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Edward KocheEdward Koche
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Session:         Page of 617

to the conclusion that the bussing that we have and the underlying thing, which is more than bussing, which is imposed racial balance -- that every school shall have wherever possible a fixed percentage of minorities in it even if that means taking kids out of their local school setting and shipping them by bus to a school that's much further away simply for the purposes of establishing racial balance -- doesn't work. I think it's destructive, and I'm not for it, even though I have voted for bussing because it's a very big psychological issue, and you really have to have a lot of facts before you take a position, which we're discussing now. But I would ultimately espouse it, because I have to lead people. It was nice to see Coleman, who was responsible for the original Supreme Court decision, ultimately saying that simply because you have racial balance in schools, that hasn't helped black kids and it hasn't helped the white kids in any measurable degree in terms of their skills, but it has destroyed the schools because the white kids have been taken out. I know in my own district on the east side of Manhattan, the figures are that about 50% of all the kids in my district go to private or parochial schools. So in my judgment, if the Supreme Court -- and I don't want to blame the Supreme Court -- had put the same emphasis on equality for jobs as opposed to racial balance in the schools, we would have been much further ahead.

And then to sum it up, in 1963, when I was a district leader, Eddie Costikyan -- and I think I may have told you this about Hilda Stokeley and Eddie Costikyan. I'll start it, and if





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