adam wrote: The Supreme Court ruled 53 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education is inherently unequal, and it ordered the nation’s schools to integrate. Yesterday, the court switched sides and told two cities that they cannot take modest steps to bring public school students of different races together. It was a sad day for the court and for the ideal of racial equality.
What I find interesting about this is that the perspective from my own city is bleak. We find ourselves with a School Board forced to make cuts due to less students being in the system as people evacuate the city and head for the suburbs. Indeed, I am not the only person to speculate that the result of the growth in the southern parts of Jefferson county (Hoover, Vestavia Hills) is due to white flight, while the city itself and northern and western areas like Bessemer, Ensley, and North Birmingham experience "black plight" and urban decay. How this sits with downtown experiencing a renaissance as the old office buildings are converted to lofts makes me wonder. Many of these lofts are being sold for upwards of $300K, which means that any children raised in this enviroment, due to the school situation, are likely to be sent to private schools in south Jefferson County or when the couples who are purchasing these lofts decide to have kids, they will likely move from the area, which leads to downtown solely being occupied by childless yuppies, retirees, and gay couples (assumably the gay couples would not have children as a general rule, nor would I expect that they would want to subject their children to the schools which have a mostly inner-city population). What I do find interesting about the above situation is that the communities have effectively done an end-run around resegregation -- the schools in Hoover, Vestavia Hills, and Homewood are all owned and operated by those cities -- not Jefferson County. I'll be the first to say that given my experiences in this city, the very same city where Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail, the same city where Bull Connor set about black protestors with police dogs and firehoses, and the same city where the Sixteenth Street Church was bombed, I would have an extremely difficult time putting enough trust in the city leaders and educators to put my child in public school here. |
