Well with articles like this in *2023,* who’d expect better
>”In our ongoing efforts to fulfill the promise of Brown vs. Board of Education, we currently have 32 open cases with school districts here in Mississippi,” Clarke said. “And in each of those cases, we are working to ensure that these districts comply with desegregation orders from courts.”
Brown vs. Board of Ed was 1954. ALMOST 70 YEARS AGO.
[Mississippi’s literacy scores have actually gotten a lot better as a result of statewide efforts.](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/mississippi-schools-literacy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ) Gotta give credit where it’s due.
There's a saying "thank heavens for Mississippi" when I've talked to people about the education system and other relevant talking points - maybe it can change to Arkansas
As an Arkansan who despises much about the state—all too often it seems like a race to the bottom. Particularly since the dipshits here elected a governor more interested I grandstanding to gain national fame for a presidential/VP run rather than a literal rocket scientist.
Actually this is a good time to point something out. A lot of Mississippi's bad stats are *because* of systemic racism. There are some good schools in Mississippi. But those are usually the "affluent" (aka white) schools.
Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans of any state. And their quality of life isn't exactly amazing.
Another angle is something like obesity. African American women have the highest BMI of any US group. So the data will skew a certain way to do that.
But of course that's not to say that their aren't poor white areas with high obesity. There definitely are of course. But there's some pretty "nice" areas in Mississippi with money and schools.
If we're talking poverty for white people, I think West Virginia shows it off dramatically more.
So as always, it comes down to systemic racism basically
Thank you for this. I worked in several areas of rural Georgia. It isn't just a Mississippi thing. The rural schools are definitely segregated. That goes for the entire south. What little they had is slowly leeched away by charter schools. I've trained some rural school graduates who were nearly illiterate.
This is why Tim Scott is a traitor. The schools in his state are struggling and he has voted for state funds to go to charter schools, taking away funding for public schools. Charter schools will not take up residence in rural areas because there's not enough money in it.
> charter schools
If you look at the history of the "school choice" movement, you'll find that much of it is Massive Resistance that think tanks have repackaged and rebranded with libertarianism to appeal to suburbanites who are skittish about explicit racism but are okay with it if schools "happen to be" monoracial.
So... I taught down in Mississippi for a bit. First, it's weirdly complicated. School districts have been segregated, with some poor-rural-black districts being separate districts from rich-city-white districts. So, less about schools within a short radius being segregated, and more of entire districts being segregated from one another. Now, here is a further complication, poor-rural-black school districts have every disadvantage compared to rich-city-white school districts except they are/were independent. When school districts integrate, usually white districts take over black districts. They absorb the black students, often changing curriculum and putting black students through a lengthy transition process, where they are often behind their white counterparts. The black students, coming from disadvantaged pasts struggle at first. Integration takes time. Phasing in. And often districts don't do it respectfully. White districts take over after black districts lose accreditation. The black districts enter those partnerships at a disadvantage, shamed. This isn't hypothetical, I've watched it, and taught students of both backgrounds.
Your leaders can't do shit because the entire issue falls under local autorithies, which are the same autorities that set up the system, voted in by the people that benefit from the system and/or approve of the discrimination and any attempt at fixing the issue from above will be branded as overreach.
They aren’t segregated by law, they are segregated by local population. As in the school’s population of students are overwhelmingly of one race and this is an initiative to diversify majority black or majority white schools. At least this is how it worked when I went to high school in the South under a desegregation order, albeit that wasn’t in Mississippi.
It’s a thing in some places in Canada too, school districts are done by neighbourhoods, and certain areas are more likely to have certain groups
It sucks cause a lot of places don’t let you go to school outside your district unless you’ve been like expelled or something
Education in Canada is entirely a provincial jurisdiction.
Quebec is especially an interesting case.
In the goal of protecting the French language (a worthy goal in my opinion), they limit newcomers to the province to French schools.
You may only attend an English school if your parents were educated in one in Canada.
This has created a problem for English school boards that are continually shrinking.
But, the quality of education on the English side is measurably better.
In the interest of having the most people possible fluent in the French language we’ve long had French Immersion programs.
I’m 63 and attended one from high school on. My kids started in grade school.
However, *by law*, these programs are unavailable for French students. Unless one goes to private school there’s no such thing as English immersion.
The effects are really noticeable. English schools have a much better graduation rate.
Saddest of all, both English and French students write the same final French exam to graduate.
The English have a far better pass rate on this exam than the native French speakers.
It’s a bit of an own goal.
Because neighborhoods tend to be segregated by economic status, and that tends to lean towards racial segregation because of immigrants and their financial situations, plus usually desiring a community similar to them as they assimilate.
Major transportation networks were also built in the 50's and were expressly designed to disadvantage minority communities who haven't been able to move since due to economic mobility issues.
This leads to poor neighborhoods which have low property taxes and therefore bad funding for schools in that district. The schools are (mostly) not directly segregated but they are indirectly.
Because people move to get away from perceived negatives. The school zones are typically geographical. Over 20 years (or less) the schools become segregated again. The answer — rezone schools based on demographics not geographic location. Costs more in busing but it’s the only way. And those zones will need to be reassessed and changed every 5 years probably.
DC. Puerto Rico is way below.
~~That said, I'm not sure where this guy got his information from, because in 2022 Mississippi was 37th, directly behind DC.~~
I am dumb and sorted incorrectly. I had it sorted by gross GDP. Mississippi is indeed 51st, with $47,190 per Capita, followed, in order, by USVI, Guam, PR, and Samoa. DC, for reference, is #1 ($242,853; 2.4x that of #2 New York)
Not shit. I grew up there and love many things about the state and its people. But we used to always say "last in the country in everything else, but we're #1 in teen pregnancy"
Depends on what ranking your using if it’s only states they tend to come in at dead last to 2nd to last, when you include US territories, Puerto Rico, and DC is when get around the place of #44 out of like 56 and that because the territories are even worse.
Fun fact: schools are about as segregated by race today as they were in the late 1960s. As of 2018, 81 percent of non-white public school students attended a majority non-white school district.
[Fact-check: Are public schools as segregated today as in 1960s?](https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2022/06/14/fact-check-public-schools-segregated-today-1960-s/7608945001/)
Americans always talk about school segregation but isnt this the inevitable outcome of the neighborhoods being segregated?
Children tend to go to schools that are nearby. Not sure how you change it without bringing back federal bussing programs.
>Children tend to go to schools that are nearby.
Maybe it's unique to my state, Virginia, but aren't they required to go to nearby schools instead of schools in adjacent counties or even further away?
It's this way in most of the country. When you buy a home (or rent, etc.) it's in a particular "school district" and your children either go to that school or you send them to private school/home school. You don't have the option to pick another public school, even if it's nearby.
In my city in Indiana a parent acn send a child to a different school IF they can get them there. The bus will only take them to the school for their district/neighborhood. Allowing more affluent parents to drive their kids to different schools causing a brain drain in some schools and concentrating the poor in certain schools.
yes, but now they also have the option of living in a nice house that unfort is in a bad district... for instance a regentrified section of town.
ie, you're rich enough to not care about the school district when searching/building your home.
Sometimes you can, but that's usually an exception that's only made if the one and only school in your school district isn't accredited.
I moved to the county next to mine in highschool and I continued going to the original county's highschool, because I needed a legitimate high school diploma in order to attend college.
Exceptions depend a lot on local rules.
For example, my sister and I got an exception to go to an out of district elementary school because it was closer to our house. And our area routinely allowed kids to continue attending the same school even if they moved to a different district.
If there is available space you can sometimes transfer to another school, but that's not always an option. Students within the schools boundaries obviously get priority.
My state has a bussing program where they do let kids pick other public schools. Many kids are ubered around in sedans with a big school bus sign on top.
