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Comment by yareally | Hacker News Reader

Moving students around schools in an attempt to equalize race and poverty levels isn't a new concept and it's been tried before (and possibly still done in some states/cities).

They tried forced busing of students to schools across the cities in Ohio back in the 70s and 80s to equalize school demographics. Parents moved in droves to the suburbs and Ohio cities only started recovering in the past 10 years after the program was ended in the 90s. No one wanted their children to go to a school 40 minutes away when there was a perfectly good one within walking distance.

If one still thinks this is a viable solution, how is it going to going to avoid the mistakes of previous attempts? Last thing the cities here need is a mass migration back to the suburbs when the cities have just started turning around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_City_Schools#1977_Des...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing

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What you fail to mention is that it worked. Seriously, busing students and reintegrating schools worked.

This is a good starting point:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...

And the only people that didn't want this were the racist parents of students of upper-middle class schools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXSU1GvuLPs

It's actually quite embarrassing to watch.

You're absolutely correct - the average American theoretically believes that every child is entitled to a high quality, equal education, but in reality only if it doesn't cost them anything.

In light of that, there's very little that the state can do to force middle class families to stay in integrated school districts, and that issue destroyed integration efforts in the '70s and '80s in most of the northeast.

The real solution to the larger problem is probably a completely different education system, but the solution to this particular problem is to expand busing to the suburbs. If desegregation is the only solution to highly unequal educational outcomes, we simply need to pursue to greater lengths.

As you mentioned, I think the option of being able to move to districts that weren't integrated and combined the way many districts tend to be funded (via property taxes) ended up being a net loss more than a net gain. If the integration experiment showed positive results as some have mentioned, families could still move elsewhere and they did. Even if integration had been enforced statewide, one could still move to a small district with only a few schools.

Some districts like Columbus lost around 1/3 of their students over the 20 years they forced school integration. Ohio schools are funded by property taxes (not the best of ideas, but that's what the state decided), so Columbus was also forced to close many schools, cut back spending and likely hurt schools even further. It definitely hurt the city, since tons of buildings were left empty for years and no one had much of a reason to visit the city after 5pm.

> Moving students around schools in an attempt to equalize race and poverty levels isn't a new concept and it's been tried before (and possibly still done in some states/cities).

San Francisco assigns students to schools via a lottery. The result looks a lot like this.

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