Forced Busing does NOT Work :: essays papers

Forced Busing does NOT Work There are many reasons why forced busing is not an adequate way to solve the segregation problem caused in the early twentieth century. For example, many minorities are against forced busing. In Milwaukee, sixty six percent of the urban population is against forced busing (Williams and Borsuk, 1999). This is very surprising considering that minorities are the very people that forced busing is aimed at helping. Why would minorities despise a program designed to benefit them? Busing minorities to primarily white schools is basically telling minorities that they can’t be educated adequately without sitting next to white people (Kreyche, 1992). This is extremely degrading for minorities. Professor Kevin Brown who has completed many studies concerning forced busing concludes that the initial reason behind forced busing was fewer resources in black schools. Brown states that the current reason for forced busing is the absence of white students in black schools. Forcing students of different ethnic backgrounds to sit next to each other is by no means integration (Coeyman, 1998). This practice is actually creating a hot zone for racism. Studies have shown that elementary school children seem to be unaffected by race. However, once these children become middle and high school students, society seems to come down on them and the students align themselves along racial boundaries (Amor, 1995) . Mandated busing gives the impression that whites are superior and blacks are inferior because the government tells them that blacks needs whites to receive an education. This argument comes to a head when the students sit next to each other in a high school class. The recent studies conducted by the American Psychological Association are not the first to focus the factors that influence how people learn. The vast majority of the studies show that the main factors influencing learning are biological factors and family conditions. Researchers have concluded that students are born with different learning capacities, which are reinforced by the way their families feel about education. Students who come from families with one parent or a family with a parent or sibling involved with crime tend to learn at a slower pace than do children who come from families with two parents. Minority students come from â€Å"broken homes† more often than do white students. Hence, the conditions within the school may not be the reason for lower test scores among minorities.