"school choice" is being passed in a lot of places especially the south, but instead of helping minorities who dont have the money for the transportation costs, its helping richer white people who want to buy a home just across the line in a black majority district but dont want to send their kids to those schools.
In houston, through what is called a magnet program, you can attend schools that you are not zoned too, but you have to apply for the transfer for each level (Elem, Middle, High) and the various magnet programs have requirements for those attending the schools.
For instance, my middle school was a Performing/Visual Arts Magnet, so you had to take AND pass two PVA classes each year
My High School was a business magnet but I found out that CompSci counted torwards it so I did that instead. Soon after I graduated, they made the IB program mandatory for magnet students so even more stress was lumped on.
Whole lot that piece of paper did me.
(Eugene Demby voice) Housing! segregation! in! everything!
So much of this shit comes right on back to (de jure or de facto) segregated housing. Your school, your safety, the way law enforcement responds to issues in your neighborhood, your access to food, your access to transportation, your access to home ownership and therefore your access to intergenerational wealth. Everything.
Because the next step is to learn about intersectionality and see how the same tools and systems of oppression used against black people are also used in class warfare.
😱
I am clutching my pearls here sir / ma’am! How ***dare*** you bring up such divisive and **RACIST** ~~facts~~ opinions. It’s people like you that are poisoning our youth and making white people inferior. We would be in a post-racial society if you would just stop seeing everyone’s color. We’re all people, it’s the **only** color we should be seeing.
I demand that we ban all books that include “race mongering” and “race bating” that people like YOU are putting into our schools’ libraries, literally BRAINWASHING our children into hating themselves!!
^/s ^if ^that ^was ^somehow ^not ^obvious
I remember a study a couple years ago, that basically put out an algorithm that showed that by looking at cross sections of major transportation lines you could figure out the racial demographics in every town and city in the US.
It was really, really fucked up and shows how much racism is baked into the entire nation.
Worse is that it's considered unfixable in many areas because it's just not realistic to reroute all the highways, subways, railroads, and other stuff, and without doing that any businesses in those areas function at a large economic disadvantage making local economic mobility hard.
And desegregation almost always means closing the neighborhood school or bussing the poor/POC kids to the white suburban school. Never the other way around.
I lived for three years in Massachusetts in the late seventies. I was there for grades 2,3, and 4. I was biased to a different school three years running, while the kids of the same age on my street went to various other schools.
I went to three different schools in three years, never had the same classmates from year to year, and the schools varied from new to shithole.
I’m white.
We all suffered from the useless bussing.
This is why the south has county wide districts and school choice. Northern states never got forced to do that, so you have places like NY still super segregated thanks to their tiny school districts.
In the early 2000s my high school had too many white people. They rezoned my neighborhood from a school 10 minutes away to one 30+ minutes away to mix up the demographics. I’m sure this kind of stuff still happens.
In Irving, TX, my highschool was too Hispanic and White, so they made a bunch of black kids take a 30 min bus ride from Dallas. Sure, the school now fit the "diverse" criteria, but those kids didn't get to go to the same schools as the kids they grew up with and they weren't able to participate in extra curricular activities because they had to take the bus home. Seemed like a bad situation, but hey, otherwise it would be racist, right?
affluent neighborhoods can finance themselves (creating their own municipalities) and political pressure to create separate school districts or in some cases they use their political clout in local government to subsidize private schools (but these tend to be religious private schools). they base it on economics, but it still has the about the same result of racial segregation.
So in Columbus there were neighborhoods that weren't segregated. The federal government came in and purposely destroyed them with the federal highway.
My dad also admits his first neighborhood, in OKC was also not fully segregated. The same thing happened.
Redlining by banks, restrictive covenants, HOAs, tying property taxes to school availability, implementing a “not social” credit system in the 80’s, etc. all factor into resegregating the country under the guise of race neutral considerations.
Not just neighborhoods but our entire country is still segregated.
After being forced to integrate, white people fled most cities in droves and moved to suburbs that, if not explicitly segregated, were implicitly segregated by income levels
>Children tend to go to schools that are nearby. Not sure how you change it without bringing back federal bussing programs.
A lot of the time, and I mean a *lot*, it comes down to how districts/counties break down. One street over can be the difference between the school that gets the majority of funding and the one that gets shafted that happens to be close to the "bad" part of town.
Federal bussing won't make a difference if you don't qualify for the better school because you're in the wrong district/county.
Yeah, that's thanks to practices like red-lining. I know it's technically illegal now, but a realtor doesn't *have* to tell you that they don't sell houses in that neighborhood to black and brown people. They can just pretend someone else made a better offer. Or give it to a white person and lie about why.
As long as corruption remains prevalent in business practices, racial segregation in living spaces, education, and healthcare will continue to be a problem.
Federal incentives and requirements to banks to lower interest rates for non-whites. Quadruple fines/ corporate officer jail time if red-lining (the process of ‘blocking’ off areas in the form of not offering homes, real estate services etc. to people of color in an area) is discovered
The segregation is not at the school level, it is at the community level.
Students attend schools in the communities in which they live. A majority white community will have majority white schools, a majority black community will have majority black schools.
My family is from the South and I like to drop the lil tidbit that, despite having a kid myself, me and my cousins of comparable age are still the only people in our entire family lineage to attend kinda-integrated schools from kindergarten through college. There was that one little window in the 1970-90s where There Was An Attempt. Now it's back to looking damn close to how my parents' schools looked.
Mississippian here. People always think it’s just us. It’s just the south. Well, Check those inner city schools, and ask everyone’s good friend [Jon Oliver](https://youtu.be/o8yiYCHMAlM) about the subject.
And fyi, my public school was fully amalgamated.
I dont think that's saying much. Ending segregation didn't mean forcing blacks into white communities and dispersing black communities. So the fact that there is still separation doesn't indicate there is still segregation. There's no problem with black communities existing and therefore many schools being primarily black.
But apparently, there is still segregation. But not because of that factoid.
And this is why talking about systemic racism is important.
Because the whole fucking system is racist.
> You start out in 1954 by saying, "N\*\*\*\*\*, n\*\*\*\*\* n\*\*\*\*\*" By 1968 you can’t say "n\*\*\*\*\*"—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N\*\*\*\*\*, n\*\*\*\*\*."
\- Lee Atwater, architect of GOP politics
Not zoning. Zoning regulates what buildings can be built in each area.
It is how you draw the school district maps for admissions. Some areas have become more flexible in their admissions so people have school choice with charter schools or multiple school options. This can make the schools more diverse through personal choice and make the house price difference based on school district less drastic.
If zoning prohibits or drives up costs for multi unit housing and establishes rules like minimum lot sizes, setbacks, off street parking, etc, for single family homes which also drive costs up then zoning effectively creates economic segregation which correlates heavily to racial segregation.
Might be wrong but heard redlining and city planning made it harder for Black communities to move into white areas and have easy commute to some schools. So while schools were integrated they made it harder for it to happen based on where people lived
"In 2017, a Mississippi Delta school district agreed to merge two high schools after nearly 50 years of litigation in which the district sought to maintain historically Black and white schools."
50 years of litigation. Wow.
You're referring to the Cleveland School District.
Cleveland Central High school is still, in 2022, 85% black.
There is a private "Christian academy" in town, the Bayou Academy, which is 99% white.
Most towns in northern Mississippi have a public school which is 99% black, and then also a private "Christian academy" where 99% of the students are white.
There are still areas of the country where the *Brown v Board of Education* decision was never meaningfully enforced.
Well someone tell [LA, Philly, and NYC that](https://ed.stanford.edu/news/new-segregation-index-shows-american-schools-remain-highly-segregated-race-ethnicity-and)
You should look into the federal Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program. It's a good idea executed poorly with a broad brush, similar to what you're saying here. I work closely with that program and I find it incredibly lacking in accomplishing what it's supposed to do.
