A few excerpts from the 1968 book "Danger in Washington," about 20 years experience in Washington DC public schools, serving as head of the system for decades. Had a much longer thread, but the site ate it. Author is a postwar liberal overtaken by the 60s Cultural Revolution.
The author, Carl Hansen, moved from Omaha, Nebraska to DC to join the public school system there. He was shocked and horrified by segregation in DC, which he regarded as evil, and made up his mind to do all he could to oppose it.
By 1954, pretty much all DC was desegregated except the schools. Basically the whole DC govt and school system was thus prepared and eager to comply when Brown v Board was decided.
The "staggering" costs of desegregation, with white families both selling their homes and moving and paying for private schools. Also rumors, such as that black students were less advanced and had more STDs (both true, on average).
Author's judgement on why desegregation succeeded in the 50s and failed in the 60s: falling white % of population and a shift from focusing on white acceptance of blacks to "civil rightists and political ax-grinders."
His first answer: not enough whites, with whites, even liberal ones, leaving the District public schools en masse. Hansen himself did the same, even having the naive honesty to admit to Congress that he wouldn't have bought a house in a colored area.
Some of Hansen's examples of whites leaving: a Jewish rabbi who supported desegregation pleading for a transfer to a whiter high school, a minister whose daughter couldn't adjust to black hygiene/behavior/academic standards, another minister who moved to Massachusetts.
The most militant white supporters of de facto desegregation/Civil Rights tended to be childless and hence not have to face the consequences. Beatings and group attacks on white kids in predominantly black schools.
Hansen strongly opposed bussing. De jure segregation was evil, but he argues de facto segregation is a destructive anti-concept. After all, any group of freely-associating individuals will not be totally representative, and it would be tyrannical to force them all to conform.
The Civil Rights kritarchy. Federal judge Wright ruling that it every school in the country needs to have a proportionate distribution of pupils by race and income, on the grounds that "racially and socially homogenous schools damage the minds" of children who attend them.
The suit was brought by a federal employee/activist black from Alabama, given in addition to his USG salary, thousands of dollars from churches to push for bussing nationwide. The Wright ruling also attacked ability tracking on the same grounds.
The reductio ad absurdum of the Wright ruling: it would appear to ban not just homogenous schools of any sort and ability tracking, but *all* forms of testing, selecting, or grouping by talent/ability/interest. Which is of course exactly what happened.
In the early years of integration, appointments were made on the basis of merit. But black teachers wanted to “put a black man in a top position, even if he is not the best available" to give "young negros something to feel proud about." The Wright ruling mandated that approach.
The disastrous federalization of the US school system, creating a massive bureaucracy and destroying local initiative. The feds paid previously sober and industrious negros to become insane screeching activists teaching parents to protest.
On the decline of monogamy and the Sexual Revolution among students, with many getting pregnant. Prostitution, incest, abuse by older men, homosexuality. Negro girls cornering one of the few white ones and carving the word "slut" into her arm.
Everything in education reform has happened before. White DC students were reading below national average, so the author made a push to revive phonics and teaching kids to read earlier. After he left, the school system dropped tracking and measuring student performance.
Hansen built a tracking system for DC in 1958, but it was abandoned due to negro pressure, ordered abolished by Judge Wright (there's that kritarchy again).
DC's only magnet school was also destroyed to redistribute its whites to eliminate 'de facto segregation.'
The author was eventually forced out of his position when he lost a court case alleging he had discriminated against the poor and Negros in allocation of resources (not true, as with analogous cases today) and the Board of Education forbade him from appealing.
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