7 ms·

The part of the article that mentioned vertical stratification to avoid horizontal stratification hit a chord with me. I personally come from a family of great

by psds2 6y ago

The part of the article that mentioned vertical stratification to avoid horizontal stratification hit a chord with me. I personally come from a family of great means but due to unique circumstances spent much of my childhood living in low income areas and having friends whose parents worked fast food jobs. I think it's the best thing that ever happened to me and I think we would have a better society if more people had close interactions with people going through a different experience than themselves.

istjohn 6y ago
That part jumped out at me, too. > “There were wealthier people on the upper floors,” says Dragonas, “people who had just arrived from the countryside further down and poor students in the basement. That sort of vertical stratification inside a five-story building helped Athens to avoid horizontal stratification — there weren’t really neighborhoods that were only rich or only poor. In the US before Brown v. Board, many cities were similarly integrated along racial and economic lines. It wasn't necessarily integrated within individual apartment buildings, but Blacks and whites would live in the same neighborhoods. When Brown v. Board mandated that schools integrate, racist whites, unwilling to let their children go to the same schools as Black children, fled to the suburbs, taking with them their disproportionate share of wealth and leaving behind impoverished Black ghettoes. Any Black families with the means soon made their own escape, and the downward spiral continued. In many states, the vast majority of school funding comes from property taxes. So schools in wealthy neighborhoods are better funded than schools in poor neighborhoods, and this guarantees homes in wealthy school districts maintain their value since everyone wants their kids in those schools. Here in Ohio, the state Supreme Court ruled that the system of public school funding relying on property taxes is unconstitutional over a decade ago, but nothing has changed. I agree with you that economic segregation is huge societal ill. Studies show that poor folks are vastly better off when they live in economically diverse areas.
- bobcostas55 6y ago
  >In many states, the vast majority of school funding comes from property taxes. So schools in wealthy neighborhoods are better funded than schools in poor neighborhoods, and this guarantees homes in wealthy school districts maintain their value since everyone wants their kids in those schools. In the US, school funding is (on average) progressive because federal and state funding more than offsets any local inequalities. See https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-funding-is-actually-somewhat-progressive/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f...
  - psds2 6y ago
    In the United States teachers school supplies, equipment for band, gear for sports and other items that contribute directly to the quality of a students education and experience are funded by bake sales, booster clubs and other sources of funding that was not at all accounted for in the article you linked or argument you make. At some schools these programs bring in six figure $ from kids reselling boutique cupcakes their mom bought, probably taking a $2 loss on each. Other schools can barely manage to raise $200 at a bake sale.
    - iguy 6y ago
      Do you know of any systematic figures on such things? A six-figure bake sale (if I grant that it happened) is probably 1% of the school's budget (at a school of 1000 in CA, or 500 in NY). I always thought such things existed more as social occasions for parents to get to know teachers and v-v, in a more co-operative context than parent-teacher evenings.
      - psds2 6y ago
        Here is an article I found by The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/pta-fundraising-schools/601435/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/pta-fu... "PTA at a well-off school might raise a million dollars or more to pay for additional teachers’ salaries, band or orchestra instruments, a new library, iPads for classrooms, field trips, or other initiatives." "I later learned that most of the shiny extras (and even some full-time aides and specialty subject teachers) at the other schools were funded by PTAs with budgets in the six and seven figures. Our school’s PTA had less than a thousand dollars in the bank."
        iguy 6y ago
        Thanks. If I was going to pick the location for the craziest such local contrast, I would for sure pick NYC. But it would be interesting to know if there are more systematic figures anywhere, that apply to cities not containing Wall Street.
- Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  Ohio is probably doing nothing about it because their state Supreme Court decision contradicts the national Supreme Court decision in San Antonio vs Rodriguez. I'm no legal scholar, but I think this is right up there with Dred Scott and Citizens United for worst-supreme-court-decisions-of-all-time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School_District_v._Rodriguez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School...
  - istjohn 6y ago
    I believe the Ohio ruling was based on Ohio's own state constitution.
    - Eric_WVGG 6y ago
