Back to "separate but equal"?

Tell me this is just a joke please.

I guess in a really sick, twisted way there could be an argument here. It would involve survival of the fittest. Poor children are segregated and not given the same enriched environment as their more prosperous peers, leaving them to remain in poverty conditions, prone to crimes, drugs and early death. Gets them out of the gene pool early, leaving society to grow through better educated, healthier and affluent population. Isn't that the best for our culture?

If you can't see the sarcasm dripping out of my pores when you read this, please read it again.

If you want me to ramble on for a long while about the experiences my mom had teaching in an inner city school, I'll be glad to do it.

I live in NC and hear about that alot on the news... I haven't really been following it, and don't really know how I feel about it given this:

I could be wrong, but from what I understand the schools were going out of their way to keep it from seeming segregated... because all of the immediate neighborhoods are apparently "wealthily" neighborhoods. So they had to re-arrange bus routes and go way out of the way to pick up kids from poorer families.

But like everywhere else in the US, they have to cut back on costs as much as possible. Which means making bus routes as short as possible because the bus budget got cut. And because of it kids are getting to/from school earlier.

Imagine having a very poor town... So the schools are supposed to make the buses go 30+ miles out of the way to make the schools population more diverse? Where is that extra money coming from? Everyone is cutting costs. Now if they are doing this then they should let the students from poorer neighborhoods go there as long as they provide their own transportation.


I am by no means rich nor racist, I would feel the same if the roles were reversed (see above paragraph)... I was one of the "poor" kids at school and still haven't won the lottery lol.

In fact I don't know HOW I feel because I don't know the details lol. I am just trying to be understanding of BOTH sides.... the way I saw it was a "we are low on funding... lest cut transportation costs" type of thing. I could be wrong, and I do see that there is an issue. Poor people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

...if I have my facts straight.


Basically it's funding vs. morals.

Celebrated??? By whom? It has been absolutely abhorred by everyone I know.

Want to know the reality of what happens?

People purchase a home and select a neighborhood in large part based on the quality of the school. The quality of the school is almost always based on the student body more than any other factor. The best students almost always boils down to a cultural one. By culture, I mean what is the work ethic and scholastic emphasis instilled by the parents on the children and what cultural influences is the child most subject to. To a LIMITED extent, it is economic based, but this is generally more a incidental factor of good students being so due to values instilled since infancy by successful parents who naturally earn more. One need only travel to compare grade school achievements in countries with a fraction of the US GDP per capita to witness this.

Social engineering has sought to resolve this by creating absolutely ludicrous school zoning, which are constantly shifting. As an example, I used to ride my bicycle to school in Montgomery to a nice neighborhood school. Zoning was redone into a crazy twisted banana shape, and I had to be bussed halfway across town to a school with the most loud, wild, violent, and unmotivated group of people I have ever had to share space with.

So what happens? We moved. And we weren't alone. Over time, the property value of the homes that have been redistricted decline. This becomes less and less appealing to successful families and more and more affordable for lower economic brackets.

Well, guess what, eventually you are back in the same boat and the successful families are all sending their kids to the same schools, and the schools produce record scores, the best teachers are attracted to the best student bodies helping things further, and they get exemplary status... and that is why zoning is perpetually changing and drawing such odd shapes, busing kids all over to force families to enroll their children in schools they don't want to, which may balance scores but does nothing to resolve the cultural issues for the poor performing students in the first place. And even in the same school, they still end up "segregated" via advanced placement programs, put in place so that these lowest common denominators and disruptive students don't hold back those motivated to achieve more.

Personally, I find it ridiculous that the more children you have, the less you actually contribute in taxes for a given income to the school system, and if you choose to enroll your children in a private school you still have to pay for their public schooling which you get no use of.

How people can justify this to themselves is beyond me.

BTW, speaking of social engineering, having attended schools in different states of the US, Europe, and SE Asia, it is amazing how much emphasis there is on social engineering vs academics in American schools. Others that have attended schools overseas surely know what I'm talking about, in linguistics for example where instead of focusing on spelling, grammar, reading comprehension, and foreign language skills and the like, there are prescribed reading by specially chosen authors and then extensive time spent discussing what social lessons can be learned from that. And naturally this is always based on the assumption that the author's words are inherent truth the student must integrate into their own beliefs to have gained anything, rather than merely an individual's opinion with their own agendas, experiences, ignorance, and prejudices.

