We could share another several dozen posts about the gross inequities in the American school system, but since it’s not widely known, I want to bring a fairly Boston-centric solution into the discussion, The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) program:
The METCO program brings non-white children from racially imbalanced urban schools in Boston and Springfield to predominantly white suburban schools in nearby communities. The urban students and the suburban students study and learn together in integrated classrooms.
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Approximately 3300 Boston and Springfield students in grades K-12 take part in METCO. They attend schools in suburban communities that have voluntarily joined the program. The program is free.
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The METCO program has been in existence since 1966, and is the nation’s largest voluntary desegration program. About 15,000 students are on the METCO waiting list.
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METCO students from urban Boston and Springfield attend schools in suburban school districts for free. METCO students get the same educational opportunities and services as students who live in the suburban districts.
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METCO students also get additional free support services to help them succeed in the program. Each participating school district has a METCO director or coordinator. Support services vary from one school district to another, but often include:
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* support staff such as academic counselors, tutors, and instructional aides
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* Family Friends and host family partnerships between METCO urban families and suburban families
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* motivational speakers
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* multicultural clubs and social events
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* scholarship programs
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* summer school
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In addition:
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* All Boston METCO students get free after-school tutoring in Boston, provided by METCO, Inc.
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* All METCO students get free school transportation. Districts often provide late buses to allow METCO students to take part in after-school sports or other extracurricular activities, or to visit with friends from school.
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* In almost all cases, students accepted into METCO are allowed to stay in the program until they graduate.
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* METCO parents are expected to participate fully in their child’s schooling and be available to attend scheduled meetings and functions…
Forty years of practice, more than three thousand students participating, five applications for every available spot (winners are chosen by lottery). METCO’s been a lifeline for thousands of bright, hard-working poor kids from “the projects” who got their shot at the same education being offered to the kids of Harvard professors and Route 128 rocket scientists. The young Henry Louis (Skip) Gates, Jr. would’ve given his left hip joint for a crack at a program like this — Professor Gates has been pretty explicit about how the pervasive institutional racism he grew up fighting permanently affected the way Gates interacts with white “authority”, even after many years as a member of America’s wealthy, educated, talk-show-guesting elite.
On the flip side, METCO’s not an educational-opportunities program, it’s a desegregation program. It was started, back in the 1960s, in a attempt to ward off court-ordered busing by leveraging the liberal guilt of white suburban parents who’d moved to Wayland, Lincoln, and Natick to get away from the crappy urban schools. Of course, it didn’t prevent Judge Kennedy from ordering Boston to start busing kids to achieve numerical racial parity, but it did buy the parents who helped organize METCO another precious few years for their own kids to grow up and ‘age out’ of the system. (Never overlook how much “Educational Reform” is measured out in three-year or six-year installments. Those parents who are the most dedicated fighters don’t have the luxury of taking the long view, because their kids are going to enter kindergarten / primary / middle / high school on a one-time and inexerable timetable.) And because it’s been such a lifesaver for so many deserving kids, from sharecropper refugees out of the Deep South to today’s immigrants from Cambodia, Haiti, and Nigeria, it’s got a vast pool of deep-pocketed, politically savvy alumni to support its continued survival.
But it’s not for poor white kids. Screw caste-based discrimination; the same suburban parents who were willing to make space in their after-school-program-supporting hearts for the deserving minoritites — kids like young Barry Obama, who were clean & articulate & polite to their adult “sponsors” — had no love for potential Will Huntings. They didn’t want the Irish and Italian kids from Southie or the North End competing with their own coddled darlings, and they knew the Feds weren’t going to wade into the income-discrimination swamps to force the issue. And the “ethnics” of Boston and Springfield, not to mention Lowell, Brockton, Malden, and Everett, were and are perfectly aware of why Wellesley chose to ally with the African-American parents in one end of Dorchester over the white welfare recipients at the other end. White working-class cops like Sgt. James Crowley, or his kids, weren’t eligible for METCO. (Note: I don’t know Sgt. Crowley’s personal background.)
Cambridge, despite the stereotypes, is mostly a working-class city with a few very wealthy, very exclusive enclaves. Does the perfectly-understandable-given-the-historical-circumstances discrimination between “deserving”, non-white urban children looking for an educational opportunity like METCO and their “unqualified” white peers influence the social dynamics of a chance interaction between an elderly high-status African-American professor and a middle-aged (Busing Era) servant-status white police officer? Are a bear’s sanitary facilities conveniently located in proximity to its forest abode?
rufflesinc
Get rid of school zones on a state wide basis. Students can attend any school in the state they reside if their parents are willing to provide transportation. The per student funding then goes straight to that school.
