Chapter 9 The orange school bus is coming

——Struggling efforts for education equality Every morning and afternoon, there is such a scene in the urban and rural areas of the United States. Orange school buses are driving on the road, stopping from time to time to let elementary and middle school students with schoolbags get on and off the bus.When the school bus stops, no matter how wide the road is, no matter how busy the street is, vehicles from all directions will stop and wait for the children to cross the road.Only when the school bus starts, the traffic on the road will move again.The school buses are as big as a passenger car and as small as a minivan, but they have the same style across the country, and they all have the same color: eye-catching orange.Today, there are a total of 450,000 school buses nationwide, and 24 million primary and secondary school students in public schools rely on school buses to transport them every day.National school buses travel about 6 billion kilometers each year and pick up and drop off 10 billion passengers.The orange school buses all over the country are a symbol of the American public education system.

The orange school bus is telling the children, "Education is equal to your future", how much education you can get, how much prospect you have in your future life.Equality is a beautiful ideal. Many people think that equality means equal opportunities in a person's life.In concrete terms, nothing is more important than equality in education.Only under the premise of equal education can we talk about equal opportunities.To this end, Americans have traveled a particularly difficult road. 1. An unfair historical legacy Perhaps nowhere in history has there been greater educational inequality than in the United States.Slavery has existed in the United States historically.Black slaves have no personal rights, and everything they own belongs to the slave owner.Some places even stipulated that black slaves could not acquire the ability to read and write, and it was illegal for black slaves to read.

Except for black slaves, the education of others was mostly provided by the church.Where the poor live, the church is poorer and the education is poorer.Where rich people live together, it is possible to raise funds to give children a better education.What kind of education children can get depends entirely on the kind of family they are born into.People are born rich and poor, and education is inherently unequal. After the Civil War, slavery was officially abolished.The United States adopted the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which stipulates that all citizens enjoy equal protection of the law.But in the South, the black and white segregation system is still implemented.Blacks have black schools and whites have white schools.The Supreme Court ruled in 1896 that "separate but equal" segregation was legal as long as black and white schools had the same status.In the next half century, black children in many parts of the United States could only go to black schools.

Are black and white public schools equal if they have the same school buildings and equipment?This is a historical problem for Americans. 2. A turning point in history In 1952, in Kansas City, a little black girl named Brown was rejected by a white school.Parents are taking the school board to court to fight for equal educational opportunities for their children.Similar legal proceedings are taking place at the same time in South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.These cases reach the Federal Supreme Court through a lengthy sentencing and appeals process.The Supreme Court combined several cases to hear arguments, which is the famous Brown v. School Board case.The largest black civil rights organization in the United States, the famous black lawyer Marshall of the American Association for the Advancement of Colored People, represented Brown and appeared in the Supreme Court.Representing the defendants were the deputy attorneys-general of Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina and Delaware, who argued that the black and white campuses were "separate but equal."

On December 9, 1952, the Supreme Court held an argument hearing in the Brown case.A year later, on December 8, 1953, the Supreme Court held another argument hearing. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is the famous Justice Warren.Warren knew that the turning point in history, which had been waiting for a century since the Civil War, had finally arrived.He knew that at this moment before the nine justices of the Supreme Court, it was a historic opportunity to fight for a big step forward in educational equality in the United States.They want to change an old unreasonable and unfair system that has been practiced in the South for a hundred years and has the support of many southern white people.According to the American tradition, education is a matter for the community to have autonomy. What to teach and how to teach have always been decided by the community itself, that is, the parents of the children themselves, and the government should not intervene.The unfair black and white separate school system in the past was based on this kind of educational autonomy.Therefore, the abolition of racial injustice in education must answer the question of educational autonomy and must have a solid constitutional basis.

