Eugene Kane, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 28, 2008
It could be the end of an era.
Black children and yellow school buses long have been inextricably linked in the history of education in America. It started with the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that allowed for school desegregation in cities like Milwaukee. That led to widespread busing movements that allowed black students to attend classes outside their neighborhoods at predominantly white schools.
A decision by the Milwaukee School Board last week to drastically reduce the amount of busing in the district will alter a fundamental relationship that has existed in this city for generations of students.
But what the Milwaukee School Board did was not a statement about the racial makeup of the city’s public schools, many of which are predominantly African-American. School Board member Michael Bonds, the architect of the plan, says busing isn’t about desegregation anymore.
“When the district is 88% minority, it’s not about race,” Bonds told me. “It’s about the fact we’ve spent $57 million on a failed policy.”
MPS provides busing for 55,000 students a day at a cost of $57 million annually, according to reports. Bonds figures that kind of money could be better used in a school system that graduates less than half of its students. Specifically, he thinks the $20 million his proposal will save could be used to strengthen neighborhood schools, including re-opening several north side schools and providing art and music programs in those areas.
{snip}
“We’ve ended up closing schools in some of the most stable black neighborhoods in the city,” said Bonds, an associate professor of educational policy and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Then, choice and charter schools open up located in the same areas we abandon. Something’s not right with this picture.”
Ironically, most choice and charter schools in Milwaukee’s central city are also predominantly African-American. Clearly, school desegregation—to say nothing of true integration—is as much a thing of the past as the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
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Original article
(Posted on May 5, 2008)
Comments
The study ordered by the Federal courts about the St. Louis inter-district deseg program shows that black students who were bussed to suburban school districts did worse on average than black students who remained in St. Louis City. One would think that it would be the opposite, because parents who chose to send their students out of the SLPS were a self-selecting sample, and thus it would stand to reason that their children would be smarter and have more ambition, as a matter of tendency. Alas, no.
Posted by Question Diversity at 6:11 PM on May 5
“MPS provides busing for 55,000 students a day at a cost of $57 million annually, according to reports.”
Multiply the $57 million with the number of places that have forced busing and we should have a pretty good idea as to how much money is waisted annually on this nightmare.
Posted by sbuffalonative at 6:54 PM on May 5
“MPS provides busing for 55,000 students a day at a cost of $57 million annually, according to reports. Bonds figures that kind of money could be better used in a school system that graduates less than half of its students. Specifically, he thinks the $20 million his proposal will save could be used to strengthen neighborhood schools, including re-opening several north side schools and providing art and music programs in those areas.
Add Milwaukee to the list of once comfortable cities where social and educational engineering drove out Whites. Fortunately Brew City wasn’t lynched to the extent that Kansas City was.
Can you imagine how that $57,000,000 annual tab might have been used over the years on deserving students?
Instead, mom and dad Grabowski are now in Oak Creek, Whitefish Bay, or Wauwatosa with a giant mortgage, a once great city left behind, and secure in the knowledge that wheh their kids go on to college, they’ll lose out on scholarships that will, instead, be given to less deserving students in the very neighborhoods they left.
It’s called progress, huh?
Posted by Annoyed In Illinois at 6:58 PM on May 5
“It started with the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision…”
Prior to this infamous Governmental dictate there were few “Blacks” in the Milwaukee public school system and the few that were there generally behaved themselves. There must be a connection.
Ronald
Posted by at 7:04 PM on May 5
“When the district is 88% minority, it’s not about race, ummmmmmmmmmmmm doesn’t that make it a majority?
Posted by at 7:33 PM on May 5
The Brown vs. Board of Education decision was fascism. A total mistake and an utterly destructive one that we as a nation will never recover from. After being forced at gunpoint to de-segregate, which was as unnatural as oil and water, we now have a slum of school system and it will never again be a worthwhile system.
Posted by at 7:38 PM on May 5
Maybe Blacks happen to prefer their own, just as whites do.-Have you ever asked them? But notice it has to be blacks that make the final decisions on this touchy issue.
Posted by at 8:06 PM on May 5
“Bonds figures that kind of money could be better used in a school system that graduates less than half of its students.”
They can spend that money any way they want to and it’s not going to improve or alter the scholastic scores in that school system. Why not take the money and go gambling in Las Vegas?
By the way, does this mean that Southern school systems are off the hook now?
Posted by Xenophon at 9:32 PM on May 5
That same $57 million a year could have been quite useful if the focus had been on teaching vo-tech job skills to the students it was intended to benefit, instead of just shuffling kids back and forth across town.
I’m funny that way; I think another two generations of carpenters, mechanics, welders, plumbers, eletricians, seamstresses and cooks would have been a better deal for the US than two generations of drug-addled, unemployable, functional-illiterates and the illigitimate children they are unable to support.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 11:23 PM on May 5
The Brown versus Board of Education era is dying off . . . thank God.
Posted by Reader-1 at 12:23 AM on May 6
Hah!!! The reason the public schools nationwide are now third-world hellholes is BECAUSE of the PC liberal busing (ethnic-cleansing) movement started in the late 60’s & 70’s. The golden goose is long dead.
