You live in a heavily populated area of the country. A middle-class neighborhood, maybe like the one you live in, is so large geographically that you probably have to drive many, many miles to enter a section of your city which is impoverished and crime ridden. This geography buffers your schools, allowing them to reflect the income and education levels and values of the middle-class neighborhood. Thus your good schools can stay good.
In a small state like mine, no such buffers can exist except marginally at the elementary school level.
Junior high and high schools all draw from every socioeconomic group. For ex. a middle-class neighborhood in west Little Rock may only be one square mile before it bleeds into a lower-middle class, and than onto an impoverished area. One junior high serves all of that geography. The same is true for north, south, and east Little. And this repeats itself at the high school level, of course.
At the elem. levels, a neighborhood school will more or less reflect one type of socio-economic group although this is frequently undone by apartment complexes sprinkled in and around each neighborhood.
Kids who want to learn, either black or white, are being shortchanged. Teachers must give too much of their time and energy to keeping order and/or trying to bring the slow-learners up to speed. Everyone could see it but nothing got done to try and turn it around. In the last ten years, the white flight became so massive that the entire school district last year lost it's federal funding for integration. In other words, integration was declared a failure and the funding was denied.
The population of this school district is 65% white and 35% black. But only 22% of the school population is white. In the last few years, blacks have started to slowly stream out of the public schools, too.
I'm so very glad that your suburban schools can be labeled 'very good'. Last Christmas, visiting in Little Rock, I drove to look at each one of the public schools I attended back in the 50s and early 60s as well as those my kids attended for a few years in the late 70s. It was depressing. Chain link fencing everywhere, scrubby grounds and rundown looking buildings for the most part. |
