When I graduated high school I heard we had more pregnant girls that year than the previous three years combined (I think a guidance counselor was the one who told me)

Wooooo class of 2005!

1/19/2011 5:01:54 PM

anyone have anything about the supposed 17minute average bus time in wake county?

1/19/2011 5:24:49 PM

Quote :

"It's unfortunate that they warped -I don't want my kids bussed across the county -I don't want my kids to have to go to separate schools/be on separate schedules -Busing kids all over the place costs money that we simply don't have to: -LET'S RETURN TO SEGREGATION"

that's what it's being turned into. not saying that stopping the bussing is a good idea, but this was the actual reason for it, that and 45 - 90 minute bus rides....

true that a early exposure to 'diverse' people is a good thing as it reduces intolerance, but even at these schools you still get racist kids coming out of them, you still get self segregation.

sure the opportunity is there to experience actual diversity but most still shy away from it. like typically groups with like, even at a very base level (2-5 year olds), my niece-in-laws have almost never seen a black person or even a partially black person, they found it interesting that someone had different colored skin than them, (and it wasn't that different). in terms of larger groups though kids don't tend to naturally blend their 'groups'.

one way around this is forced seating assignments, in the bus, in the classroom, in the cafeteria (then flip the room). but you can never fully get away from it.

there are many other issues with diversity, most of which deal with over emphasizing it to the expense of other subjects and core learning.


most of the racial problems we have are cultural issues on BOTH sides. it all starts with the parents, they have to encourage exploration, not overly place emphasis on race or socio-economic status, as well as a profound importance on the value of education. that excelling is a good thing. then we can truely start to move towards a actual 'diverse' education.

1/19/2011 5:25:58 PM

I wonder what percentage of criminals have/had no father figure in their life.

1/19/2011 5:33:56 PM

i added this thread to my topics when i saw it this morning because i felt like i could contribute some insight, but i see it's already been overrun by baseless comments

[Edited on January 19, 2011 at 6:33 PM. Reason : ]

1/19/2011 6:32:12 PM

why don't the folks who want diversity so damn bad just move?

better yet, why don't we just get rid of public education?

1/19/2011 6:55:28 PM

YOU, SIR, ARE A JACKANAPE

1/19/2011 6:56:56 PM

Since armorfrsleep and wolfpackgrrr mentioned his influence, I thought I'd plug this related thread:

message_topic.aspx?topic=607613

1/19/2011 7:33:25 PM

dude. slow clap for Arab13

1/19/2011 8:51:13 PM

so sending good/smart students to "bad" schools is the solution? just dilute the issue of shitty education, right?

the school doesn't fucking matter. the teachers aren't even the most important part. it's the kids and their parents. if they don't give a fuck, it doesn't matter. you can put them in the best school and they'll still be the shit of the country.

1/19/2011 10:15:42 PM

^ lol

if only everything broke down to your uninformed musings.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/27542104

1/19/2011 10:19:37 PM

so you're telling me daddy's wallet has more of an effect on his child's education than does his or his child's level of care for said education?

1/19/2011 10:23:46 PM

yeah, fuck peer reviewed studies when we have your baseless speculation to rely upon.

1/19/2011 10:29:18 PM

^^ umm… "PEER FAMILY" SES means the people you are around affect your performance.

You can let all the poor people stay in one school, but this environment creates a feedback loop of close-mindedness that is difficult to overcome.

A more DIVERSE SES school environment reduces this effect, making educating all groups easier (it is of course part of a system of solutions).

You didn’t even read the abstract (or probably didn’t understand it?) because that’s what that study shows.

I understand you want the world to conform to the views your parents taught you, but as John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” The world isn’t always like you want it to be Price, and I know you are smart enough to understand this. Just because you were raised a certain way doesn’t mean you can’t try to understand how reality actually works.

The reality is that smart kids do well regardless of their environment. The ~5% of people that are bussed help them out very significantly, while at worst doesn’t affect the other people. On top of this, our system forces us to create top tier magnet schools with more focused and motivated staff (often highly educated) that you don’t find in a lot of other school systems.

Maybe bussing might not be the right strategy, but socioeconomic diversity is definitely a key component to quality education for a state with NC’s demographics.

[Edited on January 19, 2011 at 10:43 PM. Reason : ]

1/19/2011 10:40:47 PM

My ride to school in high school was a good 15-20 minutes. Living 5 minutes from Cary and going to Panther Creek sucked hardcore ass.

1/19/2011 10:45:44 PM

In middle school, it was 45 minutes, but that’s because it was a rural area and students were REALLY spread out.

1/19/2011 10:48:36 PM

Dear lord I'm old. There was no such thing as Panther Creek in my day.

