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I don’t mind saying that I was a darned good 7th grade math teacher. I quickly became Math Department Chairman and started a Math Club. I set up a “math lab” with big graphics in an empty classroom and, using again my publicist skills, brought some pride and considerable notice to the school. I took over one of the district’s few teletype computer terminals and started the first rudimentary computer science work at the mid-school level.
But I also drank from a bitter cup of learning. My school was one of several “magnet” schools in the district. Magnet schools, I had already figured out, weren’t created to help superior students, they were created to draw the most outspoken parents away from the desegregation controversy. It had been well established that the real difference between the “good” and “bad” schools in any given district was the participation of the parents. Those more affluent parents who had the time to help their schools with time and money made the “good” schools, and the poor overworked single-parent families were left with the “bad” schools.
The legal and moral prescription was for integration of good and bad schools, especially across racial lines. But from the point of view of politicians and school administrations, the real solution was to isolate the “good” parents from the controversy. Thus, magnet schools came about. The most affluent and involved parents, naturally, put their children into the magnet schools. The magnet schools, having the basic element of involved parents, were the most successful schools. The other schools might not be desegregated, but who was left to complain? All the activist parents had already gotten what they wanted. Desegregation was completely sidelined.
A problem even more insidious, I soon came to realize, had to do with the placement of new school buildings. If school districts in the South had wanted to integrate, they would have built new facilities in between segregated communities, thus promoting integration. But they didn’t, and there were no laws to force them to do it. New schools continued to be placed at the centers of segregated communities, therefore insuring, geographically, that segregation would continue. Busing, applied in a deliberately provocative way, had already been discredited. No parents wanted their children transported far away to school, they wanted schools conveniently close by. Segregation, supposedly outlawed in America, rolled right along!
My direct involvement came because the Houston school district had a bond proposal that the teachers’ union opposed. I’ve forgotten what their objection was, but my own objection, and I publicized it thoroughly, had to do with the placement of proposed new school buildings -- right in the middles of segregated communities.
Sure, I was an excellent teacher and a booster of the school, but I was enemy number one to Houston school administration and, particularly, to my own principal! I soon got my first taste of filing a union grievance. I learned from that, too. I learned that my union had very little enthusiasm for opposing management, even with a grievance they couldn’t lose, and that anti-communism was more important than other considerations, even within the union.
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