I suggest these cave dwellers look at the demographics today versus 40+ years ago.
They haven't learned a thing.
Busing to achieve forced integration was one of the epic fails of all time.
Thank you to the person who sent me the email making us aware of this....
A Dream Again Deferred?
Join us to share our past, understand today and help shape the dream for our future. Join Betty Chafin Rash, Dorothy Counts Scoggins and friends for an evening of commemoration and discussion moderated by Steve Crump of WBTVTuesday, May 5, 2015, 5:00-7:30 p.m.
UNC Charlotte Center City
Frye Gaillard, author
The Dream Long Deferred
Amy Hawn Nelson, co-author
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; School Desegregation and Resegregation in Charlotte
......A 1999 court decision ended school desegregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Our schools now approach pre-1971 levels of segregation..... MORE:
http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=107b419cc13deac857ba9f8c1&id=2994cdf79d&e=685bfc2f03
Live from Atlanta, GA:
ReplyDeleteOne can only hope that shaping "the dream for tomorrow" doesn't look like "the nightmare today" that caused all those "highly qualified" minority teachers and administrators to land in jail for "deferring" the right of black children to receive a quality education in "the past".
Alicia
As a warmup for the Dream Deferred event you can also attend "Our Times Re imagined" at the Levine Museum on April 29th. This event is sponsored by the Observer, BOA, and the museum. You can probably guess from the venue what this program is all about. Here is the link: http://www.museumofthenewsouth.org/learn/programs-events/panel-discussions-and-talks/our-times-re-imagined-featuring-bryan-stevenson-and-ted-shaw. The good liberals in our town are shifting into overdrive.
ReplyDeleteGood times.... good times...
DeleteHere's the most important part of the story:
--->>> Cost is $10 and includes a wine, hors d’oeuvres and dessert reception. In addition, Stevenson will sign copies of his new book for an hour after the event. <<<---
For a real trip down memory lane (and all the good times of assignment battles past) you can also check out the archives page of the Swann Fellowship (yes, the Swanees are still around): http://www.swannfellowship.org/Archive/ArchiveMain.htm
DeleteTo go even further back, to the really good times, see the archives of their weekly online journal, Educate!, which they stopped publishing in mid 2005:
http://www.swannfellowship.org/Educate/Archive.htm
Don't be too surprised if a bunch of CMS STEM graduates stage a protest over eating them thar "hors d'oeuvres" at this high falutin' event.
DeleteHorses are noble animals, ya know, and shouldn't be eaten.
When my family and I moved to Charlotte in 1992 CMS was about 60% white with a bad reputation. We enrolled our first child in private school before giving CMS a chance during the now defunct "Choice Plan". Every private school in Charlotte lost students during the early implementation of this plan. Within a four year period we were jerked around in two highly contentious boundary reassignment changes in two different neighborhoods because CMS's Choice Plan didn't go according to plan. After a total of 6 years in CMS, we pulled both our children out and had them finish their educations in private schools. CMS is now down to a 30% white population that is never coming back. At least not in my lifetime. Even if forced busing could be reinstated the train has already left the station making the kind of dreamed integration of the past impossible. My guess is CMS will eventually level out with a 25%- 30% white and Asian population heavily concentrated at a few schools. CMS created this outcome on its own.
ReplyDeleteWe have a townhouse in Ballantyne which we plan to make our residence when we return, as opposed to our larger house just over the border in SC.
DeleteThat neighborhood feeds into Hawk Ridge Elementary and Ardrey Kell, so I think those are fairly decent schools for now. As long as they can stay that way for a dozen years or so, we'll be fine with our current choice.
I'm hoping that area will remain fairly stable as I've lived several places which have seriously deterioriated over the years.
I think I know when to pack up and leave, though, having been through this many times already.
Desegregation is pretty much a sham, anyway, the way it's done with schools.
As things are now, people can and do live next to people of all races. Even in my SC subdivision.
