Sorry to burst your bubble, Freedom’s Floodgates and and Obama/HUD/neighborhood diversity, but Boston’s whites who were bused to predominantly black schools, and Boston’s white working-class ethnic enclaves, into which blacks were bused to go to school, were not rich either. Boston’s public school students, on the contrary, were poor, and it was the poor people, both white and non-white alike, who were involved in mandatory school busing, NOT the rich whites, most of whom had either moved out to the ‘burbs or sent their kids to the best private schools they could afford, long ago.

http://www.thestarshollowgazette.com/diary/6631/on-mandatory-school-busing-here-in-boston

Please note: This is my very own essay, and nobody else’s.

The effect of this was that she never had a childhood school friend for more nine months. Occasionally she’d wind up at the same school as another Asian kid that she had met when their paths crossed at another school, but that was it.

When I met her she was in her early 20s and had many of the same problems forming long term relationships as you see in military brats. She knew that, and she also knew that, to the school district, she was just as much a part of the education (of other students) as a chalkboard or a periodic chart. She was an Asian person that all the other kids got exposed to so that they would be better people when they grew up or something.

She was used, used for her race with no thought given to her emotional, educational or developmental needs. I find that quite disgusting.

I am a 4th generation Townie. My father decided in 1968 that his four children would attend Catholic schools, but people accused us of avoiding the busing. Guess my Dad was psychic, huh?

Even though I attended private schools, I was deeply affected. Busing was an attack on the Town. The TPF OCCUPIED us. The media lied about us. For years we couldn’t even have a rataional conversation with outsiders because they had already made up their minds that we were in the wrong.

You will never know how I feel unless you lived in a war zone. Years later I nearly hyperventilated when I was watching the movie “Siege” and the military marches into the city.

The rights of every Charlestown resident were violated.

I often think how different it would have been if we had social media tools as we do today.

Nawww, this one sounds a lot more like a
“THAT guy is *a* ASS.”
kinda situation.

>>> A: What studies are finding is that it doesn’t matter what kind of school it is–for example, if it’s a magnet school or whether parents have choice. It comes down to the quality of the teachers. The more high-quality teachers you have in a school, the better it will perform, regardless of the type of students.

This doesn’t fit my own data in the least (granted: no kids, so no direct experience, but there are teachers in my family and one of my best friends is a teacher, so I have a lot of input from their side).

The reason why students succeed or fail is usually tied to school choice for a simple reason — parents who don’t give a rat’s ass about their kids won’t go out of their way to make sure their kids get into a decent school. Parents who do make the effort instill in their kids the idea that education is important, and, even if they themselves had a sucky one, they will try and make sure their kids get the hand up that they need one way or the other.

A teacher can’t do much when the parents — regardless of race — are telling the kids they’ll never amount to anything and no amount of education will change that.

Good teachers are important — but at the heart of anything, the kid has to want to learn more than s/he wants to goof off. A good teacher can change that, and inspire, but not if the kid in question is determined to be a disruption and the teacher’s response to that is strongly limited, as is the case with all of today’s anti-corporal punishment folderol (And I say THAT while having been a victim of one of the most egregiously inappropriate misapplications of it in any school system ever)

I was a sophomore in high school in Nashville when busing began. We had no fighting in my high school that was busing related and none that I can recall reading about in the paper at other schools. There was a lot of anger, though, and an outsider running for mayor who focused on busing grabbed about 40% of the vote. There were a few ‘segregation academies’ that sprang up but they represented a tiny portion of the student population.

My little brother in 6th grade had an hour bus ride each way to the other side of town. He had a tooth broken from a fist to the mouth when he refused to give up his lunch money. It was a much rougher experience than anything in the neighborhood schools.