Fred Klonsky writes with amazement that Mayor Pete Buttigieg just realized that there are segregated schools in his hometown of South Bend.
He acknowledges that he was slow to come to this realization.
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg told Reverend William Barber that he didn’t notice South Bend’s public schools were segregated.
Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend.
“I have to confess that I was slow to realize — I worked for years under the illusion that our schools in my city were integrated… But what I slowly realized… if you looked at the county, almost all of the diversity of our youths was in a single school district,” Buttigieg said in an interview with Rev. William Barber III.
Yes. “All the diversity of our youths was in a single school district,” is a weird formulation.
But that he didn’t realize that integration was an illusion in his city?
Buttigieg is either a liar or suffers from too common a white blindspot.
In Indiana, more than 70 percent of black students attend a non-white majority school,
In 2015, several South Bend schools showed concentrated black enrollment, inconsistent with county racial realities.
The problem of racial segregation is a statewide problem in Indiana. There is much that is wrong in the Hoosier state, and the legislature doesn’t care.
Indiana doesn’t have a plan to combat segregation but it has a robust school choice program of charters and vouchers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Honest question here. Can you win the presidency without being a liar?
I think most Americans are desperate for a president in whom we can have at least some basic trust. I think that’s why Bernie stands the best chance.
Would love to believe this, Dienne. It just seems like dishonesty is too often rewarded among the elite in our society. Bernie is, indeed, very unusual.
Well, yes, I would agree with you about the elite. The question will be, will the people elect our next president or will the elite? The Democratic elite right now are working very hard to nominate anyone but Bernie, which will make it very likely that Trump will win.
“I think most Americans are desperate for a president in whom we can have at least some basic trust.”
If that was the case, Donald J. Trump would not have won. Everyone knew that we could have “at least some basic trust” in HRC to appoint Supreme Court Justices that would make it easier for liberal ideas to thrive. Trump had already told the American people he had a copy of Obama’s birth certificate and been found to be a liar. Voters already know Trump U. was a scam despite Trump telling them if they gave him their money, it would teach them how to get rich. Voters already knew that Trump had used his own foundation’s charitable donations for political campaigns and paintings of him.
But it was clear there were some Americans that would rather have a President for which they have zero trust in than to vote for a President in whom they only had “at least some basic trust”. And that is going to be a huge problem for every candidate, including Bernie, since by the time the right wing propaganda machine gets done with him, the same Americans who decided they didn’t have “at least some basic trust” in HRC to appoint Supreme Court Justices who were not right wing hacks will decide they don’t have basic trust in Bernie either.
That is a problem that won’t go away. There are people who still have more basic trust that Donald Trump did not benefit from Russian interference and is repaying Putin in kind, despite all the evidence in the world. They aren’t going to vote for Bernie once Trump starts telling his lies about Bernie and the Russian propaganda starts amplifying it everywhere with African-American voters particularly targeted and reminded of how untrustworthy Bernie is when it comes to issues of race. Remember, it doesn’t matter if it is true once the Russian propaganda machine starts amplifying the lies. And remember it will always be the candidate’s fault that the Russian lies are making people think that even Trump is more trustworthy as they are.
And very ignorant people will believe that Trump is no worse than Bernie and will insist the Supreme Court doesn’t matter anyway so why not let Trump appoint more right wingers.
Such voluntary blindness is what I call the oblivion of the majority. It is what happens when privilege permits looking the other way.
…”almost all of the diversity of our youths was in a single school district,”
duh. If he had not been in an interview with Rev. Barber who would have thunk…
Another reason why Buttigieg has been called “elite Pete.”
By “All the diversity was in a single school,” did he mean that where most of the African-American kids went to school?” That is called segregation, not diversity.
People choose to ignore segregation by over acknowledging diversity. I live in Howard Co, MD. We are one of the most diverse communities in the US, but we are the most segregated county in the state of MD. Our school system has made national headlines lately because of redistricting…..the rich won’t be denied their say or their way.