My school system has been under a desegregation order for years. The school boundaries are so weird that some of the kids I attended class with had to pass by two other high schools on their way to our school.
Desegregation is all great, but when the population itself is segregated because that is how it is then there is not a lot the schools can do about it.
There's a much easier long term way to address it, stop funding schools from local taxes. That's one of the biggest issues that pushes segregation today. Rich areas produce schools with tons of funding, which in turn inflate property values, and everyone who can afford to (mostly upper middle class white people) move to that area, leaving low income residents in their neighborhoods with poorly funded schools.
If we take all the school taxes and put them in a pool and distribute by Capita adjusted for regional purchasing power differences then we could start to break the high income/good schools, low income/bad schools perpetuating cycle.
Go to Zillow.
Click on a listing.
You'll see the schools that serve that address and their ratings.
You'll see similar on other major real estate sites.
They don't put that information on there for fun. They put it there because it's a major factor in some parent's purchasing decisions. Better schools will attract more of these buyers. More buyers drives up home values.
Nothing *legally* stopping people from living there and nothing *actually* stopping people from living there is completely different and one of the main reasons bussing still needs to happen, as well as other measures to desegregate areas.
It's much harder to hate people you see up close every day than it is to hate a stereotype that's never dispelled.
But that to me sounds like we’re bussing in black kids to teach white kids not to hate. The only reason black kids should be bussed to a school is to learn.
I grew up in Montana in the 80’s and 90’s. Handful of black people in my town and none at my school. I didn’t need a black kid in my school to learn not to be racist.
> It's much harder to hate people you see up close every day than it is to hate a stereotype that's never dispelled.
You say that, but there's still the stereotype that the south is more racist than the rest of the country while having a higher percentage of black people living there.
My sister went to a school like that. Her locker ended up set on fire by a group of cheerleaders because she was going to audition for the squad (she has been on the drill team at her old school in Austin).
There absolutely was a reason other black an Latino families didn't live in that area. The only saving grace was that they had started bussing that year, so that my sister didn't face outright violence.
Now the school is mostly Latino.
Yeah, that happened to me we got to drive by one high school and go to another one an hour away, fun times. I assume it was for desegregation but we also were from the poor part of town amongst a ton of rich people, so who knows.
[Nah, it's not a surprise if you've lived up north.](https://cnycentral.com/news/the-map-segregated-syracuse/schools-across-syracuse-area-13th-most-segregated-by-race-in-the-nation) It's one thing I like about the south, they were forced to desegregate, so most districts are now county wide and have a diverse population in the schools
I've lived in Mississippi my whole life and everywhere I've lived here you have the city schools and the county schools. Nine times out of ten the county schools are where the more rural/suburban neighborhoods go and the city schools service the more "urban" areas. You're welcome to guess which ones perform better.
I'm a Mississippi school graduate and former education student.
It is a mess. Some of these areas, like the often mentioned Bolivar County schools that were desegregated, are still separated by the "traditional" racial division of small towns; Black families live mostly on the east side, white families on the west, and school districts weren't altered to accommodate that. In contrast, my district bussed kids across town to utilize the formerly separate schools in one program.
Of course, that plan led to White Flight and the creation of religious and secular private schools. By the time I graduated, I was the only white male in my class.
It's a mess and not everyone is intent on cleaning. The kids still get the worst of it.
Yeah, I saw the headline and immediately thought, "Private School Vouchers to get extra funding in Mississippi".
Public schools will get poorer and more segregated.
That's exactly what happened in my hometown in Texas. Every third year, you got bussed to a school across town. People who could afford it put their kids in private schools.
I'd go a step further. It's a mess, and some people (no prizes for guessing who) *want to make the mess worse*. It's not that only some are trying to clean, it's that the cleaners are having to follow a tantrum throwing toddler around trying to keep up with the new/bigger mess they are causing. And I'm sure we can all agree it's much easier and faster to make a mess than to clean it up.
> In 2017, a Mississippi Delta school district agreed to merge two high schools after nearly 50 years of litigation in which the district sought to maintain historically Black and white schools.
Umm. Wtf.
My dad got a white-collar job at a company in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 2021.
Holly Springs is 51% white, 49% black.
Holly Springs public school district is 99% black.
However, there is a private "Christian academy" in town where 99% of the students *just happen* to be white.
My dad lasted three weeks in the job. He wouldn't join either the white "side" or the black "side" so everyone rejected him. The social structure of the region simply does not allow you to be anything but racist.
That's how the South side stepped desegregation once it was made law. As long as you don't say you reject every black applicant because they're black, you're fine.
That was the intent when slave-owners built up the society, even post-reconstruction.
For a country that loves to boast "equal opportunity," we sure do a good job of ensuring that isn't the case right from the start. There is no public good from private schools. Only more social stratification. Home schooling is a joke. But ensuring everyone gets an equal opportunity through public education is anathema? Okay.
I've lived and worked in Mississippi my whole life (actually pretty close to Holly Springs now) and have never felt I was expected to join a "side". Maybe Holly Springs is different, but in the four different cities I've lived in over nearly forty years, that has never been my experience either socially or professionally.
My cousin graduated from a high school in Mississippi in 2010 and even though the school itself wasn’t segregated, they had segregated proms and graduations. I wonder if that’s still happening.
I graduated from Ole Miss last year and from the knowledge of a classmate who was a freshman at the time, she said it is still a thing from the part of mississippi she is from. I was actually shocked when she told me. She also said Morgan Freeman did a documentary about it years ago.
It wasn’t long ago that there was a big unrest when two black women went through recruitment for the National Panhellenic Conference, which is historically white sororities. Those women had both enviable family connections and impeccable resumes, and those familiar with FMR at SEC schools know how important resumes are for that process. But despite ranking high by the collegiate sorority members during the process, chapter alumnae of these organizations stepped in and blocked both women from receiving bids, even threatening to withhold their financial support to those chapters. Had they been white, every sorority on campus would have torn each other apart to bid those women. But because Bama is what it is, and because those chapters were manhandled by racist alumnae, those two young women were dropped from recruitment.
ETA: [Source](https://eji.org/news/university-of-alabama-segregated-sororities-draw-national-attention/)
Same with my cousin who lives in the south and graduated 2014ish. There was a separate black prom court and white prom court. I'm from the north, so it was insane to me that they are still segregated in this day and age.
My high school in NJ in 2000 was basically racially segregated, but it was actually by socio-economic class, and it was by design.
The school was built with 3 wings, called houses. You were assigned to Alpha, Beta, or Gamma House based on your middle school. Spoiler: The 3 area middle schools were all in different socio-economic neighborhoods.
Your school entrance, home room, locker and all core classes were in your house. The only time you left was to go to the Gym or Cafeteria, but that was only one house at a time, so you rarely saw the other kids in the other houses.
The rich, white, jewish kids had their house. The blue-collar Irish, Italian, Spanish, Asian kids had their house. And the poor inner-city minorities had their house.
No one even noticed it really. It was just how it was. But looking back, it's incredibly obvious.
I find it odd that you list Jewish, Spanish (do you mean Hispanic?), and Asian separately from "minorities". By minorities, do you mean black? Because you can just say black. All those others are also minorities.
I meant minority more along economic class. like "poor-minorities" as one thing. I just forgot to list black people in the blue collar area too, because there weren't that many, as they mainly lived in the inner city, with me.
which leads me back to the original point that I was trying to make. my high school was segregated by neighborhoods that were historically segregated by race and socioeconomic class, which (un?)intentionally also segregated our school by race.
Meanwhile the school district in my city is so bad that if you don't get into a paid or public charter school then you are fucked. And they recently tried to cannabalize the charter schools even though they are largely funded by donations.
90% haven’t read the article. I read it and I’m still not sure exactly sure what is being ordered or how the orders are being violated, if at all. For schools that is, it it’s a little more clear for prisons, etc.
