In the early 1970s, the cure for segregated schools, especially in the South, was busing – taking students out of their neighborhood schools and busing them across town to a different school to achieve a better racial balance at all schools.
Most public educators and sociologists, if they’re honest, will say the effort was a miserable failure. It physically desegregated certain school systems, as was the requirement of the U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision a decade and a half earlier, but it also prompted the opening of many now-thriving private schools and was the reason many school districts virtually resegregated over time as families moved to attend better schools.
In 2018, no one is calling for busing as a solution to resegregated schools. But the local NAACP, in plans it gave the Hamilton County Board of Education Thursday night, said the school district now should undergo socioeconomic desegregation.
The threat is only implied, but the implication is that a lawsuit could be filed if the school district fails to achieve that diversity.
The NAACP’s plans, developed privately over two years while other local groups such as Chattanooga 2.0 and UnifiEd worked publicly on strategies to make positive changes in the school district, propose a type of open enrollment system “that would mandatorily reassign students to achieve socioeconomic desegregation.”