He called black people “diversity”. Racist.
Fred Klonsky was wrong. I hope to have permission from a reader to post data he sent, with contrary facts about South Bend schools. They have been under court ordered integration for years.
I am so, so tired of people with no experience in public schools running public school policy.
I used to think it didn’t matter but I no longer do. They simply don’t understand anything about our schools- they came up in a completely different world.
I now check if a candidate attended public schools. I feel like I have to, just as a defensive measure.
Also- if you’re not from the midwest be aware that a city like South Bend with an absolutely dominant presence of an elite college is not exactly the norm for “rustbelt cities”. Pete is playing a little fast and loose with “rustbelt”. His experience as the child of elite academics who attended private schools is not the norm in the “rustbelt”. South Bend hasn’t been making Studebakers for a long, long time. Without Notre Dame South Bend wouldn’t be anything like it is now – it would be a small, struggling city in Indiana like tens of others and you would never hear a word about it.
I see this same pattern now that I live in the South. Many communities have almost all black schools and all white schools in the same district. I even wrote to the superintendent of a neighboring town suggesting that he redraw the attendance map so each school had a minority population. He never responded. My district in NY had about a 30% minority population. The administrators drew the attendance lines so each district had both poor and middle class students. It was a great benefit to the poor students.
Attempts to draw lines to solve segregation led to a massive out-migration in many cities during the last part of the twentieth century. The problem was that they tried to solve man’s prejudices using the public schools without massive expenditures in programs and people. We had to try to do this, and I was a youthful supporter of bussing and other attempts to mix racial and socio-economic groups. Still, our lack of commitment to preserving excellence by admitting that this was going to take a lot of money doomed the attempt. Hostility to race and clan was allowed to infect schools throughout the country. Instead of solving all the problems, some were made worse by the nominal commitment on the part of the communities involved.
It used to be a great benefit to the poor students…until CC and the testing madness took over. Now what happens in these 50/50 schools is that it is test prep all day because the poor kids don’t do well on the tests. The middle class students (who will always do well on the stupid tests) sit around being bored and start to really hate the school climate and start causing trouble. Ask me how I know this? Of course I think ALL schools should be diverse and unsegregated and I don’t/didn’t mind my children going to school and interacting with poor children or special needs kids or black/brown children, but administration changes rules to satisfy a test based numbers game. What happens is that the middle class move into a different zip code or pull their children out and put them into private school. It’s a Catch 22 and a no win situation for all. The tests MUST die!
All the testing does is expose poor students’ struggles, and it does nothing to help them. It further undermines their self image. Many students that do not test well have talents, a work ethic and intelligence that will make them contributing members of society, but we have to build them up, not tear them down.
I think that it is entirely possible that we all ignore the stark realities of our worlds. It is a sad but true reality that the injustices we see are easier to discern at a distance.
Not “all.” The victims of injustice can’t ignore the stark realities. It is easy to see when seen through the lens of inequity. Some of us choose to see. Others do not.
What is obvious to those who are victims is often obscure to those who benefit from the arrangement. You have to want to see to look.
AMEN!
Laws also allow districts to create de facto segregated schools when the only enforceable form of segregation is the “de jure” type.
And here I was thinking The Onion had made it all up…
https://politics.theonion.com/pete-buttigieg-admits-only-recently-realizing-black-peo-1840149324
In California according to the following Ed. Code none of the State’s charter schools should be segregated as the students that live in the same school district as a charter school have the same priority for enrolling as current students of a charter school.
Education Code 47605(d)(2)(B)(B) If the number of pupils who wish to attend the charter school exceeds the charter school’s capacity, attendance, except for existing pupils of the charter school, shall be determined by a public random drawing. Preference shall be extended to pupils currently attending the charter school and pupils who reside in the school district except as provided for in Section 47614.5.
But, in practice only the preference afford returning students is given priority over locally provided preferences that are effective in making privately managed charter school enrollment racially and socioeconomically more discriminatory than public schools of California that are in themselves discriminatory in their enrollments.