After the second Supreme Court hearing, Justice Warren, together with other justices, worked for more than six months.Warren knew that this historic turning point would not come easily and smoothly, and for this reason he wanted the Supreme Court to make a unanimous decision rather than a divided one.He wants to use the consistency of the Supreme Court to send a strong message to society.He discusses communication among Supreme Court justices until a unanimous decision is reached. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced the Brown v. School Board decision written by Justice Warren himself.

Justice Warren said in the ruling: "Today, education is the most important function of state and local government. Mandatory compulsory education laws and huge expenditures on education show that we recognize the importance of education to our society. .Education is necessary to fulfill our basic public responsibilities, including serving in the military. Education is also required. Education is the foundation of being a good citizen. Education today is to awaken children to accept cultural values, to obtain vocational training for later, to help children The primary means of social adjustment. Children cannot reasonably be expected to succeed in life today if they do not have access to an education which every child has the right to demand from the State on equal terms. "

In response to the old principle of "separate but equal", Warren used the evidence in court to explain that whether education is equal should not only look at "tangible factors" such as school buildings, courses, and teacher salaries, but mainly depends on the separate educational system. "as a result of".He pointed to evidence that the racially segregated school system created a sense of inferiority among black children that damaged their spirit and mind irreparably.Therefore, the Supreme Court made a historic judgment: "In the field of public education, the statement of separation but equality is untenable. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." This separate education system violates the The Fourteenth Amendment, which grants equal protection of the laws to all citizens, is unconstitutional.The Supreme Court ordered that the federal government and the state governments have a duty to abolish the separate education system.

But how can schools scattered across the country cancel the separation of black and white?A year later, in 1955, the Supreme Court ruled again in the Brown case, ordering federal courts across the country to call for the abolition of black and white separate schools "with prudent speed" in their decisions. 3. The combination of black and white schools is a legal requirement After the Brown case, the integration of black and white schools in most parts of the country has progressed smoothly, but in several historical slave states in the south, there is still segregation of black and white residential areas, as well as black and white segregation of other public facilities.In some places in the South, the abolition of black and white segregated schools was strongly opposed by local authorities and white people.

In Arkansas, seven of the eight public universities successfully realized black and white school integration after the ruling of the Brown case, blacks have been elected to the state board of education, and many primary and secondary schools have abolished the black and white segregation system.But there was resistance from white students and parents at some schools, most notably Little Rock High School.Little Rock is the state capital of Arkansas.Little Rock High School is one of the best white schools in the area.An important reason for the conflict was Governor Forbes. In 1957, the Little Rock School Board unanimously decided to develop a progressive plan for desegregation beginning in the fall, beginning with high school, then middle school, and finally elementary school.Little Rock High School approves nine blacks for fall admission. On September 2, the day before school started, Arkansas Governor Forbes mobilized the state militia to surround Little Rock High School.

