“Walter Searcy is chairman of the Nashville NAACP’s legal redress committee. He says the additional complaints show the school system can’t offer equal education if students are only zoned for neighborhood schools. Searcy says a school PTO in an affluent part of town wouldn’t allow students to go without books for three weeks of school, as was the case at John Early Middle.”

For a school to not have books for its students is an egregious problem, and I can certainly see why parents would want their kids to go to schools where there are textbooks instead of schools where there are not, but this all confuses me a bit. It seems to me that a school can only fail to have textbooks for two reasons:

1) Administrative incompetence, either by forgetting to order them in time or by poor budget prioritization.
2) Lack of funding.

In either case, how does busing solve the problem? What special powers does a PTO in an affluent neighborhood have that the PTO at John Early Middle does not? Aren't there more direct solutions for MNPS, like firing the incompetent school administrators for problem (1) or giving the school more money for problem (2)?

Busing succeeds in artificially desegregating schools, but for genuine racial equality in a school system you need to desegregate neighborhoods. Nashville has been busing for almost four decades, so clearly busing is not effective for neighborhood desegregation. However, in my opinion the fact that it does enforce school desegregation (and thereby helps minority students) justifies its continued existence for now. We must recognize, though, that this is only treating the symptoms. The question we should be asking ourselves is how we can address the deeper issues of inequality, like the continued segregation of neighborhoods. And our time is running out. As the world's energy crisis grows, we may not be able to afford to even treat the symptoms!

Then again, perhaps busing doesn't even work to desegregate schools. If there is a good mix of black and white students at John Early Middle School, aren't the white students there being disadvantaged just as much as the black ones? Assuming they are, why is the NAACP involved?