Posted by at 6:10 AM on May 6
What’s amazing to me is that these liberals who were staunch advocates of busing didn’t realize that it would be a mistake in terms of racial conflict such as sexual harassment of white girls,the introduction of black culture(too many pathologies to list),severely reduced behavioral standards,violence against teachers,increased drug usage and radically lowered curriculum.
The blindness of these people to the differences in the races is so remarkable that there should be a psychiatric term for it and then the pharmaceutical companies could begin to find a drug that may help alleviate the condition so that the population is no longer exposed to their dangerous policies.
Posted by David at 8:45 AM on May 6
Why spend $57 million to integrate white schools in a city where there aren’t any whites left? It’s kind of anticlimactic. Now we’re supposed to applaud (with conservatives and libertarians) as Polly want-a-voucher Williams receives subsidies from the State of Wisconsin in the name of “parental choice.”
Posted by Carl at 12:45 PM on May 6
“When the district is 88% minority, it’s not about race,” Bonds told me. “It’s about the fact we’ve spent $57 million on a failed policy.”
This statement should be enshrined in a book entitled “More Confessions of Liberal Idiocy.” Both perversely supposed ideals the self-deluded left enforced in Milwaukee have monumentally failed. Forced desegregation simply resulted in more segregation, and increased public funding for this effort intended to achieve better educational results achieved worse results.
Liberals and public policy - are we not seeing a pattern here?
Posted by Gary at 1:33 PM on May 6
“Multiply the $57 million with the number of places that have forced busing and we should have a pretty good idea as to how much money is waisted annually on this nightmare.”
Busing (forced busing) began to go out most places after the mid 90’s. Followed by a sactimonious ‘mission accomplished’ decree. Perhaps enough time has passed that the white victims can sue for reparations. In place of busing, school-boards all across the county are obsessed with ‘integration’ by any means at their disposal just short of forced busing. And they obsess over ‘what’s best’ for black kids. Reparations opportunities know no end. I can see where the money would come from.
Posted by LHathaway at 1:54 PM on May 6
They’ll save $57 million by stopping the buses, but that money will be spent on useless curricula like ethnic studies and African American studies. You know - the programs that provide the necessary skills to be a strong contributor in the workplace.
I don’t know why it can’t be done. The people who go to college and major in these “disciplines” seem to think their degrees qualify them for immediate ascent to CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies. No…wait…they’re not qualified but that’s because of racism. What was I thinking?
Posted by Concerned Citizen at 3:58 PM on May 6
Let’s play with the numbers: $57 million a year divided by 55 thousand students works out to be $1036.36 per student per year. Dividing that by 180 school days a year leaves $5.76 per student, per day, just for a process of shuffling kids around that has nothing to do with actually educating them.
$5.76 a day? I don’t even eat on that much.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 6:32 PM on May 6
Michael C. Scott: The average Black will never make a decent tradesman. I worked in a number of trades for years, and most of the Blacks were 3rd rate goof-offs. There were some Blacks who were good, but they were clearly the exceptions, and they didn’t hang with the homies.
Posted by Schoolteacher at 7:00 PM on May 6
“The Brown vs. Board of Education decision was fascism. A total mistake and an utterly destructive one that we as a nation will never recover from. After being forced at gunpoint to de-segregate, which was as unnatural as oil and water, we now have a slum of school system and it will never again be a worthwhile system.
Posted by at 7:38 PM on May 5 “
Why does this person say it was fascism and not what it really was - Bolshevism. It is Bolshevism that has supported black on white genocide. Fascism rose in response to the murderous Bolsheviks.
Posted by Elrey Jones at 10:06 PM on May 6
“The average black will never make a decent tradesman.”
“Decent tradesman” compared to what? I’d rather have a 3rd-rate goof offs as cooks, who can support their own families, instead of drugged-up, violent criminals who prey on folks while I am forced to support their families via extortionate taxation.
I know a (white) welder so good he can weld aluminum soda cans together without ever messing up. There’s not much call for his visually-impressive demonstration, except to get him instantly hired when he needs work, but he prefers to do prototype work on very special parts. He gets paid more than I ever did, leaving out my old patent bonuses. We don’t have much call for shoe-shiners and railroad porters anymore, but it is more than obvious to me that college prep classes are not working out well for the majority of US black residents. Isn’t it time to try something else?
What’s wrong with being able to do dress alterations, or perform maintenance work on a building after hours? Blacks used to do this sort of work here. They did OK in the shipyards during World War Two.
What we tried with “Brown vs. Board of Education” was a total failure, but what shall we replace it with?
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 12:41 AM on May 7
Of course whatever the saved $20 million is spent on will also be a waste
Posted by at 11:25 PM on May 7
School busing didn’t “fail”. School integration ruined the lives and education for MILLIONS of White kids all across this country for 50 years. In short, it was a raging success for our Bolshevik elites, as integration did to MILLIONS of poor and middle class Whites exactly what it was intended to do: terrorize, demoralize, destabilize, and weaken our communities.
Integration amounts to a proxy war waged by our elites against the mass of Whites, using Blacks and other non-Whites as unwitting shock troops to rob, rape, assault, terrorize and kill millions of poor and middle class Whites.
And to top it all, if you speak out against this scheme that has harmed so many of us, you immediately become the bad guy! So not only are we to be genocided, but we are to shut our mouths and accept it lying down.
Posted by at 1:39 PM on May 9