I’m probably biased having attended a high school in a county where two neighboring high schools are in school zones that don’t have any rental units and all houses go for $300k and up
Cermet
This agument is so old – when 15% of the billionaires, MD’s, lawyers earning 200K+, CEO’s,or, … well, name any high paying job, are black, then I’ll believe that blacks don’t need any help to equal the scale (note, while there are more poor whites, whites still get nearly all the top paying jobs). Yes, poor children of whites should get help but until the Feds pay 50% or more of school costs, that will never happen. Meanwhile, about the only thing blacks hold an advantage in is jail due to our insane drug laws that target poor blacks. Go figure.
By the way, my daughter attended a school located near a major city and 15% of the student body were black and 12% of the students got free lunches – the school was as good as an elite private school but it had 100% involvment by parents and a good tax base for 80% of its area to draw on. Money and involved parents.
someguy
Poor whites mainly aren’t poor as a result of racial discrimination. Sorry but I don’t see the tragedy here.
Bootlegger
Does Ozzy Osbourne bite the heads off chickens?
Cat Lady
@someguy:
Put the why that is on a bumper sticker, and I’ll be the next Senator from Massachusetts.
Some local “color” about METCO.
/masshole
Emma
Someguy: I do. NO CHILD should be told “you’re not (good/right color/too middle class/whatever) to get an education.” That’s why I advocate for the direct funding of school districts by the federal government.
Works like this: The feds take a look at a state, average out the top ten spending districts, then supplement the state funding for all the other districts in the state based on that average, using some of the taxes collected in that state. The money goes directly to the schools. Call it the American Child Equal Education Act. State officials that howl about “local control of school systems” are told to suck it up.
I know, I know….
Monkey Daddy
I grew up in a middle-class suburb of Boston (a bit further out than Swellesley or Snewton). Interacting with the METCO student — especially the ones on my football team — was advantageous to me as a white kid with otherwise limited exposure to other races/classes. I live in a majority black neighborhood in a majority black city now.
As an aside, those METCO kids worked hard, and were up early and home late because of the busride.
katjam
You are conflating two different things: racial disparity and economic disparity. For the most part African Americans have received a one-two punch. Programs like METCO have given them a way to counter the first and, yes, that has often meant offsetting the economic disparity of these students as well.
Poor whites have always suffered economically but now more and more middle class citizens are going to join their ranks not only because of this current devastating Recession has been so destructive but because 30 years of Republican trickle down economic policies have resulted in the hollowing out of our middle class. Republicans now want to unweave as much of the safety net as possible so if you are a Will Hunting not only will there be no METCO programs in your future but Social security, Medicare, and all other federal and state programs you might hope to rely on are at risk. If you are a Will Hunting you are a damn fool if you vote for any Republican much less a radical Tea Party candidate even if the Democrats are fumbling fools much of the time.
(In my mind I can envision a wonderful political cartoon: A large male figure labeled “Republican policies” is taking a piss on a group of small-sized figures labeled “Middle Class.” His stream is labeled “Trickle Down Economics.”)
Justin
As someone who taught in a METCO school (Newton’s Lincoln- Eliot), let me add another perspective. Contrary to what some people might believe, not all the kids in Newton, or the other METCO receiving districts, are coddled affluent white kids. L-E, close to the line with Watertown, served 2 shelters and our students did not, by and large, come from wealthy families. We had a sizable FRPL population, not all of which resulted from METCO, and the vast majority of our kids came from working class (lower to middle) families.
flavortext
LAUSD has a race-blind magnet school system, but the greatest busing system in the world isn’t going to prevent every student growing up in poor socioeconomic conditions from dropping out.
jwb
@rufflesinc: If you want to see how that would shake out, just look at the state university level, which operates on a similar system, and often ends up pretty stratified by class and race. Then, too, how are you going to fund such a system? Most states/communities fund a good chunk of education through property taxes, and if you get rid of the school zoning, the property tax basis stops making sense. This means that the state will have to take over complete responsibility for funding. That is not meant as a criticism of the proposal, but merely pointing out some ramifications.
El Cid
[Removed– wrong thread somehow. Weird things go on with comments on Firefox.]
MNPundit
No.
I am fairly sure bears do not shit where they live.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Get rid of school zones on a state wide basis. Students can attend any school in the state they reside if their parents are willing to provide transportation. The per student funding then goes straight to that school.”
Problem with that is, you have limited capacity in an individual school, so you have to ration the places for the popular schools.