When the black students came to school the next day, they found the National Guard lined up, barring any blacks from entering the school.The governor said that this is to protect the safety of school property and personnel and avoid possible violence. The siege of Little Rock High by the National Guard on the governor's order lasted three weeks.Black organizations filed petitions in federal court, and a federal judge ordered the governor to order the National Guard to withdraw.The National Guard evacuated the school on 20 September. On September 23, nine black students entered the school under police protection.White students began to attack the police, and there were thousands of white parents watching outside the school, expressing their opposition to the black and white school.The school was worried that the police could not control the situation, so they had to secretly send the black students out of the school through a side door. On September 24, Woodrow Mann, the mayor of Little Rock City who supported the black and white mixed school, sent a telegram to President Eisenhower, asking for the support of the federal government.Eisenhower announced on the same day that the command of the Arkansas National Guard would be returned to the federal government, and he ordered to send 1,000 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army to Little Rock overnight. On September 25, 1957, Little Rock High School was filled with heavily armed soldiers inside and out. The 101st Airborne Division has made outstanding contributions in World War II and is the most respected unit.Nine black students were escorted into the school by fully armed soldiers of this unit.Little Rock High School was desegregated by strong federal intervention. However, the antagonism between the white students and the public in Little Rock did not disappear all at once.The city school board, concerned that chaos and violence could break out at any time, asked federal court to suspend plans to abolish the black and white schools for two and a half years, and a federal district court judge agreed.The black organization appealed, the decision was overturned in the appeals court, and the result reached the Supreme Court in 1958, which became Cooper v. Allen in 1958.The Federal Supreme Court held a hearing on September 11, 1958, and at a speed never before seen in history, the unanimous decision of the nine justices was issued the next day. In their ruling, the justices pointed out that the Constitution is the supreme law of this country, and the Federal Supreme Court's judgment on the Brown case in 1954 is an interpretation of the Constitution and has the effect of the Supreme Law.Arkansas' governor and state legislature must obey the ruling.According to this law, the state government cannot violate the right of black students to receive equal education because of fear of chaos and violence.The Supreme Court used this ruling to show that the unfair system of black and white schools in the public education system must be abolished.State and local governments cannot use the fear of chaos as an excuse to delay the process of combining black and white schools.All schools that fail to implement this legal requirement with practical effect will be ineligible for federal education funding. 4. The yellow light turns into a green light The biggest difficulty in realizing the combination of black and white schools is the separation of black and white residential areas in many places in the history of the United States.In many places, black people live together and form black communities.Local regulations in some places in the South prohibit blacks from living in white areas.In some white residential areas, the residents themselves stipulated that the sale of houses to blacks was prohibited.Since education is an autonomous matter of the community, if the community is divided into black and white, then the separation of black and white in schools will naturally form.In such areas, the progress of black and white combined schools has been very slow.Not only are white students reluctant to go to black schools, black students are also reluctant to go to white schools. After the new civil rights law came into effect in 1964, it was illegal to prevent blacks from living in white areas, and it was also illegal to discriminate against people in housing sales and rentals, and racial segregation in housing began to be broken. In New Kent County, Virginia, half the population is black.There used to be two schools in this county, one white and one black.In the process of abolishing black-and-white separate schools based on the Brown case ruling, the county school board enacted a regulation called "freedom of choice", which is to allow all students, regardless of black and white, to choose which school to attend, and use this method to achieve black-and-white combined schools .The school committee believes that with this provision, it meets the federal requirements to abolish the black and white school system. Does the provision of "freedom of choice" meet the requirements of abolishing the black and white school system?Controversy arose on this issue.The dispute reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968 in Greene v. New Kent County School Board. On May 27, the Federal Supreme Court made another unanimous decision. In their ruling, the justices pointed out that "freedom of choice" is not illegal, but "freedom of choice" itself cannot replace the goal of abolishing black and white schools.Whether the black-and-white branch school system is abolished depends on the actual effect.The justices noted that of the county's 1,300 elementary school students, 740 were black, and only 35 "freely chose" to go to white schools in 1965, although in 1967 the number had increased to 115, 100 Eighty-five out of every black student is still in an all-black school, and no white person has "free choice" to go to a black school.In other words, this county basically has two schools, black and white.It was concluded that the "freedom of choice" provision, which did not achieve the goal of abolishing black and white schools, was