Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Deploy the Crack-Addled Analysts!

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has uncovered:

Black students in the St. Louis area are more likely to attend a school in a district that is virtually all black than they were in the 1960s.

Fifty years after the highest court in the land declared school segregation illegal, the region's student population as a whole has become more diverse. But still about half the area's students - white and black - attend public schools where nearly all the children look like themselves, a Post-Dispatch analysis shows.

As part of its long commemoration of the Brown v Board of Education, the paper concludes that schools are still segregated. The paper, however, misunderstands or misrepresents a basic concept in segregation: Segregate is a transitive verb, wherein a subject segregates a direct object. Segregation was bad when governments segregated people based upon race because it did not allow them to choose the schools their children attended--the government assigned it by race. With Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court said that separate facilities for members of different races were inherently unequal.

Once governments quit segregating pupils by race, segregation ended. However, the Post-Dispatch, arguing in favor of expensive forced integration programs, intimates that since schools are not integrated, they're still segregated. But schools are now segregated by choice, as people send their children to schools where they live and can choose where they live or they can send their children to private schools.

Hold on, some people would argue, parents are not free to choose where they live! A family living on a single service industry salary cannot live in the Ladue school district! Therefore, they are not free! They're segregated to places they can afford to live and are thus not free and their children should be bussed to Ladue!

If you think that, I have two words for you: But since this blog is read by my mother-in-law, I won't say them, but I will think them very hard in your general direction. First, you're misrepresenting freedom to choose as freedom to make any choice or take any action. Freedom to choose means you can choose what's available to you, not among all possibilities real or imagined. Just because I'm not free to travel astrally between the galaxies, soaring on the cosmic wind, that does not mean I am unfree to choose between the possibilities available to me. So parents are free to move, if they want, to places with better schools and/or to make sacrifices for their children's educations if that's what they value.

As for anecdotal evidence, I can only offer the following: A close friend of mine attended the Principia, an elite high school in the St. Louis area. Her mother had gone there. So she did. Of course, her mother made extreme sacrifices to send my friend to the Princip. Her mother was a single mother, raising two children in Colorado and New Mexico, but she moved the family to St. Louis and made sacrifices, deals, and relied on the help of others to ensure her children could attend the school she chose for them. She chose. Period.

So feel free to continue to ignore the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's perspective on this issue, and continue to take care of your children and your schools instead of forcing the government to waste its limited resources on creating a sixties Coke commercial world of properly rainbowed schools of which the Post-Dispatch would approve.

- posted by Brian J. @ 6:29 PM