It's not just local policy. Society itself is racist at a pretty fundamental level. The government made de jure segregation illegal, but all that happened was an exodus from the racially mixed cities into racially segregated suburbs. When people can't achieve segregation by moving to a particular zip code, they look for other ways to do so. Check out the city-data.com forums sometime: http://www.city-data.com/forum/#u-s-forums. You'll quickly run across the codewords ("ghetto" or "urban").
When peoples' kids are involved, the pretense of tolerance evaporates and everyone just wants to avoid sending ended up in a predominantly black or hispanic school district. Why else would student racial demographics be featured prominently, in graphical form, on the front page of each school profile in the DC public school system (http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Barnard+Elementary+School) and Chicago (http://cps.edu/Schools/Find_a_school/Pages/findaschool.aspx)?
If indeed "we're all better off" with an unsegregated situation, why is there an almost universal instinct to remain in these specific insular groups? Humans are social animals and surely a natural connection would be made between these segments unless there is a strong incentive against it. I for one don't really buy the "everyone is a bigot" line that's normally used anymore, so I'd like to have a discussion about what motivates rational people to self-segregate.
I imagine that there's a minority of white parents that like the segregated schools simply because they don't like black people. But, I also think that the majority of the white parents sending their kids to economically/racially segregated schools are simply seeking and advantage for their own kid.
The problem comes from the long-term effects on the community. We've ended up with concentrated black communities that are less economically developed and harboring students with fewer opportunities for advancement. There's no good reason that a black student should be denied the same opportunities as a white student. We'd all be better off if black people had the same opportunity to achieve as a white person -- because white people would be better off if poor people (even poor white people) had the same opportunities as rich people.
Self-segregating is normal but doing it purely along color lines is abnormal, or at least irrational. I have friends of all races and from most continents (I don't have a friend from Antarctica and I can't remember an Australian friend) but I don't have many impoverished friends. People hang out with similar people but it's short-sighted to see it as a race thing; it's a socio-economic thing.
We're all better off with highly integrated schools because we're all worse off with a large and growing class of second-class citizens that have fewer opportunities. Poor people with fewer opportunities commit more crimes, make less money and cost more public money to support (even if you only consider prison costs). People with a good education and good access to career opportunities commit far fewer violent crime and pay way more taxes and increase the prosperity of any community they join. We're better off being integrated.
Says who? On which authority?
What if poor people want to segregate themselves?
Live and let live. Individual freedom is more important than society considerations
Not if that leads to going back to serfs and kings.
There is no way that poor people demand to live in slums. The self-segragation idea is insulting and couldn't be supported by even an uninformed hypothesis.
Looking purely at the effects of segregation should answer if it's a good idea. For an individual it's possible to benefit from segregation but as a group we're worse-off. Arbitrarily picking out second-class citizens and lowering their opportunities is a short-sighted idea even if in the near term that means that more resources can be used to advance your own interests. It doesn't matter if people are choosing to be disenfranchised, it matters that we're all hurt by it -- suicide is roundly discouraged for the same reasons.
"Live and let drown" might be a more appropriate description that "live and let live."
This is dealing with the public school system. It's inherently a society consideration.
1. Schools in wealthy communities get more funding than schools in poor communities.
2. More money translates into better teachers, better facilities, more AP classes, better test scores, and measurably better education.
3. Better education translates into better future economic prospects for students.
4. Those better-off students can later afford to live in wealthy communities, start over at step 1.
Break the chain at step one. The quality of education available to you should not depend on how expensive a neighborhood your parents can afford to live in. Implementation details? Not sure--maybe fund schools at the state or national level, dividing the pie based on population (constant $/student)?
In response, a few years later, California passed Prop. 13, cutting property tax levels to almost nothing. This had untold negative consequences on local and state government, on the housing market, and on education (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978... for a summary).
Personally, I would welcome a complete ban of private schools at the K-12 level. Force those people to send their kids to public schools and they'll suddenly be screaming from the rooftops for the school systems to improve.
This is kinda but not really true. I grew up in one of the richest counties in the country (Fairfax, VA). Total expenditures per student in the public school system is about $13,500. In nearby D.C., it's $18,700. Baltimore City Public Schools is $14,700. Prince Georges County Public Schools (a lower-income district) is $14,000.
It's probably true that rural school districts suffer from both low income and low school expenditure. But many of the poorest, most heavily-minority school districts (in the large cities), are also the best funded.
> 2. More money translates into better teachers, better facilities, more AP classes, better test scores, and measurably better education.
It's quite questionable whether this is true: http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/04/07/study-no-link-betw.... The U.S. spends more on education than all but a handful of countries with high costs of living (Norway, Switzerland, etc): http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/12/america.... Yet our school performance lags.
I've read this before too and I find it baffling. Is there any research into why this is? Either money is getting spent in fundamentally different ways or the US education problem is not attributable to schools and is caused by some other factor.