I remember being the only woman in a class in college. I did sort of feel like I had to hold up things for my half of the human race. It probably meant I worked harder. It was fine, but it was also only one class a day.
I don’t think there are any good solutions to the problem of white flight. I know what our neighborhood did back in the early 1960s. We recruited families who wanted to live in a diverse neighborhood. That’s not allowed any more. You can’t talk about race at all if you are selling real estate. At the same time they turned the neighborhood school into an arts and humanities magnet, it was in danger of closing because there weren’t enough families with kids in the neighborhood, so the extra 1/3 or so they needed came from outside the neighborhood. At the time the magnet was supposed to reflect the demographics of the town. That was also ruled unconstitutional and they had to go to a pure lottery system, but by the time that decision was made, it really didn’t matter. The school is probably around 1/3 white, 1/3 AA, and 1/3 Hispanic currently.
Wasn’t the early 1960s a time when the default condition of new housing developments was that they were explicitly white-only, so that a new housing development that anyone could live in was unusual at the time?
Our neighborhood was built in the 1920s. The United States Supreme Court declared racial covenants for real estate illegal in 1948. I interviewed one of the first African-American families who moved into our neighborhood in the early 1950s. The bank told them that the neighborhood was under a covenant when they went to get the loan. They explained to him that convenants had been outlawed, got the loan and bought the house. I interviewed them a few years ago for an oral history project.
@mathmom I once lived in a subdivision that was developed by Stanley Reed around 1920. Reed would later serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and voted to outlaw racial covenants in the Kramer case in 1948. Although I have not gone back and researched it, several lawyers have told me that following this decision he continued to sell land and include his original racial covenants. They were just there and he didn’t bother to take them out.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/334/1/ indicates that Stanley Reed and two other justices recused themselves from Shelley v. Kraemer, where the remaining six justices decided unanimously that racial covenants on real estate, while not illegal, were not enforceable by government action including in the courts.
I believe, but I couldn’t find anything on the web in a quick search that NYS made racial covenants illegal in the early 1950s. Maybe because the Supreme Court judgement didn’t explicitly say they were illegal?
Not all latino students speak English, so some schools can’t serve them.
The school my kids would have gone to if we hadn’t moved was in an urban district with majority Hispanic but very few Hispanic students at this school. One of the GC’s said it was because they didn’t have support for the Spanish speakers, and most kids choose schools (very open enrollment) where their friends go. This high school (on the small side at 1200) is in a mostly white area, but attracts a lot of black students.
katliamom:
"Interestingly, one of the best schools in my city is a school which by its charter specifies its student body be divided so it’s 30% white, 30% Latino, 30% black. So whites are the minority… There’s a waiting list a mile long to get into this school with plenty white parents keeping their fingers crossed their kids get in. "
Same here. One of mine attended a charter school because of its offerings in a particular language.
That school was definitely the same makeup as you suggest above, and in the inner city. People get on the waiting list years in advance now (though during our stint when it was a newer school,you could apply a year in advance).
Yes, because there are not enough qualified bilingual teachers. Not every school can have a full supply of bilingual teachers who can teach bio, chem, math, and English so they hire the ones they can and put them in the schools that have the most need.
We had several dual language charter schools that couldn’t make it because they didn’t have enough qualified teachers. My sister is a teacher but her languages are French and German. She has many students whose parents do not speak English and every teacher’s conference takes twice as long because everything has to be translated.