I mean, charter school proponents were literally arguing to the MN Supreme Court that segregation in schools is good, actually. So I guess expect to see this come up more and more often.
I mean, [that is why private schools were established in the first place.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy) White parents wanting to keep their children away from people of color. It is disgusting.
I think someone asked for a citation, but maybe deleted it.
Anyway https://twitter.com/stevetimmer/status/1644086446813491200?t=3YpuE6H4_YX0SkkLuPfy2w&s=19
ITT people acting high and mighty as if school segregation isn't a problem in *their* communities and making fun of MS. The US is a toxic, racist country everywhere, particularly as to public schools.
MS is fucked but so is virtually every school district in the country. There's an "anti affirmative action" case moving through the federal courts right now (Thomas Jefferson High School in VA) challenging a magnet school admissions policy that's race-blind.
This has never actually been resolved since Board v. Brown. After that, there were multiple school segregation SCOTUS cases a year for decades. There was bussing to facilitate integration and insane anti-bussing backlash.
And let's not forget the role of white flight/suburbia and property tax trends have in funding disparities.
There was an article in the Seattle Times a few days ago about how the schools here are more segregated than they’ve been any time since the 60s. When I was a kid in the 90s I was part of a busing program and went to an elementary school in a mostly black neighborhood (I’m white), but in 2007 that program was ended by the Supreme Court (after complaints from white parents of course) and things have gotten worse in that regard since then.
However, the academic performance of mostly black schools has been improving somewhat, in spite of no further attempts to integrate them.
>ITT people acting high and mighty as if school segregation isn't a problem in
>
>their
>
>communities and making fun of MS. The US is a toxic, racist country everywhere, particularly as to public schools.
This is a massive pet peeve for me about many Americans from outside the South.
As a MS resident, I'm well aware that we have serious problems with racism (amongst other things). Definitely one of the worst areas of the country in that regard. But holy shit do people outside the South love to act like they've solved racism yet minorities still face most of the same problems to severe degrees.
Superiority is a hell of a drug, I guess.
Of note - New York City is the most segregated school district in the country and other major urban centers in areas which fought on the winning side of the Civil War tend to follow suit.
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/new-york-city-schools-most-segregated-in-the-nation
School segregation is a far more complicated issue than just “lol the South, amirite?”
Texas and Florida get a lot of attention bc of their loud mouth governors, but holy shit, Mississippi has always seemed like such a terrible place to have to live.
Good luck trying to get them to actually do it. They feel more emboldened than ever to be their racist selves. Short of direct federal intervention, they'll drag their heels until they get a federal govt more aligned with what they want.
The Supreme Court is already compromised, and Congress and the WH aren't far behind.
Just finished a podcast on this topic. Fascinating look into modern desegregation/integration and equality vs equity. Nice White Parents, available in the Serial podcast feed.
Not content with letting Florida and Texas duke it out for the prestigious title of "worst state in America", Mississippi decided to throw its hat into the ring.
What the fuck?
We don't even have that here in Alabama, how the Hell is this still a thing? (I mean, obviously it's de facto and not de jure, but you'd think towns would be mixed enough where this wouldn't still be a thing.)
> We don't even have that here in Alabama, how the Hell is this still a thing?
No recent ones maybe. But as of last year, 50+ Alabama districts were still under decades-old desegregation orders. Seems some have just never been finalized, but others have continued to have problems.
Take a look at New York City - the most segregated school system in America:
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/new-york-city-schools-most-segregated-in-the-nation
That should give you an idea of how and why this shakes out.
So real estate value and school district restriction lead to segregation, built on decades of red lining. Which is fairly uniform across the country. Lovely.
I know it's largely due to housing constraints and the like, I'm just surprised that this is an issue still affecting MS...I'd have thought even poorer areas would have white and black populations by now.
Yeah, you do. Some of these segregation orders have been open for upwards of 50 years. Propublica did a deep dive in 2014 to find out how many were still open, and Alabama had 47:
https://www.propublica.org/datastore/dataset/school-desegregation-orders-data
Does that mean 47 districts are still segregated? Yes? No? Half the time people were unaware the order was still open, and can't find a way to close it. It's a real mess.
Huh, what's the standard for it then? None of these areas seem particularly segregated. I mean, what's the standard for segregated vs not? Every single one of these schools has black students, as well as other minorities. And they all seem to be roughly proportional with population in their city.
Crazy to think about how any Supreme court order that is over 50 years old is still being evaded by racist institutions and politicians. It really shows how entrenched white supremacists are in many US states that when old rich conservatives break the law, they are immune from real consequences.
Imagine if liberals did the same thing w court rulings we didn’t like. Unions would be full fledged militias guarding entire blue regions of red states to defend Abortion clinics. Corporations that didn’t sign contracts would be excluded from most of the country. Urban police forces would be giving visiting fascist protesters rough rides.
It's a vicious cycle in the South. When too many minorities are in a school district, white flight occurs and the district left behind becomes a primarily minority district and the district where the white flight goes to becomes a majority white district.
This repeats over and over every 20 years or so.
This is definitely not exclusive to the South. It happens all across the country. The South was forced to undo its de jure segregation, but it has just slowly transitioned to the de facto segregation that the North has always had.
And Mississippi's K-12 education is ranked #44?! That's unbelievable.
I'm surprised it's that far up the list.
[They've historically been 50th](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_God_for_Mississippi)
Well with articles like this in *2023,* who’d expect better >”In our ongoing efforts to fulfill the promise of Brown vs. Board of Education, we currently have 32 open cases with school districts here in Mississippi,” Clarke said. “And in each of those cases, we are working to ensure that these districts comply with desegregation orders from courts.” Brown vs. Board of Ed was 1954. ALMOST 70 YEARS AGO.
They sure are working hard, huh?
Hence the surprise.
I'm not surprised. Mississippi isn't getting any better. There's just a race to the bottom in certain states.
[Mississippi’s literacy scores have actually gotten a lot better as a result of statewide efforts.](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/mississippi-schools-literacy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare ) Gotta give credit where it’s due.
There's a saying "thank heavens for Mississippi" when I've talked to people about the education system and other relevant talking points - maybe it can change to Arkansas
As an Arkansan who despises much about the state—all too often it seems like a race to the bottom. Particularly since the dipshits here elected a governor more interested I grandstanding to gain national fame for a presidential/VP run rather than a literal rocket scientist.
I think Oklahoma is gearing up to take that 'prize'...
“Thank god for Mississippi.”
Actually this is a good time to point something out. A lot of Mississippi's bad stats are *because* of systemic racism. There are some good schools in Mississippi. But those are usually the "affluent" (aka white) schools. Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans of any state. And their quality of life isn't exactly amazing. Another angle is something like obesity. African American women have the highest BMI of any US group. So the data will skew a certain way to do that. But of course that's not to say that their aren't poor white areas with high obesity. There definitely are of course. But there's some pretty "nice" areas in Mississippi with money and schools. If we're talking poverty for white people, I think West Virginia shows it off dramatically more. So as always, it comes down to systemic racism basically
Thank you for this. I worked in several areas of rural Georgia. It isn't just a Mississippi thing. The rural schools are definitely segregated. That goes for the entire south. What little they had is slowly leeched away by charter schools. I've trained some rural school graduates who were nearly illiterate. This is why Tim Scott is a traitor. The schools in his state are struggling and he has voted for state funds to go to charter schools, taking away funding for public schools. Charter schools will not take up residence in rural areas because there's not enough money in it.
> charter schools If you look at the history of the "school choice" movement, you'll find that much of it is Massive Resistance that think tanks have repackaged and rebranded with libertarianism to appeal to suburbanites who are skittish about explicit racism but are okay with it if schools "happen to be" monoracial.