1/19/2011 11:00:58 PM

man, screw the kids who live in poor neighborhoods and will go to shitty schools after this.

i'm more worried about the kids who had to have 20 minutes added on to their bus ride. oh the humanity. if only i could go back in time and give 20 minutes a day back to the kids who were bussed so that they could go home earlier and jerk off to their dads hustler magazine before baseball practice. those poor, unfortunate bastards. clearly, their individual time was more important than the whole of society being able to take a step forward

[Edited on January 19, 2011 at 11:11 PM. Reason : ]

1/19/2011 11:09:42 PM

Quote :

"Joie: BridgetSPK:where did you get this info? is this a tru average? do you know the std deviations? i'm genuinely curious. no trolling or anything. i dont have kids and i dont really have much of an opinion on this because i agree partially with both sides (however if this is correct and not many outliers ill tend to agree with diversification, but i can't take numbers thrown at me as fact )"

I got that info from the ramblings of somebody who has been studying this issue for over a decade. It is a very old figure--I first heard it years ago. It's also not based on some hardcore independent/rigorous analysis--that would be nearly impossible. However, intuitively I understand the "15 minute" figure to be based in reality.

For example, by car, Athens Dr. High and Cary High are 11 minutes apart. If you pick up a kid who is in between Cary High and Athens Dr. (but closer to the Cary High side) and bus him to Athens Dr. for socioeconomic diversity, you'd be increasing his bus ride by 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, five minutes? Enough of those 5 minute increases would easily balance out all of these horror stories where kids--supposedly--sit on the bus for 2.5 hours a day. Of course, this example is totally made up! Real example I tracked down though: Lochmere is 9 minutes from Cary High and 11 minutes from Athens Drive...some of the kids in Lochmere get bussed for socioeconomic diversity out of Cary High to Athens Drive instead...so a whole two minutes difference!

Regardless, there is no such thing as the "Cary High side" or the "Athens Drive side." Our schools are not perfectly placed so we can use our compass to draw circles around the schools and create zones. And even if we did pull off some magical circles, our schools are not perfectly sized so as to accommodate every kid in its circle. Somebody's gonna have to get bussed.

I hope you can imagine how bussing for diversity is wrongly characterized as shipping kids miles across the county. Yes, I'm sure that happens, but not nearly as much as the neighborhood advocates would have us believe. Plus, the parental satisfaction figures (>90% satisfied and over >80% very satisfied) suggest that we don't have a problem with kids sitting on the bus for ungodly amounts of time.

It's important to note that long bus rides for diversity are not a myth though: other cities have had absurd routes because they adopted diversity policies too late (after the affluent folks had already evacuated the cities); by beginning sincere, early efforts to prevent the creation of high poverty schools (bussing), we gave people less reason to move in the first place. So, bussing for diversity in Wake County is easier here because we've never been just a city of less affluent people surrounded by county suburbs of more affluent people.

Of course, other factors beyond the school diversity policy played into our city's development as well...but I really, really cannot stress enough how much this policy has positively affected our growth. In the absence of the policy, I doubt we would have developed in such a way that has repeatedly earned us top spots on "best place to live" lists--our schools are a huge part of that. And now this handful of newcomers want to eliminate one of the precise things that's made this place so awesome and attractive to...newcomers. It's crazy!

[Edited on January 20, 2011 at 4:49 AM. Reason : ]

1/20/2011 4:21:23 AM

i'm looking forward to watching property values go to shit as neighborhood schools lose accreditation. i'm sure that'll have positive side effects. wake county sure could use some nice, new ghettos.

1/20/2011 6:14:48 AM

fuck wake county schools, fuck the bus and fuck enloe

1/20/2011 6:16:52 AM

^^^
I just checked it was 8 miles from my house to my school, but the bus ride still took anywhere from 1 to 1.5 hours one way. Why? Because the bus didn't drive directly to our neighborhood, it gerrymandered all over the place and it was a solid hour+ by the time it got to my drop-off. So that difference of a mile might add more than 30 seconds to someone's bus ride.

That said there are a lot more schools now than there were then, and I imagine the routes could be adjusted such that a bus wouldn't have to snake all over the place picking up a random kid here and there.

The other school was 1.6 miles away, a bit farther than I remember - maybe too far for a small kid to walk to.

1/20/2011 8:21:37 AM

and the term 'busing' is out dated too

my fiance had to drive an extra 30-45 minutes every day because the school she was zoned too was so far away, yet there was another one only 8-10 minutes away

[Edited on January 20, 2011 at 8:42 AM. Reason : ]

1/20/2011 8:23:37 AM

my bus came at 6:45 in the morning and it was a 45 minute ride to school since we were one of the first stops in the morning (and the last in the afternoon)

then again, we lived in the sticks

1/20/2011 8:25:53 AM

^^^Totally. My bus went to four different neighborhoods. And I was the first to get on in the morning and the last to get off in the afternoon. The kid who was last to get on and first to get off probably thought the ride was short. AHA

^^It only has one "s," I know. But sometimes I hate the way it looks with one "s." It's just an "a" away from "abusing."

