McAuliffe Plan Could Lead To 1970s-Style Busing, Claims Giving Parents A ‘Choice’ Leads To ‘Segregation’

A review of Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe’s education platform shows that he aims to take away what is perhaps the biggest choice parents currently have when it comes to their children’s education: The ability to choose a school by buying a home in a neighborhood that is zoned for it.

McAuliffe’s education plan entails pushing school districts to re-draw school boundary zones to be “anti-racist” — in other words, 1970s-style busing that could dramatically change families’ everyday lives by moving their kids to a different school than the one they expected when they chose their home.

“Where parents have greater opportunities to choose schools (where integration is not the goal), schools appear to become more segregated,” says the activist paper cited by his plan.

The campaign plan calls for “creating a school integration officer within the Virginia Department of Education, reviewing how diversity factors into school accreditation standards, incentivizing localities to implement integration strategies and working with developers to drastically improve access to affordable housing so that families can locate in areas with high-performing schools.”

While details of McAuliffe’s “desegregation” plan are sparse on his website, the fuller picture is found in the paper that forms its sole footnote and that tracks with its broad claims: A report from the Commonwealth Institute called “Addressing the Lasting impacts of Racist Choices on Virginia’s Education System.” The report uses the word racist 24 times. It laments “racist” educational systems in Virginia despite McAuliffe having been governor from 2014 to 2018, and his lieutenant governor, Ralph Northam, having held the post since.

Busing

The Commonwealth Institute plan says:

Typically, a student would be assigned to a school close in proximity and that the neighborhood they live in is “zoned” for. However, having established the persisting legacy of housing and education segregation in the state, it becomes clear that this method results in segregated and often under-resourced schools. …

One way to approach this issue is through intra-district zoning policies that maintain socioeconomic and racial equity as its guiding principle alongside specific diversity goals. School divisions would make the decision to redraw school zones, based on socioeconomic status and/or the racial and economic makeup of their schools and/or neighborhoods, to create better integrated schools. …

Another district-wide strategy is called managed choice. In an equity-focused choice system, all families would be required to submit a set of school preferences, and their student’s assigned school would be based on a variety of determined goals