Prometheus 6

Almost forgot this guy:

As Test Scores Jump, Raleigh Credits Integration by Income 

Good news, right? 

"Kids are bused all over creation, and they say it's for economic diversity, but really it's a proxy for race," said Cynthia Matson, who is white and middle class. She is the president and a founder of Assignment By Choice, an advocacy group promoting parental choice.

Oops...can't be helping folks of other races now, can we?

Some of the strategies used in Wake County could be replicated across the country, the experts said, but they also cautioned that unusual circumstances have helped make the politically delicate task of economic integration possible here.

The school district is countywide, which makes it far easier to combine students from the city and suburbs. The county has a 30-year history of busing students for racial integration, and many parents and students are accustomed to long bus rides to distant schools. The local economy is robust, and the district is growing rapidly. And corporate leaders and newspaper editorial pages here have firmly supported economic diversity in the schools.

...and we have to recognize that, say, Boston would reject such a plan out of hand (why? see that added emphasis up there). 

"Low-income students who have an opportunity to go to middle-class schools are surrounded by peers who have bigger dreams and who are more academically engaged," said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has written about economic integration in schools. "They are surrounded by parents who are more likely to be active in the school. And they are taught by teachers who more likely are highly qualified than the teachers in low-income schools."

The results here are a vindication of the reasons the Black community sought school integration. Delaying any redundant discussions of causes for the moment, given that much of the poor "happen to be" minorities, these same arguments apply equally to minorities as to the poor.

Black folks wanted to integrate white communities because that was the resources...the very hands by which one grabs one's bootstraps...were located, and the determination not to locate them anywhere a negro could get at them meant negros had to move. So they did, and if it were not for the absolute resistance of the American S.S. the entire Black community would have seen similar results. There would still at this point likely be some economic distance between Black and White America but the emotional distance would be just about gone.

The result is therefore also a condemnation of the American S.S. and the America that allows it to drive the agenda, a condemnation of American's startling ability to see injustice when it is defined such as it may affect you and ignore it when it isn't.