It's just that the people who DO live next to you actually have something else in common with you, like similar education levels, income, interests, etc., etc.
So it doesn't seem as "forced", unlike the way it's done in schools.
And once you get out in to the "real world", you aren't forced to work next people of different races just because of their race.
You work next to people with similar backgrounds of whatever race they happen to be.
I remember working for more than a decade in Houston at an engineering company which had more Asians than anyone else, and almost no blacks or Hispanics.
That isn't because they didn't LIKE "minorities", it's because so few blacks and Hispanics as opposed to various Asians were qualified for the jobs.
People from China and India are "minorities", too.
(And I'll bet there are more Asians living in Ballantyne than there are blacks and Hispanics, too, for pretty much the same reason they were at my former engineering company)
I'm just waiting for the gubmint to screw things up, though, by forcing some "affordable" housing into the area, so the folks who work at Taco Bell, Harris Teeter, and the Dollar Store don't have to "commute".
Of course, it won't be the "poor" people working nearby who will be living at those "affordable" places.
Because that would make too much sense.
But that's what they'll tell you in order to move the real riff-raff in.
This past weekend I heard a promo on WFAE that said something like "This program is made possible by the support of TEACH Charlotte, which is working to solve the "injustices" of our school system." (didn't mention what those injustices might be--I suspected they were not thinking about the funding disparity between urban and suburban schools). TEACH Charlotte is a teaching fellows program that "provides an accelerated path into teaching....." I cannot find any mentions of "injustices" on their webpage, so I wondered who came up with that description for the radio ad--wouldn't be surprised if it was WFAE itself. As long as struggling students and their families are told that their lives today are defined by an unjust system or by events that happened long ago, and that they are incapable of making progress on their own, the system is going to remain "unjust" by liberal standards--i.e., those who value education and work hard to attain it are going to succeed; those who prefer to blame the system are going to be left behind.
DeleteTEACH Charlotte is Michelle Rhea's less competitive domestic peace corps version of Teach for America. It's a boot camp for quick certification into the teaching profession at low-income schools where it's hard to recruit and keep teachers with traditional education degrees. I'd LOVE to see the research that shows how TEACH Charlotte hasn't actually promoted "injustice" by perpetuating the very thing it claims it is trying to solve.
DeleteAlicia
Is it "justice" or is it "just us", some will ask.
DeleteWell, it's pretty obvious to me that it's just them...
I really don't think a victim mentality gets you very far in this world.
Because there are billions of victims on the planet.
Most of them would laugh at these pity parties if they had a fraction of the opportunities so many in the US waste feeling
sorry for themselves.
(Sad to say I've got relatives like that, too...)
The only "injustice" in schools today are the kinds of shenanigans which happen in places like Atlanta where kids are passed along without learning anything, like in that recent teacher scandal.
The good news is that the hardcore deniers among the teachers are going to be doing some prison time.
Oh, the injustice!
I'll see if I can post the Edweek blog entry on that one. Some great quotes by the judge about how the teachers might get to meet some of the kids they helped put in prison by not educating them properly!
Now THAT'S justice. Served cold on a slab.
And yet, there are some who are whining about whether the white judge is being too harsh on these black teachers and whether white teachers would have gotten such harsh treatment.
Well, I sure hope they would.
If any are stupid enough to try after this, for sure.
Of course, all that being said, I have little doubt that whatever ex-students these teachers happen to meet in prison probably would have been there anyway even without the "high stakes" testing they couldn't pass without cheating.
DeleteMany of those kids probably couldn't be educated by applying a two-by-four to their thick skulls by the time they made it to high school.
Not that this is an excuse, but there are two sides to failure in most cases.
I'm not sure there is a politically acceptable solution to this problem either.
I'm thinking along the lines of dystopian solutions like Brave New World or something BF Skinner would cook up for the government raising some kids from birth.
And we probably don't want to go there just yet.
Yeah, my dreams have been deferred for a while, too.
ReplyDeleteJust wrote some big honkin' checks to the IRS (well, electronic direct debits....)
