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You have to drop blame on racist council members and school committee members. I don’t care what limousine white liberals did. Doesn’t matter to BOSTONIANS. It’s just a whatbout used by racist whites in southie. They all knew they had to integrate since 1954. Then they act like summer of 1974 they first got the news. FOHWTBS. Black propel were ambivalent because we knew not to trust white people to implement this because it was goo to be a cluster.
I don't think they believed that the Brown vs. Board of Education decision applied to them when it was handed down in 1954. It was thought to apply to districts in the south that segregated specifically by race. Northern locations did it by neighborhood.
It didn't become clear that northern cities would be required to desegregate until the late 1960s, and the forced busing decision in the Charlotte, NC case wasn't handed down until 1971.
The real issue was the Massachusetts law that was passed in 1965. For most of the time, that was the law that the Boston school board was fighting, since it specifically applied to Boston and it was clear that it did.
I wonder why the School Committee didn't try harder to make the schools more equal and take more measured approaches to integration in neighborhoods that might have been more hospitable to it than southie.
I remember back in the mid 1970s, there was talk about bringing integration to New York City schools. There was even talk about busing students between New York City and the Westchester and Nassau County suburbs. It all came to nothing; the schools weren't even integrated within New York City, much less with the suburbs. I suspect the reaction to busing in Boston helped kill off any integration plans for New York City schools. Social and neighborhood conditions in New York were quite similar to Boston, and neighborhoods in New York City were deeply segregated and meant to stay that way. I suspect New York City would have reacted similarly to forced busing, but somehow they avoided it, and New York City schools haven't been appreciably integrated to this day.
Of course, the suburban parents would never have tolerated integration with New York City. They moved to the suburbs specifically to get away from the people who lived in the city. And they had the money to prevent it from happening without resorting to violence.
Busing was a red hot issue back then, and it led George Wallace to win the Michigan Democratic primary in 1972 because a federal court had ordered busing (in a decision later overturned by the Supreme Court) between Detroit and its suburbs, and suburban parents sure as hell didn't want their kids bused into Detroit.
So the extreme opposition to busing was not limited to Boston. It was pretty much universal.
I saw an article today talking about how the achievement gap in Boston schools has widened, and the city miscalculated GPAs for the students and admitted some of the wrong students to elite schools while rejecting those with better GPAs. The article urged that the BPS system be taken over by the state. I have yet to see an example of the type of busing that Boston had ever improving education for disadvantaged kids. The schools were just as bad after busing as before, usually worse.
I saw an article today talking about how the achievement gap in Boston schools has widened, and the city miscalculated GPAs for the students and admitted some of the wrong students to elite schools while rejecting those with better GPAs. The article urged that the BPS system be taken over by the state. I have yet to see an example of the type of busing that Boston had ever improving education for disadvantaged kids. The schools were just as bad after busing as before, usually worse.
Exactly - instead of having some good schools, some mediocre schools and some terrible schools we ended up with a bunch of uniformly terrible schools. It only takes a few disruptive, violent thugs to ruin the entire school and busing ensured each and every school got its fair share. Charter schools that can easily get rid of those who make teaching impossible as well as selective exam schools are the way out of this but needless to say modern-day judgegarraties want to destroy those in the name of green new anti-racist thermal justice.
I've read about plenty of bad BPS parents in the news. People in Boston get arrested on a daily basis. Do you think none of them have kids at BPS?
No one is saying all BPS parents are bad, I'm sure there are plenty of good ones as well. But parents have to get their kids interested in learning and teach them to behave or everyone suffers. Many bad habits are picked up at home and many are learned from kids at school.
I had many students from single parent families back during my substitute teaching days in the BPS (mid-late 2000's). Quite often, it's the mother who raises them. One student's father died when he was very little and he never had anyone in his life to discipline him to be a man. I recognized my student's name among those arrested for rioting and breaking into stores in the Back Bay back in 2020. Another student's father was shot to death by his own maternal uncle, probably after a domestic argument. A third student's father left him at birth and the father did not even know that his son (i.e. my student) himself became a father at age 17. Yet another student impregnated his classmate, another of my students, only to get in trouble with the law towards the end of the year. You can bet his classmate, the girl, will raise that child on her own. It's a never ending cycle isn't it? How can anyone concentrate hard at school with so much going on in life? My students all had talent and skill, some were even better than me at doing some things, but how were they going to better their studies in the face of so much adversity in their upbringing?
Right. I don’t know why it’s so hard to accept that it starts at home. If kids are exposed to crazy behavior all their lives they’re likely going to emulate this and a teacher or school administrators rarely can change this.
Right. I don’t know why it’s so hard to accept that it starts at home. If kids are exposed to crazy behavior all their lives they’re likely going to emulate this and a teacher or school administrators rarely can change this.
