Ten years ago, the school system in Wake County, N.C., thought it would try an experiment with the children in its care. It would enhance “diversity” by making sure schools had students from a broad mix of economic backgrounds. It achieved that goal by forcibly busing students from wealthier areas of the county to poorer areas, and vice versa. So students no longer necessarily had the option to attend schools in their own communities.
The results were predictable. Some students found themselves spending tiring hours on a bus every day, going far from their homes and neighborhood schools to distant reaches of the county — against their will and against the will of their parents. The program also isolated children from neighborhood friends with whom they had grown up.
Finally, on a wave of parent outrage, new school board members were elected on a promise to scrap the “diversity policy” and restore common sense. That was no empty promise: They recently took the first step toward dumping forced busing.
Predictably, the new school board members were angrily, and sometimes even profanely, accused of being “racists.” One California professor melodramatically claimed that overturning the policy was a “tragedy.”
But we can see nothing racist, much less tragic, in ending a policy that forced children to attend distant, unfamiliar schools instead of their neighborhood schools or some other school freely chosen by them and their parents.
School is supposed to be about educating students to help them have a positive future. It should not be about using students to fulfill someone’s vision of “diversity.”