Well since you brought up SE Asia, I'll remark on Singapore, my birth nation. They could rename themselves Socialengineeredapore because social engineering is front and center there - There are all sorts of social engineering programs there and they make no apologies for them. Singapore has a decades-old "racial recipe" that dictates the nation be 71% Chinese, 15% Malaysian, 10% Indian and 4% "other". Last I heard. Maybe it's different today, but not much different I would imagine. I assume they have "recipes" for their school system too because education is heavily emphasized there. (I was educated fully in the U.S.) If any outside nation tries to criticize, Singapore tells them to stick it. Singapore is one of the richest nations in Asia and the 4th richest country in the world according to the World Bank. They tell their citizens Tough cookies if you don't like the rules. You can always move. My dad moved us outta there. Why is still unclear to me. Maybe he didn't like the materialistic trends that were going on.

This is generally true only if the parents have enough money to buy a home in that neighborhood. I'm sure poor people would love to attend a high quality school, but they are rare in poor neighborhoods.

I disagree here, and my answer is based on a time when schools were still segregated before busing was put into practice.

In my mom's inner city school, she was able to raise basic reading and math levels within classes where the student's parents were junkies and prostitutes, and if the parents worked, it was 2 jobs and they weren't at home to help their kids. The school was poor and more often than not, my mom had to purchase not only the paper she used to hand out tests, but school supplies for her students. She and I would make lunches for her students each morning so they had something to eat. Yet in spite of their "cultural" background, her students succeeded. Her principle actively recruited teachers who had these teaching principles, so my mom was by no means an exception. But I will also add that her school was an exception to schools in poor neighborhoods.

What this proved to me is that while their home environment did play a role (hungry kids don't learn very well), that schools do make a difference to neighborhoods where kids don't pick up a good work ethic at home.

That is true! And they call the dictator in power the "president" even though only the ruling party is allowed to pick who is "president worthy" and tends to pick only one candidate. That candidate is surprisingly popular winning 100% of the vote though....

Aside from the government, Singapore is a great place, but I attended the SAS school Ulu Pan Dan so we weren't subject to the propaganda.
My points though is that they are rare because what makes a high quality school is the student body. You could take an exemplary rated school, force everyone in the neighborhood to move themselves and their children out of it, fill it will inner city kids from the worst rated school, and within no time it would not longer be a "high quality school". MOST teachers aren't any more altruistic than people in any other profession, they are just people like anyone else and prefer to teach in the cleaner schools with quiet children that are motivated to learn and show the teacher *respect*, and thats a cultural issue and will follow the student body around no matter which building it goes to. In Germany for example our tiny little town had very little funding, yet math at the Gymnasium I attended was taught at a level that US schools weren't reaching for another two years. Same on language, geography, and science.

I just thought it refreshing to be taught academics in school, and leave parenting up to the parents.

Glad they had a positive influence, but on a note of "hungry kids", I also just don't buy this.

I've been in many countries with true hunger problems, and the US is not one of them.

In fact, the biggest issue I have seen with the lower class in the US is obesity, not hunger. With soup kitchens and food stamps and many other private and public charity organizations, I have just never come across a skin and bones starving child in the United States. Poor QUALITY nutrition I can accept, but hungry kids, no way. Just saw the add yesterday on Youtube about the supposedly 3 million "starving" children in NY... hate to be cold, but its nonsense IMO.

I'm sorry that you've never witnessed hunger in this country. You might look at things differently had you ever witnessed it first hand.

Sorry, didn't meant to get off on a tangent, but just a note that I'm 30 years old and have been around (moved every ~2 years of my life up to late teens), and the only cases I have read of in the US were due to illness (physical or mental), such as anorexia or a deranged parent starving their child. The United States has a massive food surplus, providing over 60% of the world's food aid exports, with people even paid not to farm. And the obesity epidemic with those receiving some sort of financial aid in the US is well documented: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,75131,00.html

Oh well, back to the subject of schools, I just don't see how in the US we can take away the freedom from parents to choose how their children should be raised and what schools they would like their own child to attend with these government social engineering programs inside and out of the classroom. It just seems unamerican IMO and amounts simply to a power-play by the left that dominates the education field today.