Flint
Posts: 478
Joined: Jan. 2006
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Maybe education is the key here. The cycle of blacks living in poor inner-city communities, going to schools that teach almost nothing, dropping out capable of very little useful knowledge or skill, needs to be broken somewhere. The problem may lie in the local funding of schools, which tends to be hard on poor communities.
Where I live in Alabama is kind of an enclave, a city of engineers. Engineers value education very highly, and voted themselves (relatively) high local taxes to fund a really excellent school system. But other localities chose not to fund their schools, and the courts found the difference between best and worst funded schools too broad. So naturally, the state legislature decided to take the funding voted locally AWAY from those localities to subsidize those who didn't feel like paying (most of whom could pay, but didn't want to). This of course made things difficult for our local schools, so the county tried to raise school taxes again to make up the shortfall.
And this time, the voters said "We're willing to fund excellent schools for our own children. If other communities want good schools, they can pay for it." So the local schools here are deteriorating. If we pay higher taxes, the state will take the money away anyway.
So there's a problem. Busing has been tried, the idea being that if children of wealthier people are obligated to attend inner-city schools, they'll be willing to fund those schools. At least here, busing was so unpopular that there are NO school buses in my community at all. Not for anybody.
What makes a tilted playing field, even now, is that those who go through the de facto segregated school systems, for the most part, simply can't compete. I think Ghost is correct, like it or not, that the way to make such systems competitive is for those effectively restricted to them to by golly FIX them. Ghost is correct: when the Jews have been sent to the second-class institutions, they haven't subsided into resentful indifference, they have transformed what they've been handed into something excellent. Every time.
I don't know the answer. It seems pretty clear that whenever anyone lends a helping hand, whoever they lend it to reorganizes their life so they can't live without it. Which means that helping hands need strings attached and time limits. Saying this hand should be a safety net and not a lifestyle sounds great, but in practice anything that provides real safety, provides enough to live on. So a safety net isn't an amount of help, it's got to be temporary and narrowly focused. Yeah, we'll help *provided* you use that help to get on you feet, get a job, get an education. It is NOT your money; you don't get to decide how to spend it.
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