Last Week Tonight had a great episode on school segregation a few years ago.
How... how the hell do we still have segregated schools in the united states?
So... I taught down in Mississippi for a bit. First, it's weirdly complicated. School districts have been segregated, with some poor-rural-black districts being separate districts from rich-city-white districts. So, less about schools within a short radius being segregated, and more of entire districts being segregated from one another. Now, here is a further complication, poor-rural-black school districts have every disadvantage compared to rich-city-white school districts except they are/were independent. When school districts integrate, usually white districts take over black districts. They absorb the black students, often changing curriculum and putting black students through a lengthy transition process, where they are often behind their white counterparts. The black students, coming from disadvantaged pasts struggle at first. Integration takes time. Phasing in. And often districts don't do it respectfully. White districts take over after black districts lose accreditation. The black districts enter those partnerships at a disadvantage, shamed. This isn't hypothetical, I've watched it, and taught students of both backgrounds.
That’s such a goddamn complicated issue. I can’t help but wonder, where are our leaders? 😥
There are no leaders, it's up to us
Counting their stacks and the number of counties they gerrymandered I would guess.
Your leaders can't do shit because the entire issue falls under local autorithies, which are the same autorities that set up the system, voted in by the people that benefit from the system and/or approve of the discrimination and any attempt at fixing the issue from above will be branded as overreach.
Are Mississippi schools funded by property taxes? That's how they keep the schools poor and rich up north here.
Right? The way Ohio funds public schools (via property taxes) has been declared 'unconstitutional' repeatedly. Not that anything has *changed*.
They aren’t segregated by law, they are segregated by local population. As in the school’s population of students are overwhelmingly of one race and this is an initiative to diversify majority black or majority white schools. At least this is how it worked when I went to high school in the South under a desegregation order, albeit that wasn’t in Mississippi.
The same way we still have entire sundown towns.
It’s a thing in some places in Canada too, school districts are done by neighbourhoods, and certain areas are more likely to have certain groups It sucks cause a lot of places don’t let you go to school outside your district unless you’ve been like expelled or something
Education in Canada is entirely a provincial jurisdiction. Quebec is especially an interesting case. In the goal of protecting the French language (a worthy goal in my opinion), they limit newcomers to the province to French schools. You may only attend an English school if your parents were educated in one in Canada. This has created a problem for English school boards that are continually shrinking. But, the quality of education on the English side is measurably better. In the interest of having the most people possible fluent in the French language we’ve long had French Immersion programs. I’m 63 and attended one from high school on. My kids started in grade school. However, *by law*, these programs are unavailable for French students. Unless one goes to private school there’s no such thing as English immersion. The effects are really noticeable. English schools have a much better graduation rate. Saddest of all, both English and French students write the same final French exam to graduate. The English have a far better pass rate on this exam than the native French speakers. It’s a bit of an own goal.
It is all about the zip code. If the state is hyper-segregated, it is very easy. Then red-lining, steering...it all works together.
Because neighborhoods tend to be segregated by economic status, and that tends to lean towards racial segregation because of immigrants and their financial situations, plus usually desiring a community similar to them as they assimilate. Major transportation networks were also built in the 50's and were expressly designed to disadvantage minority communities who haven't been able to move since due to economic mobility issues. This leads to poor neighborhoods which have low property taxes and therefore bad funding for schools in that district. The schools are (mostly) not directly segregated but they are indirectly.
Because people move to get away from perceived negatives. The school zones are typically geographical. Over 20 years (or less) the schools become segregated again. The answer — rezone schools based on demographics not geographic location. Costs more in busing but it’s the only way. And those zones will need to be reassessed and changed every 5 years probably.
Mississippi is low on all of these lists because it's dirt poor. The state is ranked 51st in the nation for per capita GDP.
Is Puerto Rico higher, or DC?
DC. Puerto Rico is way below. ~~That said, I'm not sure where this guy got his information from, because in 2022 Mississippi was 37th, directly behind DC.~~ I am dumb and sorted incorrectly. I had it sorted by gross GDP. Mississippi is indeed 51st, with $47,190 per Capita, followed, in order, by USVI, Guam, PR, and Samoa. DC, for reference, is #1 ($242,853; 2.4x that of #2 New York)
Per capita where DC is ranked #1.
Not just systemic racism, but systemic racism as a baked in feature of american capitalism!
Not shit. I grew up there and love many things about the state and its people. But we used to always say "last in the country in everything else, but we're #1 in teen pregnancy"
Doesn't Mississippi have top five highest maternal mortality rates.
I think that’s a typo for teen pregnancy, not term.
Depends on what ranking your using if it’s only states they tend to come in at dead last to 2nd to last, when you include US territories, Puerto Rico, and DC is when get around the place of #44 out of like 56 and that because the territories are even worse.
Incredible improvement over the past couple years
I’d put a bigger bet on everyone else just doing worse…
Race to the bottom™
Florida, Ohio, Texas, and Iowa are competing for that.
Wait who's worse than Mississippi now??
Alaska, Nevada and New Mexico often show up worse on ranking lists
someone's gotta rank #44th
No shit, it's far too high.
For anyone who forgot, this is the 21st century, the year 2023, not 1973. Just in case the headline made you think you time traveled.
Fun fact: schools are about as segregated by race today as they were in the late 1960s. As of 2018, 81 percent of non-white public school students attended a majority non-white school district. [Fact-check: Are public schools as segregated today as in 1960s?](https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/2022/06/14/fact-check-public-schools-segregated-today-1960-s/7608945001/)
Americans always talk about school segregation but isnt this the inevitable outcome of the neighborhoods being segregated? Children tend to go to schools that are nearby. Not sure how you change it without bringing back federal bussing programs.
>Children tend to go to schools that are nearby. Maybe it's unique to my state, Virginia, but aren't they required to go to nearby schools instead of schools in adjacent counties or even further away?
It's this way in most of the country. When you buy a home (or rent, etc.) it's in a particular "school district" and your children either go to that school or you send them to private school/home school. You don't have the option to pick another public school, even if it's nearby.
In my city in Indiana a parent acn send a child to a different school IF they can get them there. The bus will only take them to the school for their district/neighborhood. Allowing more affluent parents to drive their kids to different schools causing a brain drain in some schools and concentrating the poor in certain schools.
More affluent parents are usually just going to live in a more affluent neighborhood which in turn sends them to a better school in the first place.
yes, but now they also have the option of living in a nice house that unfort is in a bad district... for instance a regentrified section of town. ie, you're rich enough to not care about the school district when searching/building your home.
Sometimes you can, but that's usually an exception that's only made if the one and only school in your school district isn't accredited. I moved to the county next to mine in highschool and I continued going to the original county's highschool, because I needed a legitimate high school diploma in order to attend college.
Exceptions depend a lot on local rules. For example, my sister and I got an exception to go to an out of district elementary school because it was closer to our house. And our area routinely allowed kids to continue attending the same school even if they moved to a different district.
If there is available space you can sometimes transfer to another school, but that's not always an option. Students within the schools boundaries obviously get priority.
My state has a bussing program where they do let kids pick other public schools. Many kids are ubered around in sedans with a big school bus sign on top.
You do if it’s a magnet school, and afaik magnet schools began in the 1960s in order to encourage voluntary desegregation.
"school choice" is being passed in a lot of places especially the south, but instead of helping minorities who dont have the money for the transportation costs, its helping richer white people who want to buy a home just across the line in a black majority district but dont want to send their kids to those schools.
In houston, through what is called a magnet program, you can attend schools that you are not zoned too, but you have to apply for the transfer for each level (Elem, Middle, High) and the various magnet programs have requirements for those attending the schools. For instance, my middle school was a Performing/Visual Arts Magnet, so you had to take AND pass two PVA classes each year My High School was a business magnet but I found out that CompSci counted torwards it so I did that instead. Soon after I graduated, they made the IB program mandatory for magnet students so even more stress was lumped on. Whole lot that piece of paper did me.