We had a system like you suggest in San Francisco: you could apply for any public school but if the school was over subscribed, then a lottery for the places would kick in. And the lottery was tailored to get the best socioeconomic balance possible.
I liked it. Most parents *hated* it, because the problem of limited capacity didn’t occur to them.
jwb
@Sock Puppet of the Great Satan: “Most parents hated it, because the problem of limited capacity didn’t occur to them.” I would have hated it as well, because lotteries, however fair, don’t allow you to plan. Lotteries make it very difficult for parents to figure out what the best course of action for their kid is.
Dustin
@ #2 & #3:
I’m going to guess that you, growing up and looking forward to your college career, didn’t get the culture shock of finding out that even though you had the brains to get accepted into college despite poor primary and secondary schooling you weren’t able to afford to go.
I’m also going to guess that you never fought tooth and nail against a system that constantly told you you were “privileged” and that your inability to pay the portion of your tuition not covered by loans was “too bad, tough luck”.
Well sorry, I have. So take your “there’s no problem here because other white people are the elite” BS and shove it.
jinxtigr
I grew up with METCO. I was in Lexington, and my white uppermiddleclass family had METCO friends- a kid named Malcolm. My folks were friendly with his folks.
My grandmother was racist- an old white banker lady who apparently grumbled about jungle-bunnies or some such term.
My mom was determined not to pass that on, and she did good that way.
Once I visited Malcolm’s home. I had never been in a city. I’d never seen apartment buildings, or a door buzzer where you pushed the buzzer and they let you through. I was terrified. Thought I was in Attica or something.
These experiences are priceless for everybody on every side. It ain’t about making little black kids morph into white suburbanites. You have to SHOW people how each other live, in a palpable, memorable way. I still remember how terribly unfamiliar it was going into that city apartment building, the scariness of the buzzer. It wasn’t suburban at all, at all.
METCO kicks ass. More like that.
Jager
Metco also helped some lily white high school basketball, football and track programs, the hockey teams not so much.
Cat Lady
@Jager:
: )
JMC in the ATL
A couple of thoughts:
1) The idea that anyone should be able to attend any school in a state that the parents can arrange transportation to, by its nature, favors those of higher socioeconomic status. Is a subsidized bus pass going to get a poor kid out of the city and into the suburbs in most metro areas?
2) I grew up in the inner suburbs of Boston as well, and METCO is pretty awesome at widening the experiences of those willing to have them widened.
3) This may make me sound like a douchebag, but in metro Boston in particular, the various Catholic schools offer a very good (or at least they did when I was growing up) alternative for smart kids who didn’t qualify for METCO.
Bloix
The voters of Massachusetts, a majority of whom are white and working class, could have voted at any time for a legislature that would have increased spending and equalized it across neighborhoods and towns. They didn’t do it, and it’s not the job of the federal courts to tell the voters of Massachusetts what they should do about educating their children. But it is the job of the federal courts to remedy discrimination.
Jager
One last thought from a Boston Guy (relocated to LA) I was in school in Boston when METCO started, went through all the busing bullshit, etc, etc, etc. Before I go to bed, South Boston High School’s Basketball Team was one hell of lot better after busing, way fucking better.
russell
I guess the question here is not whether METCO is a good program or not. The question is why white kids from Boston can’t participate.
I don’t see that the deep historical and social reasons for why a particular kid’s family is poor matters all that much. To the kid, anyway. If you’re stuck in a not-so-great school, the fact that you’re there because of the historical legacy of racism, vs. the historical legacy of your folks are just white and poor, is kind of academic.
You’re still stuck in a not-so-great school.
I live near Boston, in a town that hosts METCO students. I wasn’t aware that white kids were excluded from the program. I agree, they shouldn’t be.
not a gator
When I was a kid, I thought they had METCO everywhere. What a bummer to find out that my city took far more METCO kids than the ‘burbs around us (most of which took them in proportions than call to mind the Ivy League quotas) and of course that the program was voluntary and unique, not to be found elsewhere.
It’s also amazing that the program is virtually unknown outside Mass., while the disgusting South Boston race rioting and racially-motivated violence in their housing projects is national knowledge, to the point that many Black people have told me they’re afraid to move to Boston for fear that it is more racist than where they are already living.