Exactly, and none of it will change as long as there are financial incentives to pop out as many kids as anatomically possible, and these kids are seen as nothing more than human ATMs.
People here seem to be offended when it's said that it's the parents and it starts at home.
Why on earth would you think a public school system should be responsible for helping you raise your kids? I mean they are there for 6 hours a day 5 days a week so schools do play some role....which is WHY so many parents try to send their kids to a GOOD school.
Single parents or married parents. Involved parents or hands-off parents.
How did we get to the point across the country, that mediocre or even bad students set the agenda at many schools? What happened to:
- disruptive students - you're put of of the classroom, and if it continues you're expelled
- students that can't keep up - you fail and go to summer school, or repeat the grade, but the speed of the classroom is not slowed down for their benefit
Teaching to the lowest common denominator helps no one.
I had many students from single parent families back during my substitute teaching days in the BPS (mid-late 2000's). Quite often, it's the mother who raises them. One student's father died when he was very little and he never had anyone in his life to discipline him to be a man. I recognized my student's name among those arrested for rioting and breaking into stores in the Back Bay back in 2020. Another student's father was shot to death by his own maternal uncle, probably after a domestic argument. A third student's father left him at birth and the father did not even know that his son (i.e. my student) himself became a father at age 17. Yet another student impregnated his classmate, another of my students, only to get in trouble with the law towards the end of the year. You can bet his classmate, the girl, will raise that child on her own. It's a never ending cycle isn't it? How can anyone concentrate hard at school with so much going on in life? My students all had talent and skill, some were even better than me at doing some things, but how were they going to better their studies in the face of so much adversity in their upbringing?
I don't know if a lot of white people really understand that that type of dysfunction has been passed down from generation to generation from long ago. It didnt just start in the 1960s. A lot of black people are stuck carrying the trauma/dysfunction of their ancestors-yes from slavery. Our culture was never allowed nuclear families, wealth investment opportunity, and we were brought here and lived hundreds of years under violence If you go to African nations they're not putting up the same type of violence as you'll find in many African American households here.
I think this seems implausible to white people but it's legit what happens. It's obvious. You're talking about the core element of Black culture being beating whippings (leads to social dysfunction) and discouragement from education (from whites and then it became pervasive in the black community). These didn't just end in 1865, not at all. Indeed each passing generation has to do work to sort of offload this trauma. Our cultural/familial histories are extremely dark and quite frankly scary. Baby-Daddy culture always existed because of breaking families apart during slavery, emasculation of black men, chain gangs, or people just having to leave their families behind to find work or other relatives. Beatings are held up in black culture because the thought is if I don't do it the world will do worse to you. If you look at depictions of black fathers back in the day say the early 1900s-1970s most black fathers are depicted as physically abusive, rolling stones and frustrated by a lack of income to raise a family on (think Sonny Liston's Father, James Brown's father, Danny Glover in Color Purple). For the poor African Americans, you see in ghettoes today they've never had prosperity in this country at any point. So with each generation, they get deeper and deeper into this hole.
The reason "excellence and exceptionalism" is valued in the black culture over steady conformity (a very valuable asset in schools) is because it takes exceptional individuals to break these family curses we all have. Conformity generally got us not very far. If we all conformed wed all still be in small southern towns sharecropping and picking tobacco like Central American migrants do today.
Basically, people want to know why black people don't rise up. Well, we've got a lot of internal work to do before we can really compete economically. Given that was sort of the only people on earth with this sort of live with your oppressor/enslaver w/o trying to go to war with them- thing...I'd say we're right on schedule. I honestly dont know how much more you can really expect from people that got here and were treated as we were from 1600-1965. I think about all the time how my father likely had white teachers born in the 1800s teaching him (he was born in 1955) what type of effect did THAT have on him. Kinda makes me shudder. Indeed most older black people will straight up refuse to talk to you about family history/schooling due to shame/hatred/trauma.
And honestly, much of this can be said about other formerly enslaved populations throughout the Caribbean and Central/South America. it's one of the major things I learned in going to Africa and studying "Old World" countries. They're cultures arent based on exploitative greed and violence so levels of street violence are much lower in Europe/Africa/Asia than they are in the Americas. People want to point to a dysfunctional inner city or black culture but never actually ask why that culture exists...
Single parents or married parents. Involved parents or hands-off parents.
How did we get to the point across the country, that mediocre or even bad students set the agenda at many schools? What happened to:
- disruptive students - you're put of of the classroom, and if it continues you're expelled
- students that can't keep up - you fail and go to summer school, or repeat the grade, but the speed of the classroom is not slowed down for their benefit
Teaching to the lowest common denominator helps no one.
Sure that is part of the problem too. But for the disruptive students it again goes back to the parents who are responsible for teaching kids how to behave. Parents need to pay attention to how their kids are performing too. If they are behind, they need more help...if they're ahead they need to be challenged more.
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