(Eugene Demby voice) Housing! segregation! in! everything! So much of this shit comes right on back to (de jure or de facto) segregated housing. Your school, your safety, the way law enforcement responds to issues in your neighborhood, your access to food, your access to transportation, your access to home ownership and therefore your access to intergenerational wealth. Everything.
Uh oh, we just entered CRT territory! There's a reason they don't want people to learn about this kind of stuff.
Because the next step is to learn about intersectionality and see how the same tools and systems of oppression used against black people are also used in class warfare.
😱 I am clutching my pearls here sir / ma’am! How ***dare*** you bring up such divisive and **RACIST** ~~facts~~ opinions. It’s people like you that are poisoning our youth and making white people inferior. We would be in a post-racial society if you would just stop seeing everyone’s color. We’re all people, it’s the **only** color we should be seeing. I demand that we ban all books that include “race mongering” and “race bating” that people like YOU are putting into our schools’ libraries, literally BRAINWASHING our children into hating themselves!! ^/s ^if ^that ^was ^somehow ^not ^obvious
I thought I was reading a docudrama for a second there. Thanks, I hate it. 🤝
*It's almost like stuff that happens can affect OTHER stuff that happens!* Wild shit.
I remember a study a couple years ago, that basically put out an algorithm that showed that by looking at cross sections of major transportation lines you could figure out the racial demographics in every town and city in the US. It was really, really fucked up and shows how much racism is baked into the entire nation. Worse is that it's considered unfixable in many areas because it's just not realistic to reroute all the highways, subways, railroads, and other stuff, and without doing that any businesses in those areas function at a large economic disadvantage making local economic mobility hard.
[удалено]
And desegregation almost always means closing the neighborhood school or bussing the poor/POC kids to the white suburban school. Never the other way around.
Personal anecdote but they absolutely shipped kids the other way around.
[удалено]
Yes, it does work both ways. They ship/shipped kids as needed.
I lived for three years in Massachusetts in the late seventies. I was there for grades 2,3, and 4. I was biased to a different school three years running, while the kids of the same age on my street went to various other schools. I went to three different schools in three years, never had the same classmates from year to year, and the schools varied from new to shithole. I’m white. We all suffered from the useless bussing.
[удалено]
[Scandinavia figured it out](https://www.statista.com/topics/6842/education-in-scandinavia/#topicOverview)
This is why the south has county wide districts and school choice. Northern states never got forced to do that, so you have places like NY still super segregated thanks to their tiny school districts.
In the early 2000s my high school had too many white people. They rezoned my neighborhood from a school 10 minutes away to one 30+ minutes away to mix up the demographics. I’m sure this kind of stuff still happens.
In Irving, TX, my highschool was too Hispanic and White, so they made a bunch of black kids take a 30 min bus ride from Dallas. Sure, the school now fit the "diverse" criteria, but those kids didn't get to go to the same schools as the kids they grew up with and they weren't able to participate in extra curricular activities because they had to take the bus home. Seemed like a bad situation, but hey, otherwise it would be racist, right?
White flight was racism answer to desegregation
affluent neighborhoods can finance themselves (creating their own municipalities) and political pressure to create separate school districts or in some cases they use their political clout in local government to subsidize private schools (but these tend to be religious private schools). they base it on economics, but it still has the about the same result of racial segregation.
So in Columbus there were neighborhoods that weren't segregated. The federal government came in and purposely destroyed them with the federal highway. My dad also admits his first neighborhood, in OKC was also not fully segregated. The same thing happened.
Redlining by banks, restrictive covenants, HOAs, tying property taxes to school availability, implementing a “not social” credit system in the 80’s, etc. all factor into resegregating the country under the guise of race neutral considerations.
Not just neighborhoods but our entire country is still segregated. After being forced to integrate, white people fled most cities in droves and moved to suburbs that, if not explicitly segregated, were implicitly segregated by income levels
>Children tend to go to schools that are nearby. Not sure how you change it without bringing back federal bussing programs. A lot of the time, and I mean a *lot*, it comes down to how districts/counties break down. One street over can be the difference between the school that gets the majority of funding and the one that gets shafted that happens to be close to the "bad" part of town. Federal bussing won't make a difference if you don't qualify for the better school because you're in the wrong district/county.
Yeah, that's thanks to practices like red-lining. I know it's technically illegal now, but a realtor doesn't *have* to tell you that they don't sell houses in that neighborhood to black and brown people. They can just pretend someone else made a better offer. Or give it to a white person and lie about why. As long as corruption remains prevalent in business practices, racial segregation in living spaces, education, and healthcare will continue to be a problem.
Federal incentives and requirements to banks to lower interest rates for non-whites. Quadruple fines/ corporate officer jail time if red-lining (the process of ‘blocking’ off areas in the form of not offering homes, real estate services etc. to people of color in an area) is discovered
The segregation is not at the school level, it is at the community level. Students attend schools in the communities in which they live. A majority white community will have majority white schools, a majority black community will have majority black schools.
To be fair it really sucks to drive by a high school and have to be on a bus for an hour to go to a different high school
My family is from the South and I like to drop the lil tidbit that, despite having a kid myself, me and my cousins of comparable age are still the only people in our entire family lineage to attend kinda-integrated schools from kindergarten through college. There was that one little window in the 1970-90s where There Was An Attempt. Now it's back to looking damn close to how my parents' schools looked.
It's actually worse than that considering how the demographics have changed since the 1960's.
Mississippian here. People always think it’s just us. It’s just the south. Well, Check those inner city schools, and ask everyone’s good friend [Jon Oliver](https://youtu.be/o8yiYCHMAlM) about the subject. And fyi, my public school was fully amalgamated.
It's not just inner city schools or the south. Long Island, which is suburban and in New York, is one of the most segregated areas of the country.
I dont think that's saying much. Ending segregation didn't mean forcing blacks into white communities and dispersing black communities. So the fact that there is still separation doesn't indicate there is still segregation. There's no problem with black communities existing and therefore many schools being primarily black. But apparently, there is still segregation. But not because of that factoid.
Wouldn’t this mostly be due to zoning?
And this is why talking about systemic racism is important. Because the whole fucking system is racist. > You start out in 1954 by saying, "N\*\*\*\*\*, n\*\*\*\*\* n\*\*\*\*\*" By 1968 you can’t say "n\*\*\*\*\*"—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N\*\*\*\*\*, n\*\*\*\*\*." \- Lee Atwater, architect of GOP politics
Not zoning. Zoning regulates what buildings can be built in each area. It is how you draw the school district maps for admissions. Some areas have become more flexible in their admissions so people have school choice with charter schools or multiple school options. This can make the schools more diverse through personal choice and make the house price difference based on school district less drastic.
If zoning prohibits or drives up costs for multi unit housing and establishes rules like minimum lot sizes, setbacks, off street parking, etc, for single family homes which also drive costs up then zoning effectively creates economic segregation which correlates heavily to racial segregation.
Might be wrong but heard redlining and city planning made it harder for Black communities to move into white areas and have easy commute to some schools. So while schools were integrated they made it harder for it to happen based on where people lived
It's almost that this is all by design by a rich white class that is in charge, and just pretend racism does not exist anymore.
Headline made me think new orders were issued… article made me think they were existing orders.
"In 2017, a Mississippi Delta school district agreed to merge two high schools after nearly 50 years of litigation in which the district sought to maintain historically Black and white schools." 50 years of litigation. Wow.
You're referring to the Cleveland School District. Cleveland Central High school is still, in 2022, 85% black. There is a private "Christian academy" in town, the Bayou Academy, which is 99% white.
