USA Today: Income, not race, becoming basis for busing I actually have two views of this rather disappointing news.
First I am unable to get past the notion that "Assumed Inferiority", regardless of the "column by which you sort the data upon" in order to mask this view is still as belittling. Based on previous attempts I am quite certain that many Black leaders are quite pleased that these children will be provided access to "opportunity". They have yet to come to grips with the complementary part of the same argument - which makes up my second point:
Despite having control over the control over their local institutions that they have struggled to obtain for a long time - this control has not allowed the people in question to develop the elusive "opportunity" in these same institutions.
When integration is made to provide tangible benefits to the "minority" while being seen as the societal obligation for the White to help his brother in need - there is a problem that needs to be addressed. There are some words that are not politically correct that needs to brought to the light.
THE CULTURE THAT NEEDS TO BE DESTROYEDOver the past few days I have engaged in several debates on different blogs. Several times I have been reminded that Black people "had our culture stolen from us during slavery". I asked these same people "Who was this culture that you speak of created in the first place?"
Answer: They were created as a function of the conditions that were present at that time and the need to have the group in question survive life's challenges. Hunters and Gatherers, for example are required to implement collaborative division of labor strategies lest they all die together. They shared the bounty - typically by elder status. These actions became ingrained into a culture. This culture was propagated to subsequent generations.
Thus my argument for the year 2009 is that this culture of ole is only relevant in as much as our people also seek to adopt the other lifestyle and living standards that were present during these glory days - "When We Were Kings".
This post is not about assigning blame as to the force who stripped away our "self determination" in the matter of dropping one culture and being forced into a new one that resulted in our current state.
- It is my opinion that the superior concern of today is that we stand today with a certain set of challenges.
- We stand today with certain "outcomes" that are desired for our people and the standard of living at which we reside.
These two overwhelming facts necessitate that we forge a new alignment between or "desired outcomes" and the cultural enforcements that we maintain as a means of transforming these "desired outcomes" into "directed outcomes".
What are "directed outcomes"?
Directed Outcomes are
the attainment favorable societal outcomes amongst a group of people that have been derived from the application of a defined set of management practices upon the people that are in line with their goals and/or permanent interests.
When someone has an award winning flower garden those of us who don't have a green thumb marvel at the end state. For me personally I also admit that I don't have the day to day interests in pruning, grafting and pulling weeds for me to ever have my yard look as good as the person's who's handiwork I am marveling.
I may have seen this person performing care of this defined space of his garden while I lounged around, watched television and in the case of my own plot of land - mowed my grass and sprayed "Round Up" on the weeds all of the sake of maintaining minimum "curb appeal".
By comparison this other person has what I have and more. Their accouterments that are present for me to envy were sculpted during the "mean time" in which this person was working while I was content with my own world.
I am of the opinion that the default state of a garden is a plot of land that has weeds, brush and overgrowth. Only human manicuring can turn this plot of land into an award winning garden.
The human being is no less of a garden. The tweaking that we all received via the entirety of our experiences from age zero (or even negative 9 months) through to 18 or 21 have made us all what we are today.
Today we have more control over our own garden than ever before as citizens of North America - regardless of our legal or social status that had prevented us from doing so.
It stands to my reason that if the present culture that prevails among our people (and indeed all of us have unique experiences) is failing to deliver the adequate quantity of us into the finished product that we need to produce the standard of living that we all find favorable - we have no choice than to implode the present culture within which our people are bathed in and reform the messages that our people receive with a more "functional culture".
There is no choice IF the goal is to obtain these "directed outcomes".
Today much of our activism is "one off". The thought goes - If we can fight the society and have it to prove to us that we are equally worthy then they will provide us with the resources that are necessary to reside at a particular standard of living. The standard of living that "America" has defined as a living standard.
Sadly if you pull the people in question away from the granter of this living standard - or leave them all alone in the MIDST of this same system - their buoyancy will be shown per the set of economic, academic, law & order and moral principles upon which they live.