I would love to hear more details about your fiance's situation. It could be enlightening.

[Edited on January 20, 2011 at 8:35 AM. Reason : ]

1/20/2011 8:35:18 AM

I think we should make the owners of all these properties kick out their "poor people" and only rent to rich people. This would solve the problem, right?

that way the poor people could pick the homeless shelter closest to the school they want to attend!

1/20/2011 9:17:40 AM

I had a 45 minute bus ride too, not because of forced busing...because I did not want to go to Millbrook. I lived through having a 45 minute bus ride and am a better person for making a little sacrifice. In the working world I have had commutes over an hour.

These people (tedesco and company) are a bunch of whiny pansies. They are mad because they moved to the suburbs and their kids have to go to school with minorities and they dont like it.

1/20/2011 9:23:55 AM

^so maybe next election we have half of suburb people with kids that get poor on them and half poor people with kids that are bussed? That should even out the board to come to a fair decision.

Dang I'm full of good ideas this morning.

1/20/2011 9:35:37 AM

Quote :

"man, screw the kids who live in poor neighborhoods and will go to shitty schools after this. i'm more worried about the kids who had to have 20 minutes added on to their bus ride. oh the humanity. if only i could go back in time and give 20 minutes a day back to the kids who were bussed so that they could go home earlier and jerk off to their dads hustler magazine before baseball practice. those poor, unfortunate bastards. clearly, their individual time was more important than the whole of society being able to take a step forward"

Agreed. (Only I am kind of serious)

1/20/2011 10:05:25 AM

who would have imagined, busing some white kids across town advances an entire society, i'm impressed

1/20/2011 10:12:36 AM

Quote :

"I had a 45 minute bus ride too, not because of forced busing...because I did not want to go to Millbrook. I lived through having a 45 minute bus ride and am a better person for making a little sacrifice. In the working world I have had commutes over an hour."

aha so true. And in reality Wake County kids have it good compared to kids in other places when it comes to commutes. Some of the kids I used to teach had an hour bike ride to school. I can't even imagine most kids in Wake County hopping on their bicycle and pedaling for an hour to school. And these were on shitty country roads with basically zero safety. Every year we'd have a kid that would get injured on their way to school thanks to icy roads or asshole drivers

1/20/2011 10:32:57 AM

1/20/2011 10:43:06 AM

Quote :

"who would have imagined, busing some white kids across town advances an entire society, i'm impressed"

It's MOSTLY poor kids being bussed in, not rich kids being bussed out, from what I understand.

1/20/2011 11:55:43 AM

I think Raleigh just got one upped by Charlotte:

"White nationalists to meet in Charlotte"
http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/01/20/932552/white-nationalists-to-meet-in.html

Quote :

"American Renaissance, a magazine of the nonprofit New Century Foundation, plans a conference Feb. 4-6 at a site yet to be announced. According to its website, the group advocates "race realism," a belief that race is "the most prominent and divisive" fault line in society. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks such groups, says at Renaissance conferences "racist 'intellectuals' rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists." Magazine editor Jared Taylor on Wednesday dismissed the criticism. "They clearly have an axe to grind; we have perfectly ordinary people," said Taylor. "But that's their typical fearmongering. Their purpose is to paint us in the blackest language so people will contribute to them.""

[Edited on January 21, 2011 at 2:16 PM. Reason : .]

1/21/2011 2:16:06 PM

Quote :

"Their purpose is to paint us in the blackest language"

1/21/2011 2:19:41 PM

Quote :

"Well guess what, my county did neighborhood based schools... and we all still made friends, no one bitched about economics, it didn't segregate schools."

What county was that? Some counties don't have enough socioeconomic diversity for vast gaps to appear from school to school; Wake does.

Quote :

"and school is about an education, not fucking diversity. english, math, science, history. not diversity."

You don't consider learning about others' lives, especially those different from your own, an education?

1/21/2011 2:22:17 PM

This could be one of my longest threads ever!! yay!

1/21/2011 2:22:41 PM

they bussed kids over 45 minutes away from South Central Raleigh to Sanderson (North Raleigh) and they did nothing but start fights and cause trouble and also formed gangs to rival Longstreet kids in North Raleigh, who were generally good folk as far as I was concerned.

1/21/2011 2:23:56 PM

so does busing kids actually help them, or does it just make them the small percentage that is acceptable to fail at each school instead of most of them being at one school?

1/21/2011 3:40:55 PM

^ That would be the great debate and seems to depend on who you talk to.

I think one interesting case study is Combs Elementary. It went from being a horrible school to ranked as one of the best in the nation a few years ago. You can read more about it here: http://www2.ed.gov/admins/comm/choice/magnet-k8/index.html

1/21/2011 4:03:29 PM