To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Forcing parents to send their children on a potentially dangerous school bus to a potentially dangerous school in an area which removes the parent from close contact with their child’s school is an idea most caring people would find repugnant. Obviously, most parents who could avoid this situation did, they either sent their children to private schools or moved out of the city, making the problem of segregation worse.
Another repugnant idea that’s advocated is the idea of keeping the Chicago Board of Education in existence. If any organization deserves the dishonor of causing the destruction of more people’s lives, causing more crime, more segregation and has done more to keeping the poor and minorities down and out in poverty, it’s the Chicago Board of Education. It’s done this by denying an education to those that need it the most, the poor–especially poor minorities.
Chicago is not St. Louis and it’s not Milwaukee. The neighborhoods in Chicago and its suburbs are among the wealthiest and poorest in the nation. The poor are more isolated, the wealthy are able to be more insulated and the middle class gets burned more often by the social programs that are forced on them by their government. If you want to solve problems, including the problem of segregation, you can’t do it by forcing more burdens on the middle class. You can solve it by getting to the root of the problem. In the case of segregation in the Chicago public schools, it’s caused by economic segregation and ignorance. Solve the problems of education in Chicago, and within two generations, you’ll solve the problems of segregation. The only way to start to solve that is by eliminating the basic cause of that, eliminate the wasteful, unchanging and unresponsive Chicago Board of Education.
