Integration and the Benefits of Mixing Up Schools

Guest post from Pissed Off Liberal Jew!

While DK is a fan of all things homogeneous, I personally feel that educational institutions benefit from teaching high level materials to diversified groups of people. This week Professor Andrew Furman writes about his time on an inter-racial basketball team in the San Fernando Valley during the early 1980s in the Forward. Furman paints a picture of, well, taking a picture with his team of blacks, whites, Jews and an Asia. All stereotypical jokes aside (for there are plenty) OF COURSE this happened:

I remember the photographer looking down into the viewfinder of his fancy camera, then looking back up again, gazing toward us for a moment without saying anything, as if he had noticed something troubling through the lens but wasn’t quite sure how to address the problem. Recognizing the photographer’s discomfort, our graying coach, Bob Johnson, a man as mild as his name, broke his pose and peered over toward his players, taking us in.

“Okay, I think we better mix it up a little over here. This doesn’t look so good,” he uttered, giving audible expression to what was certainly on the poor photographer’s mind.

A quick look about and his meaning was clear. The five black players on our squad all stood on one side, while the rest of us had congregated together on the other. It took a mere moment to arrange a satisfactorily integrated tableau. Appeased, the photographer snapped the photo and we were done.

But holding hands and making friends, in my opinion, isn’t the point. The point is the exposure. Yes it would be wonderful, and in the end it worked out this way for Furman and his team, if people made friends with people from the other side of the tracks. The benefits of busing are summarized in one of his final points: I didn’t realize it at the time, but my world, as well as the world of my black teammates, had grown larger because of the vigorous efforts during the 1970s and 1980s to integrate the city’s public schools. Furman and his teammates were forced, by the state and school, to learn something that would have never been teachable with a book.

Regardless of the downsides (for there are plenty) busing and forced integration made/makes people think bigger. I went to a public school in the San Fernando Valley as well. However, it was not in the LAUSD. I was in a “public” school district with far fewer people in a much more expensive suburban ‘hood. The over all feeling of the school was Jewish. While playing of the football team that forced the Catholic coaches to let us miss two-a-days for Yom Kippur was empowering, over-all my high school wasn’t exactly “Stand and Deliver.”

In college I got to know many folks of different colors and creeds. But for the most part my close friends were Jewish. When I started into college politics, I was forced to work with different people. By working with them for long hours, like Furman did on his basketball team, I got to know these people better. I learned about Pilipino customs (and of that particular spelling because there is no “F” sound in the Pilipino language), Latino music and food, Black American holidays and even some Christian stuff. Because I was forced into a situation that I didn’t know before, I learned more.

I also made some great friends, but that isn’t the point nor should it be the argument for integration of schools. The educational system in the United States is in really bad shape. Anything to make it better and more complete is needed. Economic and social integration of public schools is the right thing to do for education not for socialization. Make the better argument.
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I am a Liberal Jew and I am Pissed
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