Meet Harold Webb, Wake County Board of Commissioners chairman. He draws a fairly bright line in the sand over public school busing in pursuit of socio-economic balance. The N&O details:
The inconvenience suffered by families with students shuffled between schools, he says, is subordinate to the greater good achieved by avoiding the clustering of poor, minority children in schools in their urban neighborhoods.
“I was the principal of an all-black school,” Webb said. “Enrollment needs to be as diverse as possible. When we started busing in 1976, the purpose was to give students from different communities, from different groups, the opportunity to interact with each other. If we lose that, those children will grow up to live more apart.”
There you have it, as about as clear as you’ll ever get it. Wake-style busing of the type many activists in Mecklenburg long for has absolutely nothing to do with education. It is well and truly about social engineering. But bring that up and watch the snickers and snide remarks about “black helicopters” from the Dilworth libs.
And it is beyond fascinating to me that public schools — more so than the military, sports, music, fashion, indeed all of popular culture — are held to have this powerful world-shaping capacity to “bring people together” yet cannot be expected to graduate literate, functioning adults. More than a little selective there, don’t you think?
