soc's latest: The merits of Bussing

  Should schoolchildren be bussed away from community schools in order for the school district to achieve Racial, Ethnic, Intellectual, or Social balance?

  Short answer: No.
  Forced bussing never was very popular but back in the '60s and '70s it was a fairly common court-ordered solution to the separate and unequal public schooling that was rampant throughout much of the nation due to racial segregation.
  In almost all cases, those court orders have long since expired despite the persistence of racially segregated housing patterns. Involuntary bussing, however, still persists.
  Under the leadership of President Bush's younger brother, Jeb; Florida has enlarged upon the "No Child Left Behind Act" to base County school budgets, individual school budgets, and teacher pay on the results of yearly tests of students and perceived "improvement" over past results. this has led to some competition between schools for bright students who will raise the school's score. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Florida, a large populous state, has only 67 county school systems. Some of those "local" systems are larger than the entire state system of some states.
  In order to "homogenize" the school populations, many Florida counties still bus large groups of students past their local schools to sometimes quite distant destinations. The result, while looking good on paper (for a while at least) doesn't mean the schools are integrated - the students most often are still separated by ability and have little in-class contact with other intellectual groups and at lunch and recess still tend to socially segregate. My observation is that this is not primarily racial segregation, more likely segregation by intellectual and social class.
  Other very serious problems are the loss of community and parental support for the schools and the difficulty in scheduling after-school activities. If you stay late, it can be a fifteen or twenty mile walk home. As far as parental and community support goes, last month, here in Tallahassee (a fairly small No. Florida city) one elementary school held a parent's night and got three parents. This lack of interest and support is not particularly uncommon.
  This mandated bussing has not improved Florida's educational standing, at least as measured by comparative test scores, it has made teaching unattractive and difficult (What teacher worth his/her salt, wants to spend so much time preparing and drilling for a test?) and loss of community support has made financing schools a real problem.
  If bussing schoolchildren is supposed to somehow integrate and equalize communities and our nation and lead to more equality of opportunity, it has, in my opinion, failed.
  I think a more practical and certainly less expensive solution would be integrate within community schools. As we've discussed here before, any thoughtful curriculum should include skill subjects - which naturally segregate by ability - and affective subjects - those developing attitudes - such as the Social Studies, which are naturals for intellectual and social integration. If segregated communities are the concern - build larger schools and enlarge the community served.
  That's my take. What's yours?

  • 3:18 pm
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