Post-Racial American Community Celebrates First Integrated School

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Sumter County, Alabama recently opened its very first integrated school! This is a seminal moment in racial relationships in America.

At 7:50 on Monday morning, when school started at the University Charter School in Livingston, in west Alabama's Sumter County, students in kindergarten through eighth grade began a new era, hardly aware of the history they were making.

For the first time, black students and white students are learning side-by-side in integrated public school classrooms. More than half of the school's 300-plus students are black, while just under half are white.

Segregation remains a problem in poorer areas throughout the south, where after Brown vs. Board, white communities started their own private schools and sent all their kids there, leading some counties to have private schools with a 99%+ white enrollment and the local public schools 99%+ black. Segregated proms have also been in the news in recent years, with celebrity efforts to integrate them as recently as this decade.

Anyways, use this thread to discuss how racism is over, white people actually have it worse, and how America leads the post-racial world forward.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

De-integration is a plague for many midwestern districts. Basically, anywhere that the Feds stopped providing integration oversight quickly moved to segregate the school districts as fast as they could. I remember explaining to someone I was working with in Illinois that I went to a de-segregated high school in North Carolina that had forced busing and the whole nine yards and they couldn't believe it and thought it was a joke. The real joke is that in rural/suburban southern Illinois people have ghettoized African Americans to the point where black families trying to leave East St Louis get death threats for trying to move into the nicer bedroom communities surrounding St Louis and are stuck in a city with a corrupt government and with schools so bad that the kids have to share text books.

 

[Lexicus]

There was a great interview in the Atlantic where the person being interviewed basically said that the way things have worked since Brown v Board of Ed is that if white parents as a mass wanted integrated public schools, we would have integrated public schools. But white people mostly don't want equal opportunity, they want opportunity for their kids and if that means other kids are put in crap schools so be it. They should have worked harder and gotten an education, then they could live in the area with the nice schools. Duh.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

When the St Louis city school district melted down due to corruption and chronic underfunding, they decided to give kids at the worst schools an opportunity to get bused to more affluent school districts. They held school board meetings at the receiving schools where the white, affluent parents went on long-winded racist tirades against the 'thugs' the school district was importing. When one mother of a kid from the failed school stood up to say that her daughter was an honor roll student and a good kid and that she felt a lot of the attacks on her were racially motivated, the white parents shouted her down and called her the real racist.

It was tragic, really.

I'm so happy I left the Midwest.

 

[Lexicus]

When the St Louis city school district melted down due to corruption and chronic underfunding, they decided to give kids at the worst schools an opportunity to get bused to more affluent school districts. They held school board meetings at the receiving schools where the white, affluent parents went on long-winded racist tirades against the 'thugs' the school district was importing. When one mother of a kid from the failed school stood up to say that her daughter was an honor roll student and a good kid and that she felt a lot of the attacks on her were racially motivated, the white parents shouted her down and called her the real racist.

It was tragic, really.

I'm so happy I left the Midwest.

"school board meeting footage of white parents being really really angry that black people might attend the same school as their kids" is a whole genre at this point.

 

[Farm Boy]

Sounds like positive news. Sounds like even better positive news if the kindergarteners don't know it's news. How are charter schools playing out in general, if anyone knows?

This is fun reading, but hearing it more from the ground is always valuable.

 

[Lexicus]

How are charter schools playing out in general, if anyone knows?

They are succeeding admirably in their purpose of looting public funds for private profit, keeping opportunity hoarded among the whites, and undermining and destroying the teachers' unions.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Sounds like positive news. Sounds like even better positive news if the kindergarteners don't know it's news. How are charter schools playing out in general, if anyone knows?

This is fun reading, but hearing it more from the ground is always valuable.

Achievement evidence is a mess. The NBER and Department of Education have both released reports touting and criticizing them, under the same exact time frame. It's like a lot of schools in that the structural issues seem to determine what kind of success or not they have, even on a state by state level reports and analysis are all over the place. But we do know that communities generally with heavy charter school use/attendance tend to be more racially segregated in school. All things being equal, even if charter schools were working miracles I don't think that an outcome of further segregation is anything worth having to deal with.

 

[Farm Boy]

So this positive story isn't necessarily an exception to the rule, but part of a mix? I suppose that's fair and to be expected. I do hope it goes well though. The randomized student intake mechanism sounds promising, but really only where the geography of transportation to school allows it to be promising. I guess it's not great that the skew is -20% in a 70% black area, but if the county has never had an integrated school, and this one manages to do well and not blight out in a mostly 50/50ish split, that still sounds like a major win.