You really can't escape the long arm of Uncle Sam reaching into your wallet.
So, CMS wants more transparency from charter schools that are supposedly prohibiting the system from implementing additional new programs (vs. improving all the new programs it already has and all those new "magnet" programs at D and F schools that don't attract any diversity whatsoever but just continue to widen the "justifiable" - because CMS said so - disparity in urban and suburban school funding).
ReplyDeleteAnd dare I ask for transparency from CMS as far as transportation costs that still look like the "good old days" of forced busing in many areas? Think the neighborhood across the street from Calvary Church on Hwy 51 that attends their "neighborhood" school - Myers Park. And what about the amount of money CMS shells out in unpaid school lunch fees and substitute fees to cover full-time dance and yearbook teachers to develop 'pay-for-performance' standardized tests in their subject areas and travel expenses for certain BOE members and ...
Just sitting back and enjoying the gnashing of teeth.
Alicia
And what about the CMS Student Assignment Gestapo that went door-to-door trying to round up "cheaters and schemers" after the sports eligibility scandal at South Meck? What did that cost?
ReplyDeleteI remember the CO writing that CMS investigated at least one family that wasn't even in the school system any longer. I refused to send my children to South Meck. only because I was fed-up with being jerked around in two highly contentious reassignment controversies within a four year period all while being accused of being a selfish suburbanite. What's the likelihood I wasn't on that hit list?
Totally off topic but..
ReplyDeleteI love my new local newspaper. Yesterday's headline, "How to Drive Safely with Dementia".
Off to get my car inspected. My registration is about to expire.
And now this morning...
ReplyDeleteCMS implements a new program to get dad's involved at school.
For a full year before work, the "selfish suburbanite" father of my children tutored two low-income minority children two - three mornings a week who were at risk of failing 5th grade. Both boys passed the EOG's.
Tipping Point:
The loss of white families in CMS is of it's own arrogant doing and they are not coming back no matter how many new programs the system implements. Charter schools will continue to shift and change the educational landscape right under CMS' feet whether the system likes it or not. The days of public school monopoly in Charlotte are over.
Alicia
CMS is also losing Black students.....
DeleteYet, They need $39 million more dollars in the budget for this coming year.
I wonder if anyone has the "volunteer" statistics for "minority" parents who tutor white kids.
DeleteI'll bet it's insignificant. Especially from the dads.
Houston, we've had a problem here...
And it's spelled P-A-R-E-N-T-S. And the lack thereof...
Solve that one and we'll see many others fall by the side.
Dog with a bone.
ReplyDeleteYes, I do need to let some things with CMS go. Can't change the past.
Alicia
Then based on your comment, I should let go of the crap my two brothers and I went through starting over 40 years ago that still affects us today.
DeleteThat "crap" is forced busing to achieve integration at all cost and be damned the students learning because we have to mix the races which we all know failed miserably.
How's that for a run-on sentence?
Well, it's not just CMS and "Hell No, I Ain't Fergettin'"...
DeleteOur high school was about 25% black, 25% Italian, and the rest white when I went there. The successful ones were steel mill workers, others did what they could.
Most of the Italians went to Catholic elementary schools and were well behaved due to the nuns. NO problems there.
The whites went to public schools and were also well behaved. Mostly no problems there, either, just maybe
one or two bad eggs who were mostly "class clown" types.
While some black kids were like wild animals in comparison.
Most were about 3 years behind the rest, so the average black HS student would have been at about 5th ,6th,or 7th grade level.
For the ones who could actually read, that is.
Not all, mind you, but a rather large group were not only relatively ignorant, but violent as well. And they seemed to dominate the other black kids and rule the roost.
Entering high school was a total culture shock. Probably for everyone. The black kids couldn't keep up in the classes, and everyone else had to watch their backs. It was so bad that most kids would not go to the bathroom by themselves without a "posse" watching their back. If you didn't some black kid was just as likely to either piss on you or push your head into the wall as you stood at a urinal and they walked by. Even worse, some kids were just attacked for no particular reason except that they were available and vulnerable. And little was EVER done to stop this.