Long story short - this new "income based distribution of human resources" is doomed to fail. It places the transformation of these "poor and minority" students as a function of their exposure to more effective cultural enforcements that are present in the "wealthy schools".
It strips away all pretense that a properly managed and confined "poor school" could EVER apply the same social and cultural controls that are present in the "rich school". Thus they attempt a short cut - convincing all who will go along that "POVERTY" inherently has some force of "INFERIORITY IN OUTCOMES" embedded within it.
I must reject this claim outright.
The dysfunction does not come from "poverty".
The dysfunction comes from non-management of impressionable resources.
Since there is no process for "directed outcomes" applied to these equal human beings - the unfavorable outcomes are unavoidable.
In the presence of a void in culture - young men and young women will craft their own culture.
From a logistical stand point there will never be a time when the balance of "poor and minority" Americans are given the "privilege" of sitting next to a "non-poor and non-minority" as a means of receiving their magical radiation.
In fact I believe that this is an example of "Non-White White Supremacy" to build our development plans off of such as strategy.
It is time to scrutinize and manage our CULTURE and those who claim to be our LEADERS.
By Jordan Schrader
USA TODAY
Struggling to improve schools that have large populations of poor and minority students and under legal pressure to avoid racial busing, a small but growing group of school districts are integrating schools by income.
More than 60 school systems now use socioeconomic status as a factor in school assignments, says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which studies income inequality. Students in Champaign, Ill.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and Louisville have returned this year to income-based assignments.
"To the extent we can eliminate the highest concentrations of poverty or spread more thinly those concentrations of poverty, I think we make the environment a little less challenging for students and staff to be successful," says Kalamazoo Public Schools Superintendent Michael Rice.
School leaders, though, can encounter backlash from parents of children whose school assignments take them out of their neighborhoods.
Supporters of economic diversity policies hold up the school system in Wake County, N.C., as a national example, but voters who came out for a recent school board election turned against it.
The district's goal is for none of its 159 schools in Raleigh and its suburbs to have more than 40% of its student body eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.
That's a goal a third of schools haven't reached in recent years, but Wake County schools still are more economically integrated than others in the state and nation, Kahlenberg says. Magnet schools pull some suburban children into the city; others' reassignments are mandatory.
But opponents of mandatory busing gained a majority on the Wake County school board in the Oct. 6 election.
Parents such as Joe Ciulla, who works for a technology company and lives in suburban Cary, say long bus rides harm children, and distance keeps parents from involvement at school. Low-income families are hit especially hard, he says.
"They take these poor kids who are struggling and do their very best to spread them around and create the appearance of healthy schools," says Ciulla, whose group, the Wake Schools Community Alliance, helped elect four candidates pushing for neighborhood schools.
Wake County bused students for decades based on race but switched in 2000 to considering income, one of the first in the nation to do so.
If the policy were ended, teacher Paulette Jones Leaven — who as a black child in the 1960s attended segregated schools until sixth grade — says she knows what would happen.
"We would return to segregated schools," says the in-school suspension coordinator at Carroll Middle School.
Jones Leaven notes statistics that show 96% of students go to school less than 10 miles from home as the crow flies.
Studies show low-income students do better in middle-class schools, Kahlenberg says. He says that's borne out in Wake County, where both poor and middle-class students have mostly outperformed their peers in other urban North Carolina districts — though scores have slipped lately.
He hopes Wake County will find a middle ground, perhaps like Cambridge, Mass., whose diversity plan offers a greater degree of choice for parents.
Assignment schemes in other communities vary. Champaign assigns children to elementary schools using individual factors such as parents' incomes and education levels, Assistant Superintendent Beth Shepperd says.
Prodded by a 2007 Supreme Court decision that limited how districts could use race, Kentucky's Jefferson County Public Schools moved to assignments that consider a neighborhood's economic status, minority population and adult education levels, says Sheldon Berman, its superintendent.
Either way, Kahlenberg predicts the Wake County election won't be a preview of backlash across the USA. Most areas don't have the explosive growth in student population that has made school reassignments in the county so common, he says.
Posts