      Which is overruled by the United States Constitution.
- bluGill 6y ago
  White flight wasn't only because of fear of blacks. That was an issue, but suburbs were in style and offered other benefits. Most people left for other reasons if they could. This is that couldn't afford to leave were poor. Often enough they were black as well. Remember even a tiny minority acting in a bad direction can make the whole that way. Don't descend too far into racism to explain a complex situation.
  - jungturk 6y ago
    These are certainly multi-factor situations, as you say, but white flight isn't the only race-related contributor to deteriorating home prices in predominantly non-white neighborhoods. For example, the impact of federal policies denying mortgage loans in non-white neighborhoods in the 1930s (aka redlining) are still detectable today. If your pool of buyers is lower (because of the lack of availability of a loan program) its reasonable to expect the prices would represent that, and if your prices are growing more slowly that non-redlined neighborhoods, its reasonable to expect prospective buyers could be concerned about investing in those homes. We don't have to meander too far from the facts to see this as racism (assuming we take racism to mean the promotion of white dominance using institutional power). https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-redlining-race-real-estate-values-lc.html https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
    - bluGill 6y ago
      True, but that doesn't mean it was racism that kept individual people out.
  - zip1234 6y ago
    Some of the first zoning in the US was race-based.
  - istjohn 6y ago
    No, that's simply false. White flight was about racism. Period. And it was not "a tiny minority acting in a bad direction," it was one of many ways Blacks were systematically oppressed at the time, see, e.g., red-lining, employment descrimination, and discriminatory policing. (To be clear, except traditional red-lining, all of this still happends.) White opposition to school integration was so mainstream, presidential candidate Joe Biden vocally opposed busing in the 1970's when he was a Deleware senator. You may remember Kamala Harris pointing this out in a Democratic primary debate. In Boston, white residents rioted in opposition to school desegregation. For more evidence that white flight was motivated by racism and not something more innocuous, look at the story school enrollment numbers tell: > Upon desegregation in 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland, the Clifton Park Junior High School had 2,023 white students and 34 black students; ten years later, it had twelve white students and 2,037 black students. In northwest Baltimore, Garrison Junior High School's student body declined from 2,504 whites and twelve blacks to 297 whites and 1,263 blacks in that period.[1] Now look at this chart of Columbus City Schools enrollment over the past 100 years.[2] It looks like a church steeple with the peak at 1971. In the nine years leading up to 1971, enrollment increased 19%. In the nine years following 1971, enrollment fell 34%. What happened? In 1972, the CCS school board adopted a pledge stating, "It shall be the goal and policy of the Columbus Public Schools to prepare every student for life in an integrated society by giving each student the opportunity of integrated educational experiences." In 1974, the board approved a program to transport students in a voluntary racial balance plan. In 1975, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued the school district, demanding desegregation. Finally, in 1979, the district implemented a busing plan to desegregate its schools after the district court ruled against it.[3] White families in the 1970's saw change coming and fled to the suburbs in response. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Desegregation_of_schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Desegregation_of_... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qvT_UF_mZdyqjfDlCdMyxruGGqYaxN-ai0T22CS7jOc/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qvT_UF_mZdyqjfDlCdMy... [3] Getting Around Brown details the entire history of school segregation in Columbus, including the events cited in this paragraph. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxH84YBTnvm3dmhNM0ZqMHlCbDg/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxH84YBTnvm3dmhNM0ZqMHlCbDg...
- zip1234 6y ago
  The current system zoning still reinforces racial and socioeconomic division. Wealthy neighborhoods keep out less wealthy people by only allowing certain types of housing (more expensive housing).
- viburnum 6y ago
  This is false. Redlining and racist covenants predate Brown by decades.
  - istjohn 6y ago
    Yes, there was segregation before Brown. But it was not so pervasive and near-universal in the way it became after. There were many places where whites and Blacks did live in the same areas. These places may have been segregated, but it was on the scale of city blocks or streets. You did not have large urban ghettoes in virtually every city of any size like you do today. Of course Brown was not bad, it was just not enough, and we still have to finish what Brown started. A big part of the problem is that the Supreme Court undermined the force of Brown in subsequent rulings instead of following through.

