It\u2019s ridiculous that Democrats are debating busing instead of real hopes for improving urban education
It’s beyond ridiculous that forced busing, of all things, has become an issue in the 2020 Democratic race — prompting a bogus battle over racial justice, rather than a discussion of how to offer excellent public school educations.
It started with a carefully plotted shot by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) at ex-Veep Joe Biden in last week’s debate, ending with the vivid line, “That little girl was me” — and followed up within moments by her campaign’s tweeting out a photo of little Kamala. (Soon enough, the Harris camp was selling $30 T-shirts with the picture.)
Except that Harris was in a voluntary busing program to desegregate the Berkeley schools, whereas Biden at the time was fighting against court-ordered busing — which was a notorious, and bitterly divisive, failure at desegregation, most famously in Boston.
That’s why no less a progressive than Mayor Bill de Blasio, who grew up just outside Boston, said last year that he doesn’t think busing is “the right way to achieve the goal” of integrated schools.
Yet Harris’ spurious hit to Biden’s civil rights record has Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a top Biden backer, stepping carefully. Asked about the issue this week, he declined to dismiss the idea of using busing to curtail school segregation, noting that diversity is an issue “we’re grappling with the city and the state.”
Lost here is that the main goal of busing wasn’t simply integration, but ensuring that minority kids got access to quality schools. The push for integration started in response to the plain fact that government-sponsored school segregation hadn’t remotely delivered the second half of “separate but equal.”
Democrats, and the whole nation, should be talking about how to provide real access to quality education in urban public schools. One obvious part of the answer is charters: alternative public schools now producing real results for low-income black and Latino children, especially here in New York City.
The Obama administration, to its great credit, tried hard to foster charter-school growth. But the innovation is anathema to America’s teachers unions, which hold immense power in the Democratic Party.
Sadly, that helps leave the party’s presidential hopefuls sidetracked in a fight over a dead-end “solution.”
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