The problem of school desegregation is something entirely different, though. First, I hate to say it, but inner city schools have enough money as it is. Stuyvesant works perfectly well on $8,500 per student per year. What $20,000/year buys is incompetence-proof schools; failing schools in Bed-Stuy could use that, but as long as opponents can point out to well-run schools, there won’t be the political will to give them money. Making those schools better-run requires parents who have the time and money to raise hell whenever the principal is being an idiot, but if those parents had the time and the money, they probably wouldn’t live in Bed-Stuy.

Second, there’s a huge split in the civil rights movement about whether school integration is any good. Jonathan Kozol mentions that there are black activists who’re just as much into separation as residents of Manahasset and other white suburbs; to those activists, what’s important is spending more money on black-majority schools, and integrating whites and blacks is a failure from the 1970s.