In teaching American history, my classes spend a lot of time attempting to gain a more complete understanding of a variety of supreme court cases. A few of these cases concern school integration - and I often feel that my educational experience can help shed light on the topic.
As a kid, I grew up in a city (Winston-Salem, NC) that had mandatory busing to integrate the schools. (This was court ordered as a result of the supreme court case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System in 1970). The system looked like this: I attended an elementary school that was in the suburbs, where I lived. African-American kids from the inner city took a 45 minute bus ride out to our school. For middle school, it was me ( and other suburban white kids) who had the long bus ride to the inner city. Then, we all returned to the suburbs for high school. Overall, this system succeeded in integrating our schools. Until my final years in high school, I never knew that many places in America had an educational experience without mandatory busing.
Since the mid nineties, most cities (including Winston-Salem) have abandoned mandatory busing in favor of magnet school programs - simply allowing for family choice in schools (In Winston-Salem, this has essentially resegregated the public schools there - where one elementary school is almost 100% African-American and Latino, with 98% free/reduced lunch - and another is 88% white, with 15% free/reduced lunch). In addition, school systems are trying numerous strategies to combat the massive gap in test scores between minorities and white students.
The NPR podcast This American Life recently took on crucial questions about our school integration experiment of the 1980s, including:
- Was it successful?
- Did mandatory integration of public schools help close the achievement gap between minorities and white kids?
- Is it still necessary to make sure kids of different races attend school together?
Click here to hear the podcast The Problem That We All Live With
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