And if it wasn't violence, then there was always ridicule and humiliation.
So, another favorite thing to do (and great laugh getter with the "homies") was to act like they were sticking their penis up your rear while you were standing at the urinal. This, of course, was mostly reserved for the white kids as the recipient with black kids standing around in groups laughing about it.
The blacks were the experienced "gang" members and knew how to dominate the toilets, halls, cafeteria, and locker rooms, but were mostly total failures in the classrooms.
Fun stuff if you like watching animal planet.
Some of the things I saw the black boys doing with their little penises in gym class would have gotten them thrown in jail in the real world.
Or their asses severely whipped outside an "urban" school or with their "gang".
But in school it was "tolerated" as "typical" behavior.
The coaches wouldn't even step into the locker rooms unless they heard enough yelling to make them think someone was getting seriously hurt. Which means never, because they had a high tolerance for noise in the locker rooms.
Sad.
But at times it really was like being in the monkey cage at the zoo.
After a year of that, pretty much nothing would surprise me.
But we left before the shooting and the establishment of a police sub-station in the school the following year.
And things went SERIOUSLY downhill after that.
So, yeah, I had to suffer some consequences as well. At least the academics at that school for non-blacks survived for a few more years, so I missed a chance at a better science and math education at the risk of getting killed or cut or beat up outside class, but within about 8-10 years, the place was totally ruined.
(continued due to 4800 character limitation!)....
DeleteAs to the aftermath...
What's funny is looking at old yearbooks from that era. What started out as fairly slick professional-looking publications in the early 1970's kept declining until I remember seeing an early 1980's yearbook that looked like something elementary school students could have produced it with crayons.
The school continued to limp along for another 30 years or so after we left.
It became mostly black by the mid 1970's. Became a "magnet" school sometime around the 90's and was finally shuttered after 2006.
The school was finally merged with a nearby "rival" black school. (This is in the Birmingham, AL school district which is pretty much all black now) and they had such bad fights between the former school rivals that they had to hire parallel principals so that they had separate support staff to help contain the violence as the rival gangs were sent to the dominant school and kids from my old school did not "trust" the administrators of the new school.
Since they were a different "gang", of course.
I don't know if they wore separate "colors" to school or not, but it would not surprise me.
Totally pathetic, yet totally expected.
The Birmingham school system is probably much worse than CMS, but is probably an indication of what the future COULD hold for CMS.
One of the recent HS closings in CMS (Harding I believe) with all the black kids getting so upset and the intervention needed there because of fighting reminded me of the demise of my old HS ten years ago.
These kids act like gangs who have just lost their "turf" when their schools are closed.
It all seems so familiar to me.
Like Deja Vu all over again.
So the time may not be that far away...
Honest to God...
DeleteI never had a negative experience in grades K-12 as far as race relations. In fact, my experience at a diverse arts magnet high school was so positive that it left me completely naive to the realities of race relations in the real world. I was about 24-years-old before I became aware that a lot of blacks and whites don't like each other for reasons related to forced busing and other school politics that I never had to endure growing up.
It's not an exaggeration when I say that my experience as a CMS parent related to race relations was traumatic in a way I never would have expected. I had high hopes when I enrolled my children in CMS but - tragically - left angry and bitter after 6 years in the system.
Alicia
Alicia,
DeleteThe thing is that race relations are probably better as you go up the talent, education, and income ladder. In general, but not always.
You don't have these kinds of issues at most colleges or graduate schools or on most jobs, especially white collar jobs.
It's at the lower levels where the real issues lie from what I've seen. And probably worse in the cities. And it's not just that these people are "poor" because I've always lived around "poor" people and they are not all lowlives.
At one time, even public housing was fairly respectable and filled with respectable people, mostly widows who had little income and almost no work experience.