insufficient. The justices subsequently suggested that whether the unfair system of black and white branch schools should be abolished depends on the measures and effects of several aspects, including facilities, teachers, staff, transportation and extracurricular activities.If these items achieve the merger of black and white, the school district will be regarded as abolishing the black and white school system.These aspects were later called "Green factors". So, how to achieve the various Green elements, the Supreme Court pointed out that it is the responsibility of the school committee to formulate a practical plan to ensure the rapid abolition of the black and white school system without delay.Any program that fails to do this will not be tolerated. The Supreme Court's ruling on the Green case actually issued an order to speed up the abolition of the black and white school system: the school committee has the responsibility to implement coercive measures to achieve black and white schools, without hesitation and delay. Coincidentally, the Brown case in 1954 announced the need to adopt "prudent speed", "Brown (Brown)" means orange in English; the Green case in 1968 sent a message to speed up the abolition of black and white schools, "Green ( Green)" means green in English.Justice Warren wrote to Justice Brennan, who drafted the ruling: "As soon as this opinion is issued, the traffic lights (for black and white schools) will finally change from Brown (yellow light) to Green (green light). " The yellow light turned green, accelerating the move toward equality in the education system, and Americans paid a huge price for it.The Green case happened in the historic year 1968. On the second day after the Supreme Court debated the Green case, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by white racists, and the whole country was in confusion and tension.A month later, the Supreme Court issued its judgment in the case, ordering that the amber light be turned into a green light.Three years later, in 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in the Swann case that in view of the difficulty of separating black and white residential areas in rural areas too far apart, it affirmed the use of the school bus system standardized in the United States since the 1930s to send white students to In black ghettos, black students are sent to white ghettos, and school buses are used to forcibly mix black and white students to achieve the goal of combining black and white schools. 5. Black and white combined schools and the loss of whites I went to ask our friends Lynne and Angie.Lynn grew up in a poor white family in a West Virginia mining town, one of the poorest in the United States.The story of the movie "The Miner's Daughter" happened near her hometown, and she herself is an out-and-out miner's daughter.I asked her to tell me about the school when I was a child. That was the situation in the early sixties.Lynn's elementary school consists of three houses in the countryside. Two grades share a classroom with a large coal stove in the middle.Fortunately, in the coal mine area, there is plenty of free coal.Every day, the children bring a big potato and bake it on the stove, which is lunch at noon.Lynn said that the big coal stove was burning all day long, and the little faces and hands of the children were dark all day long.The school is not far from home, and the children walk by themselves every day, but there is a downhill from her home to the school, and the ground is covered with snow in winter, so they have to wrestle.She simply sat down here and slid down the slope.But there is a small stream at the bottom of the slope, and it doesn't freeze in winter. The older sister, who is two years older than her, slides down first every day, and then takes the pose of an old hen to block the sliding sister.Once she failed, she slipped into a stream, sat in the icy water, and stood by the stove for a long time after school to dry her trousers. Speaking of these, 51-year-old Lynn looked nostalgic.I asked, are there any black students in your school? No, not one.In this mining area, less than half of the workers are black.Negroes lived together and had their own schools.Black children never mix with white children, black schools are never confused with white schools. So, what happened next?Lynn said that this small school was abandoned later, and the same humble black school was also abandoned.Better and bigger schools were built elsewhere.At that time, the road from home to school was long.But Lynn said, we have a school bus. I asked, how about the black and white combined school?Lynne said, for me, it's fine, because my mother always taught us that we can't look down on poor people, and we can't look down on black people.Your mothers are poor people. Anyone who looks down on poor people or black people is looking down on your mothers.However, most of the black students had a hard time because they were a minority, their test scores were generally lower, their habits and behavior were different from the whites, some teachers and classmates treated them rudely and bullied them.Black students generally feel timid and lonely. This is very difficult for a child. However, it has gotten better over the past few years.By the time her four daughters are in school, Lynn said the combined black and white school is complete.No one would be surprised that her daughter had black children.However, she said that at the same time, the education of public schools in the United States is generally tending to be liberalized. After the black and white school merged, teachers have greater concerns about restraining students with discipline and punishment, and even no longer restrain them, leading to excessive indulgence of students. Teaching order cannot be guaranteed.These are things that worry Americans with children very much right now. I asked Angie, "What about you? How did you go to school when you were a kid?" Angie grew up in a large white family in a small southern town, a wealthy and respected gentry family in the local area.She is forty years old this year, and she happens to be in