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1/ In 1966, a group of Boston-area parents partnered together to create a program called METCO. It bussed predominantly black and Latino students to wealthy white neighborhoods in the suburbs, with the goal of giving students of color access to better educational opportunities.
2/ METCO’s founders believed that, eventually, housing integration would make the program unnecessary. But affluent white families continued to self-segregate in the suburbs and thwart attempts to build affordable housing developments that minority families could occupy.
3/ Some parents assume that METCO costs them, because it adds more students to schools, not realizing that their town gets state money for participating. Asking parents to pay higher taxes so that more students from elsewhere could join their local schools would be a tough sell.
4/ @AlanaSemuels reports that METCO struggles to maintain funding and support, even though it resulted in a 98 percent high-school graduation rate for the students it bussed in.
5/ Yet Massachusetts, like many other states, has continued to let the issue of segregation and integration fall by the wayside. No new districts have signed up to allow students to be bussed in for more than 20 years.
6/ Parents of color know that a good education is accessible if their children can attend a white school in the suburbs. But the current waitlist for METCO is 8,000 people long, and persuading white parents to support a program that isn’t about white children is no easy feat.
7/7 Read @AlanaSemuels’s feature for the full story and what METCO says about modern integration: theatlantic.com/education/arch…