Our family was so "poor" that we had black neighbors in the 1950's in Alabama.
Imagine that.
Most people will probably tell you that did not happen because the "South" was so segregated, and overall, it was, but not for everyone and not for my family and our small community just outside Birmingham.
But these were semi-rural people who had mostly lived there for generations. One black neighbor I remember down the street had a mule and used to grow his own vegetables in about half an acre next to his house.
Of course there were still parts of "town" (really not a town) that were more segregated, but there were always parts which were mixed as well.
The thing is that these people hardly ever had any problems with each other. I never recall having any issues with our black neighbors when I was growing up.
In fact, my dad used to regularly pick up black hitchhikers and others he would see walking down the road if he drove by and we had room in the car. And if we ever needed a babysitter, we usually found someone nearby and typically they were black as well.
And I remember that my mom used to pay one sitter we had about half her paycheck which she earned while working as a waitress at a Catfish restaurant and a department store (similar to Walmart) way back in the 1960's.
So, in a sense, I was a bit naïve as well.
My dad even used to have an insurance "route" in the black neighborhood and he used to take me around with him as he went from door to door collecting premiums.
(And it was legitimate insurance with Liberty Mutual, not strong-arm Mafia-type "insurance", either...)
I never and don't dislike Blacks. I had Black friends in high school.
DeleteThe thing is, they didn't want to be bused outside of their neighborhoods anymore than I did. All they wanted was to have the same opportunities and rightly so.
My problem was that I was being forced to go to a school that did not have the programs I had signed up for in junior high at the school I thought I would be attending.
How would you like it if you had signed up for atrs/dance emersion that would take you on a path through high school, only to be told you had to go to another school that did not have those programs solely because of your skin color?
I'm sure ALL the kids were disturbed by having to go somewhere outside wherever they had been prepared to go.
DeleteI have no idea how the black high schools were, but I kinda doubt that they were as violent as the "de-segregated" schools turned out to be.
I suspect that the violence was something that happened after de-segregation, but I don't know for sure.
I know that the formerly white high schools WERE NOT violent before de-segregation because most of our parents and friends had attended those same schools and could tell you how they were ten or fifteen years earlier.
And they were NOT the same.
Many schools became places where survival took priority over learning anything.
So, while the "de-segregated" schools might have had more academic offerings for blacks than the former black schools did, you didn't find many black kids at all in those classes.
Again, a lot of them were semi-literate and were struggling with the basics even in high school. I have no idea how THAT happened. Some of them were at grade level, but most were below.
For example, I only had one black guy in my Algebra class. He was easily the smartest black guy in the Freshman class who I had encountered. He was a good guy and worked hard. And he was a solid "B" student. I don't recall seeing ANY blacks in my Biology class. There were a few in my English classes and a few in my History class.
I had to read tests to several of the black boys in my History class, so I know they didn't have a clue what was going on in class.
I think most of them were taking remedial classes and job skill related classes, not academics. That and waiting to turn 16 so they could get a job and quit school.
So while many blacks supposedly had access to more opportunities, I'm not sure they were prepared to take advantage of them. So that was a source of friction as well.
There were clearly separate classes for most blacks and whites simply because of the level of instruction.
Most of the black kids should have flunked our History class, but we had a black teacher, so I don't know if they did or not and I did not return the following year, so don't know who made it and who didn't.
I do know she busted her ass trying to dumb down the classes so that the black kids only had to LISTEN to her and not READ to pass her tests. That was her mission.
She even announced this to the class (not that she was doing this for the black kids, but that they only had to LISTEN to pass her tests).
And that's true because I would read them their tests, so they didn't even have to READ to take the tests.
Yeah, my days as the "magic white kid" were a real education for me, but not in the way the powers that be probably intended.
I have some stories about THAT class that would probably stun folks today.
Or maybe not.
I'm not so sure that things are really better now, maybe semi-literacy has become the new "normal" for "urban" schools.
It wouldn't surprise me.
