'FAILED' PUBLIC SCHOOLS

‘FAILED’ PUBLIC SCHOOL INTEGRATION CAUSED THE CHARTER SCHOOLS “Failing public schools “ is a mantra promoting charter schools, which are not very much better, if any better at all , than others when it comes to educating young people. These thoughts were quickened by remarks by President Donald Trump during February 4’s “State of the Union” address. He presented a single mother and her 4th grade daughter in the gallery who had become beneficiaries of some kind of scholarship to a charter school. While I am happy for that mother and young daughter, I yet wonder about efficacy of charter schools. I was once appointed to a state of Missouri education committee in the early 1980s, where state VIP’s decried “at-risk” youth. Of course I retorted “all youth are ‘at risk’ not just blacks, not merely inner city youth.” No one in school is safe . Naturally the mother and daughter were African American. The focus of the struggle since the 1968 riots has been integrating the schools, at the expense of educating scholars. The post-1968 focus of most of the civil rights organizations and their misleaders was to get the “right” to sit beside white students by black students, primarily by the NAACP ‘s LDF litigation . Integration of the races, education by osmosis, was supposed to be the “cure” for what had for so long ailed education in American public schools, they held! Not the content of the curriculum, not the lifting of the distortions of inferior black culture and race in textbooks, perspectives, attitudes. Not caring anything about the perverse effects of the dissolution of the blacks’ schools, or their environmental impact: unemployed teachers , staffs , administrators; split up homes; proliferation of slums, busing for integration was a philosophical view of American life that was hammered home by the principal post-1968 integrationists after the death of Martin Luther King , Jr., who had attended black public schools in Atlanta, Georgia, and also black Morehouse College. Certain post-1968 schools which were separated by politics, were segregated, by residential housing patterns were caused by previously prevailing Jim Crow” laws. But the “cure” may have been worst than the “disease,” if there was a disease not a con game, existing to start. After “Brown v. Board” in 1954, there was not a disease! To “cure” what was not sick, just financially estranged from a fair share of tax money required to maintain a state of equity, a semblance of equality, did not require the decimation of sacred traditions: the closing of traditional neighborhood schools. Who needs diseased, inferior black schools, civil rights misleaders, and brainwashed organizations quietly whispered? Why not fire all of the black teachers, staffs, administrators? Clear these out! The mad destruction of entire black communities, which their schools had anchored for decades was the consequence. The destruction was not just physical. Slums, vacant homes, caused by families moving away to the suburbs to escape the “disease” , resulted, true. But, collateral conceptual destruction catalyzed the pall-mall of lowered expectations, hopes, perceptions. The “cure” required the separation of families into different schools to satisfy magnet themes’, theories, and pupil race ratios devised by so-called experts. These theories had never been proven in practice; but they were good enough for their experts to get well paid by as-inane , feckless, tainted school boards pursuant to rich contracts. Enough. Education is my passion. Having attended public schools in Missouri from 1956-1969, I have personally witnessed much of what I have written of. Indeed, I filed a brief amicus curiae (friend of the court while employed as an Assistant United States Attorney) in federal court in KC in the case “Jenkins v. State of Missouri” in 1984. The landmark case went twice to the United States Supreme Court. I know whereof I speak. As I represented no party, my brief was unacknowledged in the main; except peripherally; for everyone advanced interests opposing the basic views that I had advanced. Even so, I continue to abide my own views that integration, per se, is not necessary for students to learn and that the remedies adopted by the courts were anathema to blacks , even if they were promoted by blacks and some whites who hold to a subliminal secret view of innate black inferiority; whence mass integration; whence, now, charter schools urged by Donald Trump.