NC busing: the Seventies live!

A new war has begun on an old issue: busing students out of their neighborhood and into another for the sake of school diversity. The battlefront is Wake County, North Carolina, and contains Raliegh, the State capital.

It seems that for years students from wealthier areas were bussed into poorer ones, and students from poorer schools to wealthier ones, all for the sake of diverse classrooms. We should refrain from the comment that you get what you pay for, that when you begin from a bad premise (in this case, the 'right' to a public education) you simply invite all sorts of bad ideas, each growing worse as the error spreads farther from good policy and healthy schools. But we won't. The issue is too great to ignore.

It could be argued ad infinitum whether the policy has had a positive or negative effect. Apparently test scores have leveled across the district, but what does that really tell us? Only that mixing some good students in with, ah, lesser academics, will naturally give the appearance of improved overall academics. To be sure, there may be greater diversity within the schools as well. This too is not of itself a bad thing, as tolerance of others when tolerable should of course be encouraged.

Yet such things ignore the issue of school choice. Why should a student not want to attend a closer school, or a parent not want to send their child near to home? But this is exactly where the whole idea of public education tears its own fabric. The local school is not truly your school: it is public property. Ultimately the body politic and not the immediate locals control it.

It is understandable that teachers in poorer areas have a more difficult job than their peers in areas where the drive to succeed is greater. As a side issue here, it should be pointed out that they ought to be cut slack, rather than move mountains to smooth over the rough areas of academic measurement. After all, money is a legitimate public concern, and saving $14 million bucks as the Wake County Schools claim they will ought, on the surface anyway, allow for a few dollars to be spent on innovations which may encourage students who have special needs, to perform better.

Still, the bottom line is that it's all just one big mess, and it all begins with rights which aren't naturally there. The first obligation for the education, as with the clothing, feeding, and general rearing of children, is parental, not societal. We have strayed from that, from the beginning of our Republic. Now we pay the ultimately price for it: we risk losing control of who, when, and where our children are schooled. The real lesson of the North Carolina school busing fiasco is that when we surrender our most basic rights to the general public, we in fact lose them.

And the ones who actually pay the price are the ensuing generations.