Jerry Brown founded Oakland School for the Arts, one of two Oakland charter schools while he was mayor of Oakland and the school established a preference for those passing an enrollment performance while ignoring the Education Code preference be provided for those Oakland pupils residing in the same school district as Oakland School for the Arts.
Jerry Brown’s Oakland School for the Arts that has had a terrible record since he founded Oakland School for the Arts as a college preparatory, arts middle and high school. The Oakland School for the Arts is petitioning Oakland Unified School District for five more years and the School’s record of use of its audition preference to keep away socioeconomically disadvantaged, English Learners, Special Education students is apparent from this Oakland Charter Office comparison 2018-19 Middle Schools Enrollments of all the District’s middle schools and Oakland School for the Arts (OSA):
%Socioeconomically %English Learners % Special
Disadvantaged (6-8 grades only) Education
OSA 14% 2% 8%
Oakland School District 74% 27% 14%
Like the Mayor from Indiana running for President, the Oakland School Board has been blind to the policies it has supported that continues the segregation in its City but recently has recognized the segregated outcome Jerry Brown’s Oakland School for the Arts (OSA) audition requirement has produced and pressured OSA to phase out the audition requirement as part of its renewal.
Note that commitment to phase out audition preference means continuing silence on the right of students in the District to have enrollment priority.
Also, if the School’s enrollment policy is discriminatory, why is the broken enrollment policy just dropped? I’m hoping that the Oakland School Board demand OSA not phase out its discriminatory policy but drop it completely.
We’ve been under court ordered desegregation order for decades with review for every change. I call BS on this article.
Pat,
You are right. The post is wrong. I plan to post a retraction as soon as I get sufficient information. Hopefully tomorrow.
In other news, Pete Buttigieg just discovered that he’s white.
“I have to confess that I was slow to realize — I worked for years under the illusion that I was African American…” — Mayor Pete
SDP: are you a writer for The Onion? If not, you should be; you’re hilarious beyond hilarity, satirical beyond satire, ironic beyond irony.
& loved your PISA poem.
I live in South Bend and this is not a fair representation of Pete or the state of integration in the South Bend Community School Corporation.
South Bend is operating under a Consent Decree, dating back many decades. Schools are highly integrated – except that non-black Hispanics get counted as White. In the west part of town it does mean that several schools are mostly Black and Brown. The bulk of the district is integrated in the way the courts imagined.
I have at least three candidates I’d prefer to our Mayor, but he isn’t awful. The water he walks on is completely frozen, though. And I’d point out that the city borders and school corporation borders are not the same, and the Mayor has no say in anything to do with school corporation policies or operations.
Don,
I hope to post a full correction tomorrow.
This is a perfect example of why I support aspects of the Common Core. I agree that it should have been tested first – no argument. But reading laterally in a digital environment is a skill that all people need today – no matter where you live. The Common Core was meant to address that.
But the change in instruction felt “disruptive” to the subject areas – they were asking all teachers to be “English” teachers and asking all teachers to be “Technology” teachers. Most teachers do not want their subjects to be inter- or multi- disciplinary.
But our “new” Internet / Mass Media world is a dramatic turning point in our world’s history and we do have to experiment with addressing this change. And change (even for good reasons) are difficult to implement.
“Unofficial” segregation is when:
“Schools are highly integrated – except that non-black Hispanics get counted as White. In the west part of town it does mean that several schools are mostly Black and Brown.”
This alone is problematic everywhere it is occurring. It’s what the greater conversation surrounding Buttigieg’s comments are really about.
Also, I wonder what the percentages are AFTER the students enter the schools in East South Bend (and North South Bend and SOUTH South Bend). And not just schools in South Bend, but every other city, town, and state.
The classrooms and “teams” are where the most segregation happens (but not “officially,” of course).
All of this is what we are still fighting. All of this is what Buttigieg wasn’t aware of.