Boston and Cambridge (ha ha, especially Cambridge) have their race issues for damn sure (redlining was typical until VERY recently, for one thing, and forget about Hailing A Cab While Black) but, well, just for one example, my sibs didn’t know any KKK members at school until we moved to suburban Maryland. When I left Boston in the early 2000’s the Gen X up-and-comers in government were working hard to undo decades of institutional racism, whereas in Florida where I live now the so-called “liberal” whites don’t fuckin’ care. (Although occasionally they pay (unintentionally hilarious) lip service to the idea… such as when a local pol in Gainesville, while helping her buddies steal money from the communal pot, tried to lay cover by claiming it was part of their “plan for [to redevelop] the East Side” … even though the piece of real estate in question was in the historical NW (Pleasant St/5th Avenue/Seminary Lane) neighborhood! Oops!)
I guess with racism it’s easier to go with the “devil you know”.
not a gator
Re: white kids being excluded
I’ll agree with that when white, I mean Irish Catholic kids stop getting special preferences in the Boston Public Schools.
Why is it legal for Catholic school students to take the same exam twice and enter Boston Latin based on the SECOND score while public school students must compete using their FIRST score?
The legal system in Mass. has upheld an unfair system where Catholic school kids get to use Boston Latin as a safety school when they SUCK too much to get into the Catholic exam high schools (such as Trinity, Boston College Academy, etc.). For a while there was an affirmative action program which held open slots for students of color (who overwhelmingly attended the criminally crappy–and racist–Boston Public schools) but this was struck down, while the privileged Catholic school kids were allowed to CONTINUE to take THE SAME EXAM TWICE. (Source: Boston Globe)
Did horrible the first time? Take it again in six months, and then submit your score along with first-time takers. No, that isn’t like cheating at all.
Is it fair that private school students are allowed to drive around to the front of the line in front of public school students for admission to the PUBLIC exam school?
not a gator
Hah, they didn’t move there to get away from Boston’s schools. Natick public schools? Srsly? Lincoln is debatable, but you didn’t even come close to naming towns famous for GOOD schools in pre-MCAS Mass.
Whites moved out of Boston in the 60’s because of fear that their houses were losing value because n******s were moving into the neighborhood. They moved into inner ring suburbs (such as Dedham, which carried on with illegal redlining for years) not far from the communities they left. Heck, some of them torched their houses in pursuit of insurance money, allegedly worth more than resale value, as they left.
The ones who stayed pulled their kids out of the public schools … but that’s assuming they were in to begin with. The Catholics who could afford to already had their kids in private schools. The parochial schools date back to the 19th century when the Commonwealth (run by Proddies) declared war on Popery and included Protestant prayers and propaganda in the school curriculum with the explicit intention of molding children into non-Catholics. Thus, the Catholic immigrants poured their communal resources into a parallel school system (which went all the way to the college level).
But yes, this was the period of disengagement and disinvestment in urban schools, as well as the time (the 80’s especially) when yuppies would move out of the city as soon as they had kids because the city “was not safe” and the schools were bad (the self-fulfilling prophecy).
The rioting and anger against segregation (which continued through the 1990’s) manifested in the neighborhoods of poor laborers who couldn’t afford private school tuition for their children–in the slums of South Boston (Irish Catholic) and ghetto of the North End (Italian Catholic). However, these people didn’t have the means to flee. Rather, they attempted to turn their neighborhoods into armed garrisons to repel the alien invaders whom, they believed, were being showered with undeserved favors by the WASP power structure.
Back to schools, Newton was once (before MCAS) considered one of the best school systems in the entire USA (perhaps among the top five). Many families paid a premium to move there. Newton also had one of the highest rates of participation in the METCO program. There may have been some white guilt at work because Newton’s largest historically black neighborhood was razed (via eminent domain) as part of the Mass Pike Extension Project in the 1960’s, and its residents scattered.
But maybe not. The elementary school in the Newton system which took more METCO students than any other in the late 1990’s (Memorial-Spaulding) was as far geographically as you could possibly get from the old West Newton and still be in the city limits.
Maybe it wasn’t white guilt. Maybe arose from the belief that exposing their children to greater diversity was a critical component of their education and also from a desire to share the great bounty that they enjoyed.
If I recall the content of the school assemblies I attended at Mem-Spaulding in the 1980’s and note that part of Mem-Spaulding’s district is one of the wealthiest zip codes in the US (ha ha, please note, not all of it–my ‘hood was nicknamed “Levitown”–and in the Hub it’s typical for the rich to be cheek by jowl with the middle class and even the poor), I find this interpretation to be even more plausible.
not a gator
Actually, there is a grain of truth to the OP’s MeFirst!OMGTHEPAINOFBEINGIRISHCATHOLICINIRISHCATHOLICBOSTON screed, which is that during the 19th century there was open and ugly anti-Catholic discrimination in Massachusetts.
All that started to change with the rise of Irish Catholic politicians, including the Irish Marion Barry, corrupt Mayor Michael Curley (early 20th century).
