To hear the opponents of Wake County’s new neighborhood schools policy tell it, moving away from forced busing for economic diversity will result in separate-but-equal resegregated schools. You’d think Plessy v. Ferguson had never been supplanted by Brown v. Board of Education if you went to any of the pro-diversity rallies.
What never seems to be mentioned, though, is how the new system will help the kids they claim to want to help. Nor are they interested in whether there is any empirical data that shows the forced busing system ever helped improve the test scores and achievement of any of the students in the low socioeconomic category.
However, linguist and professor John McWhorter, who is black, writes that the biggest problem plaguing black students is the notion that blacks with high academic performance are “acting white,” a notion that didn’t exist before integration (emphasis added):
No one needs to wonder why black kids don’t do well in terrible schools, of course. A bone I had to pick with Rich Ford was that he thought that Buck missed the point that alienation from society was the reason black kids are turning away from the books. But the reason the ”acting white” business is interesting is that it happens mainly among black kids in better schools — sadly, the integrated ones. … In all-black schools, nobody gets called ”acting white” for liking school. This is important.
McWhorter is ambivalent about resegregated schools, but notes that it seems inconsistent for people to swell with pride at an all-black graduation ceremony at Spelman or Morehouse, but cringe at the thought of an all-black high school.
As with most things these days, there are nuances, and it’s not all just black or white.
UPDATE: The John Locke Foundation’s Terry Stoops confirms that, even with its vaunted “diversity” program, Wake County Schools is serving low-income students poorly. They trail the state’s other large systems, Guilford County, Charlotte-Meck and Winston-Salem/Forsyth, which don’t employ forced busing.