by psds2 6y ago

istjohn 6y ago

That part jumped out at me, too. > “There were wealthier people on the upper floors,” says Dragonas, “people who had just arrived from the countryside further down and poor students in the basement. That sort of vertical stratification inside a five-story building helped Athens to avoid horizontal stratification — there weren’t really neighborhoods that were only rich or only poor. In the US before Brown v. Board, many cities were similarly integrated along racial and economic lines. It wasn't necessarily integrated within individual apartment buildings, but Blacks and whites would live in the same neighborhoods. When Brown v. Board mandated that schools integrate, racist whites, unwilling to let their children go to the same schools as Black children, fled to the suburbs, taking with them their disproportionate share of wealth and leaving behind impoverished Black ghettoes. Any Black families with the means soon made their own escape, and the downward spiral continued. In many states, the vast majority of school funding comes from property taxes. So schools in wealthy neighborhoods are better funded than schools in poor neighborhoods, and this guarantees homes in wealthy school districts maintain their value since everyone wants their kids in those schools. Here in Ohio, the state Supreme Court ruled that the system of public school funding relying on property taxes is unconstitutional over a decade ago, but nothing has changed. I agree with you that economic segregation is huge societal ill. Studies show that poor folks are vastly better off when they live in economically diverse areas.

bobcostas55 6y ago
>In many states, the vast majority of school funding comes from property taxes. So schools in wealthy neighborhoods are better funded than schools in poor neighborhoods, and this guarantees homes in wealthy school districts maintain their value since everyone wants their kids in those schools. In the US, school funding is (on average) progressive because federal and state funding more than offsets any local inequalities. See https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-funding-is-actually-somewhat-progressive/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f...
- psds2 6y ago
  In the United States teachers school supplies, equipment for band, gear for sports and other items that contribute directly to the quality of a students education and experience are funded by bake sales, booster clubs and other sources of funding that was not at all accounted for in the article you linked or argument you make. At some schools these programs bring in six figure $ from kids reselling boutique cupcakes their mom bought, probably taking a $2 loss on each. Other schools can barely manage to raise $200 at a bake sale.
  - iguy 6y ago
    Do you know of any systematic figures on such things? A six-figure bake sale (if I grant that it happened) is probably 1% of the school's budget (at a school of 1000 in CA, or 500 in NY). I always thought such things existed more as social occasions for parents to get to know teachers and v-v, in a more co-operative context than parent-teacher evenings.
    - psds2 6y ago
      Here is an article I found by The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/pta-fundraising-schools/601435/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/pta-fu... "PTA at a well-off school might raise a million dollars or more to pay for additional teachers’ salaries, band or orchestra instruments, a new library, iPads for classrooms, field trips, or other initiatives." "I later learned that most of the shiny extras (and even some full-time aides and specialty subject teachers) at the other schools were funded by PTAs with budgets in the six and seven figures. Our school’s PTA had less than a thousand dollars in the bank."
      - iguy 6y ago
        Thanks. If I was going to pick the location for the craziest such local contrast, I would for sure pick NYC. But it would be interesting to know if there are more systematic figures anywhere, that apply to cities not containing Wall Street.
Eric_WVGG 6y ago
Ohio is probably doing nothing about it because their state Supreme Court decision contradicts the national Supreme Court decision in San Antonio vs Rodriguez. I'm no legal scholar, but I think this is right up there with Dred Scott and Citizens United for worst-supreme-court-decisions-of-all-time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School_District_v._Rodriguez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School...
- istjohn 6y ago
  I believe the Ohio ruling was based on Ohio's own state constitution.
  - Eric_WVGG 6y ago
    Which is overruled by the United States Constitution.
bluGill 6y ago
White flight wasn't only because of fear of blacks. That was an issue, but suburbs were in style and offered other benefits. Most people left for other reasons if they could. This is that couldn't afford to leave were poor. Often enough they were black as well. Remember even a tiny minority acting in a bad direction can make the whole that way. Don't descend too far into racism to explain a complex situation.