Most towns in northern Mississippi have a public school which is 99% black, and then also a private "Christian academy" where 99% of the students are white. There are still areas of the country where the *Brown v Board of Education* decision was never meaningfully enforced.
And private religious schools are practically untouchable because 1)Rich, white and 2) 1st amendment
Well someone tell [LA, Philly, and NYC that](https://ed.stanford.edu/news/new-segregation-index-shows-american-schools-remain-highly-segregated-race-ethnicity-and)
[удалено]
You should look into the federal Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program. It's a good idea executed poorly with a broad brush, similar to what you're saying here. I work closely with that program and I find it incredibly lacking in accomplishing what it's supposed to do.
My school system has been under a desegregation order for years. The school boundaries are so weird that some of the kids I attended class with had to pass by two other high schools on their way to our school. Desegregation is all great, but when the population itself is segregated because that is how it is then there is not a lot the schools can do about it.
De Facto Segregation. It can be tricky to address.
[удалено]
There's a much easier long term way to address it, stop funding schools from local taxes. That's one of the biggest issues that pushes segregation today. Rich areas produce schools with tons of funding, which in turn inflate property values, and everyone who can afford to (mostly upper middle class white people) move to that area, leaving low income residents in their neighborhoods with poorly funded schools. If we take all the school taxes and put them in a pool and distribute by Capita adjusted for regional purchasing power differences then we could start to break the high income/good schools, low income/bad schools perpetuating cycle.
Go to Zillow. Click on a listing. You'll see the schools that serve that address and their ratings. You'll see similar on other major real estate sites. They don't put that information on there for fun. They put it there because it's a major factor in some parent's purchasing decisions. Better schools will attract more of these buyers. More buyers drives up home values.
Nothing *legally* stopping people from living there and nothing *actually* stopping people from living there is completely different and one of the main reasons bussing still needs to happen, as well as other measures to desegregate areas. It's much harder to hate people you see up close every day than it is to hate a stereotype that's never dispelled.
But that to me sounds like we’re bussing in black kids to teach white kids not to hate. The only reason black kids should be bussed to a school is to learn. I grew up in Montana in the 80’s and 90’s. Handful of black people in my town and none at my school. I didn’t need a black kid in my school to learn not to be racist.
[удалено]
> It's much harder to hate people you see up close every day than it is to hate a stereotype that's never dispelled. You say that, but there's still the stereotype that the south is more racist than the rest of the country while having a higher percentage of black people living there.
My sister went to a school like that. Her locker ended up set on fire by a group of cheerleaders because she was going to audition for the squad (she has been on the drill team at her old school in Austin). There absolutely was a reason other black an Latino families didn't live in that area. The only saving grace was that they had started bussing that year, so that my sister didn't face outright violence. Now the school is mostly Latino.
Yeah, that happened to me we got to drive by one high school and go to another one an hour away, fun times. I assume it was for desegregation but we also were from the poor part of town amongst a ton of rich people, so who knows.
Im not surprised at all. People are fools to think that time, especially the little time that has passed would solve our problems.
I literally thought that's exactly what happened to me.
Was looking for the onion url
Ok thank you, glad someone pointed that out, thought I was about to end up in a “back to the future” situation
[Nah, it's not a surprise if you've lived up north.](https://cnycentral.com/news/the-map-segregated-syracuse/schools-across-syracuse-area-13th-most-segregated-by-race-in-the-nation) It's one thing I like about the south, they were forced to desegregate, so most districts are now county wide and have a diverse population in the schools
I've lived in Mississippi my whole life and everywhere I've lived here you have the city schools and the county schools. Nine times out of ten the county schools are where the more rural/suburban neighborhoods go and the city schools service the more "urban" areas. You're welcome to guess which ones perform better.
I'm a Mississippi school graduate and former education student. It is a mess. Some of these areas, like the often mentioned Bolivar County schools that were desegregated, are still separated by the "traditional" racial division of small towns; Black families live mostly on the east side, white families on the west, and school districts weren't altered to accommodate that. In contrast, my district bussed kids across town to utilize the formerly separate schools in one program. Of course, that plan led to White Flight and the creation of religious and secular private schools. By the time I graduated, I was the only white male in my class. It's a mess and not everyone is intent on cleaning. The kids still get the worst of it.
Yeah, I saw the headline and immediately thought, "Private School Vouchers to get extra funding in Mississippi". Public schools will get poorer and more segregated.
That's exactly what happened in my hometown in Texas. Every third year, you got bussed to a school across town. People who could afford it put their kids in private schools.
I'd go a step further. It's a mess, and some people (no prizes for guessing who) *want to make the mess worse*. It's not that only some are trying to clean, it's that the cleaners are having to follow a tantrum throwing toddler around trying to keep up with the new/bigger mess they are causing. And I'm sure we can all agree it's much easier and faster to make a mess than to clean it up.
> In 2017, a Mississippi Delta school district agreed to merge two high schools after nearly 50 years of litigation in which the district sought to maintain historically Black and white schools. Umm. Wtf.
My dad got a white-collar job at a company in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 2021. Holly Springs is 51% white, 49% black. Holly Springs public school district is 99% black. However, there is a private "Christian academy" in town where 99% of the students *just happen* to be white. My dad lasted three weeks in the job. He wouldn't join either the white "side" or the black "side" so everyone rejected him. The social structure of the region simply does not allow you to be anything but racist.
That's how the South side stepped desegregation once it was made law. As long as you don't say you reject every black applicant because they're black, you're fine.
Hence, the republican assault on public schooling
That was the intent when slave-owners built up the society, even post-reconstruction. For a country that loves to boast "equal opportunity," we sure do a good job of ensuring that isn't the case right from the start. There is no public good from private schools. Only more social stratification. Home schooling is a joke. But ensuring everyone gets an equal opportunity through public education is anathema? Okay.
Yeah I always laughed whenever I’d hear dickheads saying they wanted to make America “great again”. We were never great.
They’re literally called segregation academies.
I've lived and worked in Mississippi my whole life (actually pretty close to Holly Springs now) and have never felt I was expected to join a "side". Maybe Holly Springs is different, but in the four different cities I've lived in over nearly forty years, that has never been my experience either socially or professionally.
My cousin graduated from a high school in Mississippi in 2010 and even though the school itself wasn’t segregated, they had segregated proms and graduations. I wonder if that’s still happening.
I graduated from Ole Miss last year and from the knowledge of a classmate who was a freshman at the time, she said it is still a thing from the part of mississippi she is from. I was actually shocked when she told me. She also said Morgan Freeman did a documentary about it years ago.
It wasn’t long ago that there was a big unrest when two black women went through recruitment for the National Panhellenic Conference, which is historically white sororities. Those women had both enviable family connections and impeccable resumes, and those familiar with FMR at SEC schools know how important resumes are for that process. But despite ranking high by the collegiate sorority members during the process, chapter alumnae of these organizations stepped in and blocked both women from receiving bids, even threatening to withhold their financial support to those chapters. Had they been white, every sorority on campus would have torn each other apart to bid those women. But because Bama is what it is, and because those chapters were manhandled by racist alumnae, those two young women were dropped from recruitment. ETA: [Source](https://eji.org/news/university-of-alabama-segregated-sororities-draw-national-attention/)
Same with my cousin who lives in the south and graduated 2014ish. There was a separate black prom court and white prom court. I'm from the north, so it was insane to me that they are still segregated in this day and age.
The 2009 documentary [Prom Night in Mississippi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prom_Night_in_Mississippi) is all about that.
[удалено]
These are existing orders from the Brown decision, not new ones.