elementary school when the "yellow light turns into green light".Angie murmured in embarrassment. I didn't understand, and was about to ask again, when Lynn joked next to her: "He is the child of a rich man." I immediately understood that what Angie said was: "I went to a private school." This is the other side of the process of combining black and white schools.The combined black and white schools in the United States are an effort to achieve educational equality.However, education affects thousands of families and every child without stopping.It not only affects blacks whose educational status has been improved, but also affects whites who were originally relatively stable.The use of school buses to transport black and white students together, after the realization of black and white public schools, has generally improved the standard of the original black schools, but also lowered the standards of some original white schools.More realistically, parents no longer want their children to go to whichever school they want, but after registration, the school district will allocate schools uniformly to ensure the combination of black and white schools.It has become a common phenomenon that the school at the door of the house cannot be attended, and it has become a common phenomenon to go to a distant place to go to school. Education has a great impact on a person's life, and no one dares to take children's education lightly.Even those who support mixed black and white schools sometimes have to do something else to ensure their children get the education they feel comfortable with.Many parents, like Angie's parents, send their children to private schools.Private schools generally require parents to participate more in the education and control of their children, and parents are more at ease.I asked Angie, "Are private schools expensive?" Yes, very expensive, Angie replied. When Angie's two children went to school, the solution she and her husband took was to move to a better school district, where they could be assigned to a better school.To this end, they moved twice.Moving for a child's education is a common, mostly white phenomenon.In Richmond, the capital of Virginia, only half of the white students remained in the past ten years.This situation is called "white flight". 6. The Coleman Report When it comes to public education in the United States, there is one person whose name cannot be ignored.The man's name was James Coleman. Let's start with 1964. 1964 was a very important year in the history of the United States. In this year, the long-awaited new civil rights bill was passed, laying the legal foundation for the complete abolition of the southern apartheid system and the realization of racial equality.At this time, it has been ten years since the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown case that the black-and-white public school system was unconstitutional. The process of combining black and white schools is still proceeding at a "prudent pace." How exactly, whether there are problems worthy of the attention of the government and society, and what kind of problems are not very clear to people.Therefore, Congress proposed in Article 4 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that a special investigation should be conducted at all levels of the public education system to investigate the issue of equal educational opportunities for different races, colors, religions, etc., so that on the basis of the investigation, a targeted public policy.That investigative task fell to Coleman, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Professor Coleman led a team to collect data on 600,000 students in 4,000 schools across the United States. This is the largest survey in the field of education. They were then locked in a hotel room for three months of analysis. In 1966, before the deadline set by Congress, Coleman delivered a "Report on Equality of Educational Opportunity" to Congress.This is the famous Coleman report in the history of sociology, which is recognized as the most important report on social issues in the 20th century. The research conclusion of this report is beyond Coleman's own expectations. Prior to this, people only knew that the cultural and educational level of black children was relatively low, and the gap widened the further they went.Coleman, like most people, believes that this gap is mainly caused by the material level and conditions of the school.The results of the investigation found that the gap between the original black school and the white school in terms of physical conditions such as school buildings, facilities, and teacher salaries is not as large as previously thought.Moreover, after analyzing the causal correlation of schoolchildren's learning levels, it is found that the main reason for the low learning level of black children is not the physical conditions of the school, but the social composition of the school, that is, the socioeconomic background of the schoolchildren's family. Coleman found that if the majority of students in a school were children from economically stable middle-class families, then all students, whether white or black, showed better academic performance, while schools full of poor students, Students' grades are generally low.Black students do better in mixed schools with mostly white students than in all-black schools.He also found a strong correlation between a student's family background and academic performance. So, how does the socioeconomic background of a student's family affect their learning?Coleman's research found that blacks and other disadvantaged minorities, such as Latinos and Indians, lack the self-confidence to change and control their own future compared with white middle-class people. Coleman called it "self-assessment (self-assessment) esteem)".Affected by social status caused by factors such as race and skin color, these disadvantaged students have relatively low self-evaluation.That is to say, they feel that the environment is too strong, and it is impossible to change their lives through education. They lack self-expectation for their own future, feel that they have no hope, and the "morale" of learning is relatively low, resulting in poor academic performance and gaps. The further back the bigger. Social realities were found to be responsible for the lower "self-assessments" of black and disadvantaged schoolchildren.The most iconic is the distribution of law school and medical school students.Law and medical schools are recognized elites, and disadvantaged populations have historically been underrepresented in both institutions. In 1965, only 1.5 percent of law school students nationwide were black, compared with nearly 13 percent of the population.Of the two million Spanish-speaking Mexican citizens of California in the 1960s, by 1969 only three of them were graduates of the state's law schools.Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah have a lot of Indians, but never had Indian-American law school graduates. The historic significance of the Coleman Report is that it puts educational equality in the context of socioeconomic equality.Educational equality is subject to social and economic equality, which in turn affects socioeconomic equality, thus raising the issue of educational equality to the overall goal of transforming society.It proves to Congress that equality of educational opportunities should be examined not only from the investment in education, that is, the public educational resources that students can obtain, but more importantly, from the results of education, because it is the result of education The expectations of students affect the self-evaluation of students, determine the learning status of students, and also cause substantial inequalities in educational opportunities for disadvantaged groups under factors such as race, skin color, and religion. It was this conclusion of Coleman's report that became the basis for the "affirmative action" or "affirmative action" generally implemented in the United States. paved the way.Public education has largely favored disadvantaged groups, implementing so-called "reverse discrimination for the sake of equality".While primary and secondary schools are mandatory to combine black and white schools, they also generally implement preferential policies in terms of university enrollment, government agency employment and promotion, and take care of blacks and other disadvantaged groups.In law schools in particular, black students, who used to be impossible to get into based on merit, now account for a significant proportion. Facts have proved that these black law school graduates have provided society with qualified black elites and changed the proportion of blacks in various branches of government and social management.This reverse discrimination is a phased measure in a specific historical state.Therefore, decades later, whether this practice has fulfilled its historical mission, whether it should be gradually terminated, and whether the specific measures are appropriate have become the focus of controversy, and a series of judicial lawsuits have emerged for this, which has not subsided so far.However, it is undeniable that the inclination of public education to the weak has obviously changed the equality of educational opportunities in American society in recent decades. 7. Return to the community Beginning in the mid-1970s, the federal court began to relax its mandatory measures on black and white schools, because at this time the mandatory racial segregation system had been abolished, the equality of race and color had been established in the legal system, and the fight against racial discrimination had become the norm. social consensus.Marshall, a black lawyer who represented the Brown family on the Supreme Court, has been nominated by President Johnson to become a justice of the Supreme Court.The situation has fundamentally changed.Now, control over schools and the education system is beginning to return to the hands of the community. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in the Denver case that it was necessary to distinguish between racial segregation measures imposed by the state government and segregation formed by the voluntary choice of the people, which is not unconstitutional. In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled against the use of school buses to transport students across metropolitan limits.Thus, in some remote rural areas, if the residents are all black or all white, there will be schools that are basically black or white.Such schools are no longer considered illegal segregated schools. In 1991, the Supreme Court ruled that the orders issued by the Supreme Court in Brown and Green were not intended to be permanent.These orders are only to abolish institutional racial segregation, abolish unequal black and white schools, and allow races that have been treated unequally in history to have equal educational opportunities.Once the black-and-white school system is abolished and the school district meets the requirements of the Green Elements, control of the school should return to the community. In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled with a new goal: returning public education to the community.The Supreme Court emphasized that there are "limits in time and scope" for judicial orders to remedy the inequalities of the previous education system.The ultimate control over education belongs to the people themselves. 2004 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown case.Public education in the United States has taken an uneven road for half a century.In the dilemma of equality and freedom, Americans are in a dilemma.With the awakening of black people's self-awareness, black people generally began to emphasize their own cultural value, and some black communities also demanded that public schools reflect the characteristics of black people themselves, and required black people's own educational content.Now not only whites, some blacks are also willing to separate black and white schools. A survey conducted by Harvard University in 2000 found that black and white students in some parts of the United States have a tendency to separate. This road of seeking fairness is far from complete.