- jungturk 6y ago
  These are certainly multi-factor situations, as you say, but white flight isn't the only race-related contributor to deteriorating home prices in predominantly non-white neighborhoods. For example, the impact of federal policies denying mortgage loans in non-white neighborhoods in the 1930s (aka redlining) are still detectable today. If your pool of buyers is lower (because of the lack of availability of a loan program) its reasonable to expect the prices would represent that, and if your prices are growing more slowly that non-redlined neighborhoods, its reasonable to expect prospective buyers could be concerned about investing in those homes. We don't have to meander too far from the facts to see this as racism (assuming we take racism to mean the promotion of white dominance using institutional power). https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructure/gov-redlining-race-real-estate-values-lc.html https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructu... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
  - bluGill 6y ago
    True, but that doesn't mean it was racism that kept individual people out.
- zip1234 6y ago
  Some of the first zoning in the US was race-based.
- istjohn 6y ago
  No, that's simply false. White flight was about racism. Period. And it was not "a tiny minority acting in a bad direction," it was one of many ways Blacks were systematically oppressed at the time, see, e.g., red-lining, employment descrimination, and discriminatory policing. (To be clear, except traditional red-lining, all of this still happends.) White opposition to school integration was so mainstream, presidential candidate Joe Biden vocally opposed busing in the 1970's when he was a Deleware senator. You may remember Kamala Harris pointing this out in a Democratic primary debate. In Boston, white residents rioted in opposition to school desegregation. For more evidence that white flight was motivated by racism and not something more innocuous, look at the story school enrollment numbers tell: > Upon desegregation in 1957 in Baltimore, Maryland, the Clifton Park Junior High School had 2,023 white students and 34 black students; ten years later, it had twelve white students and 2,037 black students. In northwest Baltimore, Garrison Junior High School's student body declined from 2,504 whites and twelve blacks to 297 whites and 1,263 blacks in that period.[1] Now look at this chart of Columbus City Schools enrollment over the past 100 years.[2] It looks like a church steeple with the peak at 1971. In the nine years leading up to 1971, enrollment increased 19%. In the nine years following 1971, enrollment fell 34%. What happened? In 1972, the CCS school board adopted a pledge stating, "It shall be the goal and policy of the Columbus Public Schools to prepare every student for life in an integrated society by giving each student the opportunity of integrated educational experiences." In 1974, the board approved a program to transport students in a voluntary racial balance plan. In 1975, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund sued the school district, demanding desegregation. Finally, in 1979, the district implemented a busing plan to desegregate its schools after the district court ruled against it.[3] White families in the 1970's saw change coming and fled to the suburbs in response. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Desegregation_of_schools https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Desegregation_of_... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qvT_UF_mZdyqjfDlCdMyxruGGqYaxN-ai0T22CS7jOc/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qvT_UF_mZdyqjfDlCdMy... [3] Getting Around Brown details the entire history of school segregation in Columbus, including the events cited in this paragraph. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxH84YBTnvm3dmhNM0ZqMHlCbDg/ https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxH84YBTnvm3dmhNM0ZqMHlCbDg...
zip1234 6y ago
The current system zoning still reinforces racial and socioeconomic division. Wealthy neighborhoods keep out less wealthy people by only allowing certain types of housing (more expensive housing).
viburnum 6y ago
This is false. Redlining and racist covenants predate Brown by decades.
- istjohn 6y ago
  Yes, there was segregation before Brown. But it was not so pervasive and near-universal in the way it became after. There were many places where whites and Blacks did live in the same areas. These places may have been segregated, but it was on the scale of city blocks or streets. You did not have large urban ghettoes in virtually every city of any size like you do today. Of course Brown was not bad, it was just not enough, and we still have to finish what Brown started. A big part of the problem is that the Supreme Court undermined the force of Brown in subsequent rulings instead of following through.