Kansas City Closing Almost 39 Schools to Avoid Bankruptcy

[guido911]

Apparently "white flight" is partially to blame.

"The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment," Kansas City Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks said to applause from a standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 people.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/10/national/main6287595.shtml

[Conan71]

Just a bunch of white racists.  How dare they flee drugs, crime, and poverty.

I'm sure you are largely to blame for this Gweedoedoe

[guido911]

Just a bunch of white racists.  How dare they flee drugs, crime, and poverty.

I'm sure you are largely to blame for this Gweedoedoe

You got that right conman.

[Conan71]

You got that right conman.

hater

[JeffM]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-college-20100308,0,1800629.story

If nothing else made you feel good last week, you had to smile at the news out of Urban Prep Academy for Young Men, a charter school in Englewood.

Every one of the 107 students in Urban Prep's first senior class has been accepted to a four-year college.

That's a remarkable achievement, especially considering that the overall college acceptance rate for Chicago public school graduates is 52.5 percent. And that number doesn't include the many students who start high school but don't finish it.

Urban Prep's acceptance rate would be the envy of any school, public or private. But consider this: When these seniors entered Urban Prep as freshmen, only four percent read at grade level. And 82 percent of the school's students come from low-income families.

Urban Prep helped the kids make up ground by implementing a tough, college-prep curriculum that required double periods of English. All told, Urban Prep students spend 72,000 more minutes in the classroom than their peers at regular CPS schools.

[Red Arrow]

White flight should have provided affordable housing for minorities.

[nathanm]

White flight should have provided affordable housing for minorities.

If it weren't for that pesky thing called maintenance. It's pretty hard to replace a roof or even repaint if you hardly have any money because you can't get a good job because all the jobs fled to the suburbs, you can't afford a car, and the bus takes 2 hours each way. And, of course, the at the time century old houses we're talking about require a lot more maintenance than something newer.

Or, if you prefer, take a place like St. Louis, where there are more houses than people who want to and can afford to live in them. They end up abandoned due to lack of demand, followed by neglect. That leads to homeless drug addicts inhabiting them, bringing down the value of surrounding homes even further.

It was exacerbated, of course, by many bank's policies back in the 50s and 60s of not lending money collateralized by inner city housing, regardless of the borrower's income or the surrounding neighborhood. (redlining) By the time regulation dealt with the redlining issue, it was too late. The neighborhoods were toast and nobody wanted to live there anyway.

This was all happening just at the beginning of the civil rights movement, at a time when very few minorities held good jobs. Often not because they were uneducated (although many were due to the "black" schools getting far less money than the "white" schools), but because racism was endemic, so nobody would hire minorities for anything more than a menial job. You know, the ones we hire Mexicans for today.