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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

> The school district I lived in was the result of a redistricting to pull in us white students into a large neighboring nonwhite school.

Sounds like this was done the wrong way around. What percentage of the students at your school were white?

You got your ass beat because you were in the minority, and you were in their school. The best way to change behavior is to intimidate the students through intense peer pressure. If the minority students are going to a school where they are the minority (and properly integrated into the student body), the results will be very different from what you experienced.

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Normal people feel uncomfortable betting their children to prove somebody's else theories...

"In perhaps the biggest surprise, Armor's studies found that black elementary students who go to magnet schools (which have the highest percentages of whites) score no better on standardized tests than do blacks who go to all-black nonmagnet schools.(97) In short, Armor found that, contrary to the notion on which the whole desegregation plan was founded--that going to school with middle-class whites would increase blacks' achievement--the Kansas City experiment showed that "integration has no effect."(98)"

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html

First of all, one person's opinion does not make a truth. Second, and more importantly, many of these desegregation programs do not achieve true integration. Sure the black students are in the same school as the white students, but they're not in the same classrooms as the white students who are doing well in their studies. This is exactly what I experienced.

You also have to ask questions like "Are these students receiving extra help to make up for what they aren't getting at home? Do they feel isolated because they're the only poor black student in the class, or do they feel motivated to find a way to fit in with the high-achieving white students?" That is the difference between desegregation and integration.

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