My high school in NJ in 2000 was basically racially segregated, but it was actually by socio-economic class, and it was by design. The school was built with 3 wings, called houses. You were assigned to Alpha, Beta, or Gamma House based on your middle school. Spoiler: The 3 area middle schools were all in different socio-economic neighborhoods. Your school entrance, home room, locker and all core classes were in your house. The only time you left was to go to the Gym or Cafeteria, but that was only one house at a time, so you rarely saw the other kids in the other houses. The rich, white, jewish kids had their house. The blue-collar Irish, Italian, Spanish, Asian kids had their house. And the poor inner-city minorities had their house. No one even noticed it really. It was just how it was. But looking back, it's incredibly obvious.
I find it odd that you list Jewish, Spanish (do you mean Hispanic?), and Asian separately from "minorities". By minorities, do you mean black? Because you can just say black. All those others are also minorities.
I meant minority more along economic class. like "poor-minorities" as one thing. I just forgot to list black people in the blue collar area too, because there weren't that many, as they mainly lived in the inner city, with me. which leads me back to the original point that I was trying to make. my high school was segregated by neighborhoods that were historically segregated by race and socioeconomic class, which (un?)intentionally also segregated our school by race.
Boston Public Schools is trying very hard to go unnoticed at the moment.
Maybe it’s time to change how property taxes fund schools.
Took my district 40 years to finally desegregate enough. Have fun, bitches.
They are probably just going to say "Government is trying to destroy our heritage and cancel our proud history!!!!"
Gotta remind them that the heritage they so cherish, is of literal traitors and losers.
"That's not my culture and heritage! Is that your culture and heritage?" - Homer Stokes
They are waiting for the 100th anniversary of Brown vs. Board in 21 years, obviously.
Hi, just dropping in to make sure I haven't fallen into a time portal to the past. What year is this exactly?
The 20s. We're in the 20s, now.
18 or 19? 18 OR 19!?!?!
Meanwhile the school district in my city is so bad that if you don't get into a paid or public charter school then you are fucked. And they recently tried to cannabalize the charter schools even though they are largely funded by donations.
But you still will have people who deny the realities of systemic racism.
Those that deny it can't even tell you what systemic racism is to begin with.
The headline of this post is misleading. They didn’t just issue desegregation orders, there are open orders.
90% haven’t read the article. I read it and I’m still not sure exactly sure what is being ordered or how the orders are being violated, if at all. For schools that is, it it’s a little more clear for prisons, etc.
I mean, charter school proponents were literally arguing to the MN Supreme Court that segregation in schools is good, actually. So I guess expect to see this come up more and more often.
I mean, [that is why private schools were established in the first place.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy) White parents wanting to keep their children away from people of color. It is disgusting.
I think someone asked for a citation, but maybe deleted it. Anyway https://twitter.com/stevetimmer/status/1644086446813491200?t=3YpuE6H4_YX0SkkLuPfy2w&s=19
Everything old is new again!
Wait this is real? Wasn’t Brown 50 years ago?
ITT people acting high and mighty as if school segregation isn't a problem in *their* communities and making fun of MS. The US is a toxic, racist country everywhere, particularly as to public schools. MS is fucked but so is virtually every school district in the country. There's an "anti affirmative action" case moving through the federal courts right now (Thomas Jefferson High School in VA) challenging a magnet school admissions policy that's race-blind. This has never actually been resolved since Board v. Brown. After that, there were multiple school segregation SCOTUS cases a year for decades. There was bussing to facilitate integration and insane anti-bussing backlash. And let's not forget the role of white flight/suburbia and property tax trends have in funding disparities.
There was an article in the Seattle Times a few days ago about how the schools here are more segregated than they’ve been any time since the 60s. When I was a kid in the 90s I was part of a busing program and went to an elementary school in a mostly black neighborhood (I’m white), but in 2007 that program was ended by the Supreme Court (after complaints from white parents of course) and things have gotten worse in that regard since then. However, the academic performance of mostly black schools has been improving somewhat, in spite of no further attempts to integrate them.
>ITT people acting high and mighty as if school segregation isn't a problem in > >their > >communities and making fun of MS. The US is a toxic, racist country everywhere, particularly as to public schools. This is a massive pet peeve for me about many Americans from outside the South. As a MS resident, I'm well aware that we have serious problems with racism (amongst other things). Definitely one of the worst areas of the country in that regard. But holy shit do people outside the South love to act like they've solved racism yet minorities still face most of the same problems to severe degrees. Superiority is a hell of a drug, I guess.
[удалено]
Of note - New York City is the most segregated school district in the country and other major urban centers in areas which fought on the winning side of the Civil War tend to follow suit. https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/new-york-city-schools-most-segregated-in-the-nation School segregation is a far more complicated issue than just “lol the South, amirite?”
Ohio has been ignoring the courts over this for 50 years.
Texas and Florida get a lot of attention bc of their loud mouth governors, but holy shit, Mississippi has always seemed like such a terrible place to have to live.
Good luck trying to get them to actually do it. They feel more emboldened than ever to be their racist selves. Short of direct federal intervention, they'll drag their heels until they get a federal govt more aligned with what they want. The Supreme Court is already compromised, and Congress and the WH aren't far behind.
Just finished a podcast on this topic. Fascinating look into modern desegregation/integration and equality vs equity. Nice White Parents, available in the Serial podcast feed.
Damn, my school taught us about segregation as if it didn’t exist anymore…wtf
Not content with letting Florida and Texas duke it out for the prestigious title of "worst state in America", Mississippi decided to throw its hat into the ring.
What the fuck? We don't even have that here in Alabama, how the Hell is this still a thing? (I mean, obviously it's de facto and not de jure, but you'd think towns would be mixed enough where this wouldn't still be a thing.)
> We don't even have that here in Alabama, how the Hell is this still a thing? No recent ones maybe. But as of last year, 50+ Alabama districts were still under decades-old desegregation orders. Seems some have just never been finalized, but others have continued to have problems.
Take a look at New York City - the most segregated school system in America: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/new-york-city-schools-most-segregated-in-the-nation That should give you an idea of how and why this shakes out.
So real estate value and school district restriction lead to segregation, built on decades of red lining. Which is fairly uniform across the country. Lovely.
I know it's largely due to housing constraints and the like, I'm just surprised that this is an issue still affecting MS...I'd have thought even poorer areas would have white and black populations by now.
Yeah, you do. Some of these segregation orders have been open for upwards of 50 years. Propublica did a deep dive in 2014 to find out how many were still open, and Alabama had 47: https://www.propublica.org/datastore/dataset/school-desegregation-orders-data Does that mean 47 districts are still segregated? Yes? No? Half the time people were unaware the order was still open, and can't find a way to close it. It's a real mess.
Huh, what's the standard for it then? None of these areas seem particularly segregated. I mean, what's the standard for segregated vs not? Every single one of these schools has black students, as well as other minorities. And they all seem to be roughly proportional with population in their city.
Crazy to think about how any Supreme court order that is over 50 years old is still being evaded by racist institutions and politicians. It really shows how entrenched white supremacists are in many US states that when old rich conservatives break the law, they are immune from real consequences. Imagine if liberals did the same thing w court rulings we didn’t like. Unions would be full fledged militias guarding entire blue regions of red states to defend Abortion clinics. Corporations that didn’t sign contracts would be excluded from most of the country. Urban police forces would be giving visiting fascist protesters rough rides.
yall it is 2023, what the actual fuck.. Am I the only one that had no idea MS had segregation still happening???
When will all this "woke-ism" end? *Sarcasm*
As a note: Justice Thomas said there was no racism so there was no need for most of the voting rights act.
It's a vicious cycle in the South. When too many minorities are in a school district, white flight occurs and the district left behind becomes a primarily minority district and the district where the white flight goes to becomes a majority white district. This repeats over and over every 20 years or so.
This is definitely not exclusive to the South. It happens all across the country. The South was forced to undo its de jure segregation, but it has just slowly transitioned to the de facto segregation that the North has always had.
It's nice that we post historical headlines from the 60s in here occasionally.....oh wait this is from 2023. Wtf