What WOULD surprise me is the educrats actually admitting it.
So, while I wasn't "told" I had to go to a school with less opportunities than my "urban" school, that was a decision my parents made (moving to a rural area) just to avoid the violence.
Academics were secondary in that decision. And I did suffer some setbacks due to that. But better than getting knifed or stabbed or shot or otherwise maimed in school, I guess.
We did it mainly because my sisters were headed to high two years after me.
It was a smart move for us, even though the academics were probably lower.
Also, as for changes in academic paths, I was clearly headed towards the science and math side and would have LOVED to have had the real math and science classes my old school offered.
DeleteInstead, I got some really dumbed down classes at the rural school.
But the English and History classes weren't that bad, so all was not lost.
I also managed to spend the summer of my Junior year at a local college summer program which I might not have done if I had stayed at the urban school, so that was good and probably a better preparation for college level work than most anything else I could have done in high school.
But still, I was totally blown out of the water as far as any science education was concerned (say, pre-Med, for example) just because I had so much to catch up on.
I was able to catch up on math, but could not do it for math and the sciences.
It was just too much to try to handle.
So, yeah, losing out on three years of HS science, including Chemistry and Physics and probably one year of HS math (Calculus) has its consequences when you try to play catch up.
Of course, angry and bitter is never a good place to try an solve something. Or, maybe it is?
ReplyDeleteAlicia
I'm not sure there are any solutions.
DeleteSome people will just get along while others won't, as always. For those who get along, things are probably better today, so there has been some progress.
For others, though, I think things are worse. I think that life at the "bottom" of the totem pole is generally much worse for most people in the US than it was when I was a kid. I'm not sure if that is peculiar to the US or not, though.
When I was a kid most problems I knew about and could see were with alcohol and lack of good, reliable birth control (and various taboos against using them), which resulted in some families having WAY MORE kids than they should have had (as well as some early deaths among women) and a lot of generally worthless and abusive behavior (from the alcohol).
Today, too many children is not as much of an issue, but there still seem to be a lot of unwanted kids and more powerful substances to abuse as well as a culture which tends to excuse those things (and bad parenting) more than it used to.
I don't know where all that will leave our next generations in the US as far as their anger and bitterness goes.
I can only imagine that we will have more and more children who feel neglected by those closest to them, which seems like a much worse situation than being angry at something from the "outside" which has caused your trouble (like the government).
But having said all that, even here in Hong Kong there are social issues, so no one escapes THAT.
Most of the native Hong Kongers are supposedly depressed (based on many surveys and such) and don't see much of a future for themselves.
As a whole, they are a fairly clean-living, hard-working lot, so I really hate to see them in a bind because they seem to do all the "right" stuff (for the most part).
Some of them have "taken to the streets" to show their dissatisfaction, but I don't think it has had much of an impact or ever will.
Especially now that Hong Kong is just a drop in the much larger bucket of China.
Changing demographics can be a bitch, especially when it is "your" demographic which is being affected the most.
But if people just sit back and do nothing (or suffer in silence), while it may seem noble, that's almost guaranteed to result in them getting run over.
Miss you, Wiley. Hope you are OK.
ReplyDeleteI'm premiering my 5th grade Shakespearian production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" tonight. 48 kids. The set that parents designed is awesome. And they said it was "too advanced" for 5th grade. Well, ha!
Alicia, alive and well.
DeleteJuat ALOT going on the past week with work, did a BBQ Cook-Off competition this weekend, son is coming home on leave next week and his fiancee is graduating WCU that weekend.
I'll be posting more stuff soon.
I need to look into how I can give you and Shamash publishing rights hereso you can post articles, etc.
Have you noticed how hard the Observer is pushing their Times Re-imagined civil rights event on the 29th? Even with the free wine, hors d'oeuvres, and desserts they seem to be having a hard time drumming up participants. They've had a column about it in the paper every day and finally today it was front page news. Could it be that even the good liberals in this town are tired of this subject?
ReplyDelete