Segregation Now & Growing

So yeah, in this article, the author laments the growing segregation in public schools. Now, your first impression might be to think this is bad, but is it? And if it is, is the government the way to solve the problem?

See, the author starts criticizing the recent Supreme Court case that said schools could not choose student schools based on race. (For those smart enough to remember the Brown decision, it actually is pretty much a repeat of that decision, just from an opposite perspective.) See, in the case, a white student did not want to ride a bus across town simply because she was white; she wanted to go to school near her house. Forced integration disadvantaged all youths who had to travel far away from home simply to meet some quota at a school.

And amazingly, this case gives a major reason why schools tend to be more of one race or another. Ask a real estate agent who sells to families how often the school district is mentioned when trying to sell a home. People choose where to live based on many items, but local schools tends to be a big deciding factor, especially in cities. (As probably a matter of fact, forced integration can only really work in a city because it is hard to justify putting a bunch of white kids on one bus and a bunch of black kids on another and then driving an hour to integrate majority-white and majority-black schools. If parents choose to live in a neighborhood that is not diverse, why should the child be punished?

Unfortunately, the author of this article decides to uphold the racist agenda. Non-white schools are not inferior because of race. (At the risk of getting Jesse "Hymie-town" Jackson on my case, could it be that majority black schools have higher crime? Maybe, but my solution still would be very, very different from Jackson's.) Races can't be mixed by force. On a side note, isn't it amazing that the same people who decry Iraq because the religions won't mix are usually the same ones who complain that the races don't mix here in America?

I say, let schools integrate by the people who live there. Actually, let's do one better. How about we get rid of the public in public schools? Let's have more private schools. (And for the racists of the bunch, studies show that private schools getting students from the crappy schools tend to do better, even if the students can't self-select, which eliminates the argument that private schools are better simply because they have all the good kids and the public school has all the troublemakers.)

By the way, I do have to laugh at the end of this article when it discusses Hispanics being "triple-segregated." Umm...yeah, it ain't the white parents complaining that Hispanics are being put into English-only classrooms. Whoops, there goes the whole anti-Hispanic discrimination angle. Now if only we could get the race relations people to sit down, close their eyes, realize they are not back in the 1840s, and approach life as if race didn't matter, because frankly, it doesn't. And no, the economy won't be hurt by all-black schools. It will be hurt by public schools and public school incompetence. And yes, I went to a public school and I am still trying to recover.