How Forced
Integration Drove L.A. Jews into Private Schools, by Gary North - 5/18/16
I knew
only one Jew in my high school: Larry Altchuler. As far as I know, he was the
only Jew on a campus of 2,000. He was a friend. He gave me great
advice: join Junior Achievement. JA trains teenagers in the basics of starting
a business. I declined. Now, 60 years later, I teach high schoolers how to start
businesses. Strange.
There was only one Asian on campus:
Lily Sunada. I never knew her. I don't recall ever seeing her.
We were in Manhattan Beach, a
middle-class suburb two small towns south of the Los Angeles city line. I could
walk to the L.A. airport . . . or walk home at 10 p.m. if I missed the bus,
which I did once.
I knew that there was a high school
in Los Angeles that was mostly Jewish: Fairfax High. It closed on Yom Kippur.
It was not known for being good at any sports. It was known for its academics.
At Boys State, the American Legion
summer program in politics -- Bill Clinton is its most famous alumnus -- I met Joel Gora. He was at Fairfax. He had just been elected Lord High
Commissioner. The gentiles had student body presidents. Not Fairfax. Lord High
Commissioner sounded really important. I was impressed. That was in 1958.
Two decades later, the Jews were no
longer at Fairfax. They were in private schools.
What happened? Forced integration
happened. Busing happened.
DIASPORA
I read an
article on this by Steve Sailer. I never knew about
it. I left California in 1975. I had never lived in Los Angeles.
It should come as no surprise that
hard-core liberal Jews were behind the integration, and run-of-the-mill
Democrat Jews fought it.
Very quietly, whites left the
schools. Jews were among the defectors. Back then, Catholics tended to go to
Catholic schools, and Protestants lived in independent school districts like
Pasadena, San Marino, and Orange County.
Moreover, San Fernando Valley Jews
were highly enthusiastic about public schooling. One of my older memories is
hearing from my Jewish teammates on my baseball team at the local park that
Catholic schools were kind of un-American. Jews went to public schools to
demonstrate their commitment to civic Americanism.
But then, very quickly, they
stopped.
Yet that massive historical example
that happened 38 years ago at the heart of the world capital of the
entertainment industry has largely been lost in the mists of time.
The Jewish exodus from LAUSD [Los
Angeles Unified School District] reached its peak during the desegregation
movement of the 1970s.
After the ACLU filed a lawsuit in
1963 to end segregation in L.A. schools, the LAUSD board created voluntary
integration programs, introducing magnet schools and giving district schools
the option of busing students from lower-performing facilities to higher
performing schools.
In 1976, the California Supreme
Court charged state school districts with enforcing integration. In response,
two years later the L.A. school board began a sweeping mandatory busing program
that would reassign more than 60,000 students, transferring minority children
from downtown and South L.A. to predominantly white schools in the San Fernando
Valley and the Westside, and vice versa.
Students often were bused up to an
hour away from where they lived, and the move caused a public outcry among both
whites and minorities over what many parents saw as "the end of
neighborhood schools," according to former LAUSD school board member David
Tokofsky. Racist and classist prejudices also turned some white families away.
In the first year of forced busing,
the district lost 25,000 white students, recalled Shel Erlich, the former
longtime head of the LAUSD communications office. In the second year, an
additional 17,000 left. In 1981, after only three years, California residents
voted down all mandatory busing programs and the plan in Los Angeles was
suspended.
But the damage had been done -- in
the late 1970s, Erlich said, the district was about 30 percent white; now, that
number hovers below nine percent.
"[Busing] drove a huge number
of Jews from the public schools," said local author and Jewish Journal
columnist Bill Boyarsky. "Parents were not comfortable sending their
children to a school where their kid might be the only white person in the
class."
Jewish leaders had taken both sides
of the busing debate. Educator Jackie Goldberg, who would later win seats on
the Los Angeles City Council and the California State Assembly, headed the
controversial Integration Project in the late 1970s that pushed for mandatory
busing.
Activist and later U.S.
Congresswoman Bobbi Fiedler, on the other hand, led the vocal Bustop movement
in the Valley that fiercely opposed busing and challenged the program in court.
This was one more liberal experiment
that failed. In the name of racial integration, it produced academic
segregation. It was NIMBY in action: "Not in my back yard." The
non-whites got the school buildings, and the whites got out.
By the time the busing period ended,
school overcrowding and sinking test scores were rising issues in the public
school sphere, and most white and Jewish families didn't return to the system,
historians say. Private schools flourished; Jewish day schools proliferated in
the 1970s and 80s.
Falling test scores. Why? Because
the highest achievers left, and the low achievers remained. Surprise, surprise!
It was all done quietly. There were
no cries of "racial bigots are leaving!" It's not wise to call Jews
racial bigots. There will be negative repercussions. So, everyone agreed to
avoid talking about what was obviously happening. "Don't ask. Don't
tell."
I have never seen anything written
about this until now, a generation later.
What is the lesson? If liberal Jews
refuse to sacrifice their kids to the integrated public schools in Los Angeles,
the way that liberal Democrats in Congress refuse to send their kids to
Washington's integrated public schools, there cannot be integration. Talk is
cheap. Private schools are expensive. "Segregation lives!" No KKK. No
burning crosses. Just silent re-segregation.
"Your kids have to go to school
with their kids." "No, they don't." Not in
Los Angeles, and not in Mississippi.
KHAN ACADEMY
This is why the Khan Academy offers
hope to self-disciplined kids in ghetto schools. They can get a good teacher
into their lives. They can get a structured program that is not geared to the
lowest common denominator, after the previous lowest dropped out in 9th grade.
I found out something interesting
last week. There are school districts whose Wi-Fi blocks out YouTube videos.
This blocks out the Khan Academy.
Fairfax High was no threat to Los
Angeles in 1978. It was destroyed by ideology. The public fought back in the
courts. Too late.
The public schools are doomed in the
large cities. They are dying. Their graduates are stigmatized. Yet the public
schools have been America's only established church ever since the 1830's. The
faith that supported them is fading. It cannot withstand the implications of
its own creed: neutral education for
all.
It isn't neutral, and it isn't free.
Khan Academy isn't neutral, either, but it is free.
http://www.garynorth.com/public/15209.cfm
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