Dear Editor
Dear Editor Busing Robert Lekachman's "The Fragility of Racial Progress" (NL, February 16), provides an interesting examination of the movement toward equality in this country. Like many...
...Busing steadily increased, and a couple of years ago...
...Nowadays students in many white urban schools are barely mastering a watered-down curriculum, while numerous pupils in lower-class black schools are illiterate...
...Society does not invest its schools with great resources or prestige...
...The question now is whether boards of education and the judges will come to their senses while there are still viable school systems and cities left...
...How naive busing supporters are to think that when black youths arrive from a ghetto culture of violence, sex on the staircase and antipathy toward authority, they will consider the white students' behavior worthy of emulation...
...Its strategy is to manipulate people and change society via schooling...
...Even in the more affluent past, taxpayers preferred a dull educational program...
...If the receiving schools were allowed to pick the better behaved and more ambitious pupils, from a compatible social class, the experiment might succeed...
...reducing instruction hours and jeopardizing adult control...
...Thus, a city that outlaws block-busting, practices it...
...Many Negroes are now entering the middle class and many others are being brought up properly...
...There have been two kinds of school segregation...
...The only way to remedy the situation, the critics contend, is to mix pupils in proportion to racial populations...
...And when busing puts them with advanced students they will feel their failures more keenly...
...Peer group and neighborhood continue to influence him strongly during his school years...
...School after school has been overwhelmed...
...Although busing is a major issue, it has seldom been debated...
...Dissenters are labeled hypocrites and racists...
...When an incoming black freshman was overheard threatening to change the school's "atmosphere...
...Supporters of busing expect the white students to tame the black...
...Since the proposition involves millions of children, it is time to analyze its premises and observe its results...
...When underprivileged children have poor family lives and go hungry they are bound to have difficulties in school...
...It is doomed to fail...
...When blacks flood in, whites flee...
...Unsatisfied with a safe degree of integration, they keep pushing for more...
...Part of the blame for the problems of black children lies with the Federal government failing to provide jobs and local governments driving out the middle class...
...Other equally concerned liberals, however, are beginning to consider busing a measure of destruction of public education...
...They should assert themselves more...
...I bad to drive a black youth home from his part-time job to protect him from getting a second beating that day...
...Its main goals are to stimulate lower-class blacks to catch up scholastically and to bring the races to mutual understanding...
...Then the black children will prove they can earn an equal education...
...Although education has helped properly motivated people qualify for jobs, it reflects society more than it influences it...
...All this has a whirlpool effect, sucking urban tax bases down in an increasing tempo...
...The decent folk must control the bad elements in their midst...
...a black senior admonished her not to jeopardize their good standing...
...Where truant officers and psychologists failed with a lower class that is unprepared for school, the white children shall succeed, and without charge...
...This year local white youths over-reacted to rumors and began beating up inbound Negro students...
...In an overdue ruling, the Supreme Court banned this...
...What paragons those white children must be...
...in view of the heady expectations for them...
...How could it be otherwise...
...Family life shapes his major attitudes...
...The other, more recent kind of segregation has occurred where most blacks attend different schools from whites because they live in different neighborhoods...
...Local blacks and whites of similar economic background got along amicably...
...blacks began telephoning threats, molesting girls and attempting riots...
...Most black children know how to behave...
...School employes are being laid off...
...and I emphasize that??but those who don't arc numerous enough to cause chaos...
...They should set standards of personal development...
...but were absorbed without incident, and their inherent decency was given a chance to emerge in the school's more favorable environment...
...This solution is called busing for racial balance...
...How can such enfeebled institutions work social miracles...
...The outcome depends on who sets the tone of the school...
...Later a few blacks from the notorious South Bronx were bused in...
...New York City Richard H. Shut man...
...Proponents of the first declared blacks genetically inferior to whites and separated the races by laws...
...Opponents of these separate schools argue that they give blacks an inferior education...
...An innocent young neighbor of mine learned new things about contact between the races when he was knocked unconscious...
...Limited integration in my Bronx district's high school had seemed to work...
...The school busters are killing the great City of New York and its once fine public education system, created through struggles by liberals and radicals in the past...
...Statements like mine make little impression on racial balancers...
...Supporters promote it righteously, apparently feeling no obligation to prove its value...
...Like many observers, he measures justice in the schools by their degree of integration...
...A child's pre-school years are his most formative...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 7
