Do You believe busing is the answer to acheiving integration in public schools?

[still_one]

4 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	Yes
	1 (25%)
	No
	2 (50%)
	Other
	1 (25%)
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[qazplm135]

1. part of the answer

and certainly a stopgap measure on the long long road to racial harmony.

[TheFarseer]

2. Does anyone else think

We are wasting a lot of money on busing that could be spent on actual education?

[StarfishSaver]

6. Do you know how much school districts spend on busing for the segregation?

Do you know what percentage of the overall cost of school busing that busing for desegregation comprises?

Unless you do, you can't intelligently answer that question.

[TheFarseer]

9. Good luck finding stats on that

I just see that busing has not worked in my city.

[MarvinGardens]

7. What if busing is helpful for education?

Many teachers do not want to work in high poverty schools. They also don't get as much support from the parents and the local community. Affluent folks are more likely to leave, if they can just move across a nearby boundary, exacerbating the problem.

I don't have any data to show you, but it is easily possible that busing does impact the educational quality of poor kids.

[TheFarseer]

8. Ok so some kids get bused to another school

What about the kids left at the “bad” school? They’re still there and there’s less money to spend on actual education. And the people that are able to, move from the magnet school to a different school district not subject to busing. So now you have 2 schools people are running from. That’s what happened in my city. It just moves the problem/spreads it and never fixes it. To me that’s not the answer.

[MarvinGardens]

11. Kids from more affluent areas are bused in to the formerly high poverty school.

If it's a large enough area doing it, the white flight then tends to be to private schools, but that is more limited due to the expense.

See also my post #4.

[zipplewrath]

3. On more than race

quite honestly, especially in this day and age, busing should be as much based upon economic diversity as anything. Make sure the student population has the same economic distribution as the community, not just the local neighborhood. They should be more focused on avoiding "rich kids schools". Around here, schools are run at the county level, not the city, it makes "white flight" harder in general.

[MarvinGardens]

4. I answered yes based on a comparison of 2 metro areas I have lived in.

Bussing is no longer required in the South, but is still practiced in some areas (or was recently). Wake County, NC (encompassing Raleigh, Cary, Apex, and other suburbs) still practiced a form of it. Each neighborhood was defined as a "node". Nodes were assigned to schools in order to keep the % poverty below 40% at any school. They used economics, not race, but the two often go hand in hand.. The nice thing was that when looking for a house, you didn't have to worry that the schools were terrible. They'd be fine pretty much anywhere.

Now I live in the northern Atlanta suburbs. It's neighborhood schools, with no bussing and vast differences in poverty between school districts. I think it is worse for the community, encourages white flight, and it creates an extra layer of hassle in the real estate market. If I can say something positive about it though, my kids could practically walk to their school.

The white flight is much stronger here and is quite ridiculous. There is a subgroup of white person who keeps moving further and further out. Atlanta has a lot of minorities, and the close-in white areas are very expensive. So their choices are to live among minorities, or move ridiculously far out. My coworkers seem liberal for the most part, but then I talk to the occasional one who lives 1.5 hours out from work, you know, for "good schools".

[StarfishSaver]

5. Busing is one of many tools

And was always used as a last resort when other options failed or were blocked.

[jayfish]

10. School of Choice...

Is the real answer. I've seen it work first hand in my own childrens' schools. Lots of white parents are not happy with the results.