All this talk of “balancing” talk radio by bringing the government in to “make things fair” brings up an idea.

What this country needs is political balance across the board.  The “red states vs. blue states” split is tearing the nation apart.  When half of the nation’s votes and 90% of the land are populated by self-reliant, hard-working people who create most of the nation’s actual wealth, and the other half (and 10% of the land) are people who get wealthy by jiggering numbers and skimming from the work of the rest of the country, we’re headed for disaster.  Moreover, the nation would benefit if Red and Blue could live together, rather than segregated; the ideological cross-pollination would make a better nation, in the long run. 

So I advocate forcibly relocating people from New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and the rest of “Blue America” to live in the interior, and moving people from the “Red States” to replace them.  52% of the “Blue States” will be populated by red staters, and 48% of the “Red States” will be occupied by former blue staters.

Anyone who resists will face the full weight of federal law enforcement.

And the results would be…?

Probably pretty dismal, right?

Bringing in government to re-engineer society is pretty much always a bad idea, whether it’s “Urban Renewal”, clearing the Plains of Indians, banning alcohol (or, as we’ve seen in our inner cities, drugs), the “Fairness Doctrine”…

…or mandatory school busing.  Katherine Kersten writes about the decades of fallout after yet another attempt at (voluntary) integration falls flat:

The Inter- District Downtown School in Minneapolis and the FAIR School in Crystal opened their doors with much fanfare in 1999 and 2000, respectively. Their sponsor is the West Metro Education Program, a consortium of the Minneapolis school district and 10 suburban districts. WMEP created the schools at a cost of more than $26 million to be showcases of racial balance, achieved voluntarily.

Last week, we learned that they are no such thing.

Today, InterDistrict students are 70 percent minority’ and the FAIR School is nearly 70 percent white. Their racial composition is little different from that of the districts in which they are located. The InterDistrict School actually qualifies as “racially isolated” under state desegregation rules.

For those of you too young to remember – and I am, although I do remember parts of the debate, because I was a really weird kid who remembers a lot of news from the late sixties and early seventies – the theory was that forced busing would improve things by sending the poor to wealthier districts, and by giving the kids from the wealthier districts an exposure to life outside the privileged classes. 

Kersten:

 As a result, many Minneapolis students began spending extra hours every week on the bus to get to schools far from home. Brothers and sisters were often assigned to widely separated schools, and parents struggled to attend conferences and get involved in school life.

After two decades of busing, however, black students’ test scores did not improve as expected. (No surprise there: data from the National Assessment for Educational Progress from 1975 to 1988 — when black students across the country made significant academic gains — showed black students in majority black schools doing as well or better than those of blacks in majority white schools.)

But mandatory busing did have one devastating unintended consequence: White, middle-class families began streaming out of the city. When the suit that launched busing was filed in 1971, the Minneapolis district was 14.5 percent minority. In 1985, it was 40 percent. In 1994, it was 62 percent minority and today it’s 72 percent.

The effects?

Minneapolis is still paying the costs of two decades of forced busing. Busing increased the concentration of poverty in the inner city, undermined community institutions that could otherwise have provided vital stability in poor children’s lives and weakened district schools.

Today, it is black students who are leaving Minneapolis district schools. Some are choosing to attend suburban schools through Choice Is Yours program, the outcome of a 2000 legal settlement. Many more are flooding to charter schools. Ironically, students at Minneapolis charter schools are more likely to be poor and minority than those at district schools.

The teacher’s union’s legislature’s response?  Shut down charters, and cram the kids back into the public schools for their own good.  But I digress.

In 2004, black Minnesota students had the fourth-lowest graduation rate in the nation, according to a recent Education Week study. Imagine the progress we could have made on this and other fronts if — instead of devoting endless hours to racial balance study groups and endless millions to busing — we had focused on learning how the best schools are succeeding with the children who face the greatest obstacles.

The lesson we need to take away from this:  when government tries to enact social change anywhere below “broad sweeping concept”-level, it’s always a disaster.