Boston now has an ITALIAN mayor. (Italians were even lower on the ladder than Irish, with the Irish for many years making sure they stayed that way! After all, if you’re clinging to a rung there’s nobody you hate more than the guy below you trying to grab your rung and maybe inadvertently push you off in the process. Kind of explains Boston Irish and Italian enmity towards Blacks, West Indian Immigrants, Vietnamese, Jews, Laotians, Gays, etc, as well.)
not a gator
@russell:
So apparently you’re unaware that for DECADES the Irish and Italians in South Boston and the North End believed that their neighborhood schools were precious, delicate snowflakes that would be irreparably harmed by the inclusion of lazy, shiftless, violent, crack baby Negroes, or, to put it in the politically correct terms of the time, that desegregation was really a ploy to make ALL of the schools as bad as the bad schools in the “inner city”.
“Reasonable people” used to say that desegregation would make all the schools worse and that the “reasonable” solution was to quietly fix the Black schools. Parents in “white ethnic” ‘hoods in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and ’80’s were perfectly pleased to send their kids to their local school; they were only mad at being told to share.
The OP’s rant is the new conservative crybaby, klepto-cries-victim, “reverse racism” meme that was only minted about a decade ago when sore-loser titty babies whose precious darling, who didn’t score high enough to get into the private exam schools, and who was ALSO passed over by the public exam school (Boston Latin School, not to be confused with all the private schools with “Latin” in the name), discovered that their brat’s exam score was higher than some of the students who were accepted. (Never mind that precious-darling-genius was taking the exam for the second time vs. kids who were taking it once.)
This is coming out now because the generation who was forced to attend desegregated schools (but still believed the racism and ethnocentrism of their parents) now have kids and don’t care if their kids go to school with kids of other races, after all, they did and look how they turned out, but they DO care if those other ethnic groups are perceived as getting a better OR EQUAL “break” compared to themselves.
Ethnic identity politics are all about ME ME ME. “No Irish need apply” is long gone but the political and cultural machine that arose to defeat it is still rumbling on. I would say “much like the ‘New Black Panthers'” except that that was just three guys. You’ll find a lot more than three open defenders of Irish or Italian ethnic supremacy in Boston and environs.
not a gator
@Dustin:
I’m sorry, but being unable to pay for college does not discriminate by race. (The FAFSA and Stafford Loan programs are need-based.)
My wife’s family had no money but her mom sacrificed like crazy so that she could study, get A’s, and spend her free time applying for literally hundreds of scholarships. Oh yeah, they were white.
I attended a METCO school. METCO’s still around because it benefited both parties. For decades poor (Catholic) whites wanted no part of it; only now do they stroll in with Johnny-come-lately whining about the structure of the program. I’m sorry, but when METCO was created it was GOVERNMENT POLICY to raze JEWISH, BLACK, IMMIGRANT, and GAY neighborhoods to build public works projects. Poor whites were spared this–as well as incinerators and other polluters being sited in their neighborhoods–OUT OF DEFERENCE TO THEIR POLITICAL POWER.
Oh boo hoo hoo, the worm has turned, with many communities in Massachusetts VOLUNTARILY DESEGREGATING (such as the once lily-white West Roxbury), but the right-wing Catholic muhajideen isn’t ready to get with the times and put down their arms yet. Cry me a river, crybabies.
not a gator
Exactly. Although as someone who also attended a school desegregated by mandate in another state, the latter was actually even MORE educational. Growing up in the inner ring ‘burbs of Boston was a VERY sheltered life.
Only because it came out that some of the brothers at Catholic Memorial (which was practically down the street from me when I was growing up) were molesting the boys there.
The anti-affirmative action thing started before the RCC scandal broke. (There had been a trial of one priest for diddling kids but it was still considered an anomaly.) I can only imagine that today, with the drop in church attendance across Boston and drop in money being given to the church and church schools, there’s a certain lack of enthusiasm for parochial education.
In the 80’s the Catholic schools were considered the cream of the crop, if more conservative than Newton or Lexington (and to some parents that was a plus), while many Boston parents didn’t want their kid going to Boston Latin. My my how the worm turns.
But maybe now there will be some REAL effort to restore the lustre of the Boston Public School System. Once a national jewel, it was shivved and left for dead in the 1960’s. Now that hipster and gay parents are settling in ‘hoods like Rozzie we might actually see some well-educated activist parents pushing for positive changes. (To be fair, African-American students have been fighting hard to improve their schools for twenty years, and AA parents have been pushing for neighborhood schools, especially on the elementary level, for about fifteen.)