Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Around Town / Education / Kotz / Law and Order / Legislature / Politics Mike Turner's Right: Busing Was the Worst Idea Ever
Posted by Pete Kotz on Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 5:39 AM
Okay, so the "political correctness" line is a little weird, coming from the House Democratic Caucus leader and all. Whatever you think of all those civil rights acts of the '60s and '70s, it's hard to argue they were born from dogma, and not good intentions gone awry. But he's still right.
There was a time when the school served as the cultural center of virtually every urban neighborhood in America. It was a place of multi-generational allegiance, where the neighborhood came together week after week, year after year for plays, pageants, sports, and awards ceremonies. Think town hall meets YMCA meets family social club.
But once busing began, the neighborhood school disintegrated. It could no longer be the community center if half the kids were being shipped across town. And what's the point of maintaining a neighborhood if the government's tearing it apart weekdays from 8 and 3? Everything needs a center, and busing had blown it up...
Stereotype would have it that just the white racists began to bolt, unwilling to allow their kids to mix with lesser species. That would be wrong. They may have been the first, but over the years they were followed by anyone with the money. And much of it had nothing to do with race.
Ask any parent worth his or her salt, and they'll tell you the point of childbearing is to raise kids who have it better than they did. But busing, this grand game of social engineering, stole that away. What's the point of aspiring to a certain life, a certain neighborhood, a certain place of comfort and friendliness, only to have one's kids shipped across town? Better to move some place where Mom and Dad can make those decisions for themselves. And that usually meant flight to the burbs.
Go to any city that saw its schools die before Nashville's, and you won't find a white exodus. You'll find a middle class exodus, black neighborhoods just as devoid of their up-and-coming as white neighborhoods. Busing stole their ability to create their own destiny. They fled to take it back.
So while Turner may have mangled his theory with talk of PC, he's essentially right. Busing didn't just kill the neighborhood school. It was also the leading killer of the American city.
Comments (3)
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Yep. There were plenty of white kids in the schools during the early years of busing. At that time (at HG Hill) the inner-city kids were bused to us and we stayed in our neighborhood.
When it was time for the suburban kids to be bused into the city, that's when all my friends' parents put them in private schools or moved out of Davidson.
As time passed, the post-WW-II Nashville neighborhoods that were built around the schools as a social center have grown gray and few homes have any children anymore. The kids of these people, now accutely aware of school quality issues, had nothing to move back to.
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It is true that busing destroyed most neighborhood schools. I was part of the first group of kids that experienced it but my parents fled like everyone else to an out lying county. But before busing I hardly ever saw anyone of color in the area of town we lived in, but about 5 years later black families started moving in. So though busing may have destroyed neighborhood schools it could have very well been what was needed free black families from the east and north sides of town. Nashville was hugely segregated and there was no better solution at the time. I wonder what we could have done differently looking back because if we had kept it the same everything would still be the same.
Political Correctness might have been the wrong terminology for the point I was trying to make, but the fact remains that when our schools worked and we were the world leader in K-12 Education, our schools were community based where everone in the community had ownership in the local schools, even people that didn't have kids in school had a since of community pride in thier schools. Now thats not to say that we didn't have problems at that time, there was great disparity in the quality of the education that kids recieved in the 50's 60's and 70's and in some ways those disparities still exist. The answer to those problems then turned out to be busing and I think that has cause a whole lot of the problems we face today. Nashville is a very diverse city and very few of the High Schools that we closed back then, if they were reopened would be segregated schools. Nashville is a great city and needs great schools
