Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe wants to go back to 1970s busing and End the Suburbs
McAuliffe’s education plan pushes school districts to re-draw school boundary zones to be “anti-racist” by forcing children to be bused to schools not necessarily in their neighborhood.
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.”
The details are outlined in a report from the Commonwealth Institute called “Addressing the Lasting impacts of Racist Choices on Virginia’s Education System.” The report decries the so-called “racist” educational systems in Virginia.
Since 2014, only Democrats have run the state. Apparently, they are calling themselves racists.
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 determining goals that can include diversity and proximity, among others.
The plan also talks of force by tying accreditation to racial composition. A school could lose its accreditation if not sufficiently integrated.
The report says that “School accreditation systems often take into account measures such as test scores and chronic absenteeism to determine the quality of a school,” but that “Since diversity is necessary for a quality education and adequate workforce preparation, it should be part of the accreditation process.”
McAuliffe’s plan also calls for deliberately building low-income housing around top-rated schools. It says McAuliffe would work “with developers to drastically improve access to affordable housing so that families can locate in areas with high-performing schools.”
The Commonwealth Institute paper says this involves “inclusive zoning,” which has been called “abolishing the suburbs” because it means permitting apartments to be built anywhere within all existing single-family-home neighborhoods, as well as getting rid of the minimum lot sizes that give suburban neighborhoods quiet, nature-filled feels.
California already has such a policy and it limits homes to a lawn no larger than four feet.
If they destroy zoning, it eliminates local control and gives the federal jackboot more territory. It will lead to the end of single-family homes and suburbs.
There is no data to support this policy as an effective educational tool. It’s simply an anti-private property political agenda.
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