Mike Rose is an accomplished writer and teacher, in this piece he examines the diverse examples of educational excellence. He talkes about how Pasadena' s population through tourism, the decline in tourism durring the great depression and the rise after WW2.
I had read some things about Pasadena but i was surprised to read that it was an extremely segregated community. Everything from the housing, schools and medical facilities were segregated. This was mostly due to the fact that It was filled with a more priviledged type of person while now it is mostly recognized as a middle- class community. The white population became a minority while the Latino and Asian populations increased, Armenian's also began to migrate from there point of entry in east hollywood and glendale.
After Pasadena high was reformed to accomidate the boom in population, desegregation laws and busing were mandated. The ethnic percentage grew even larger after the demographic changes, bus changes and the white students flight to private schools. This explains a lot about what happened to most inner city and lower class schools. It is easy to forget that at one point those schools were filled with wealthier students but once those students were intergrated with middle and lower class students, their families chose to change to a more private location.
I felt this reading had two purposes, to inform about Pasadena's school system but also to show people how a certain county or school system could alter so quickly . Pasadena went from being an upper class neighborhood filled with wealthy and few lower segregated class, to a place were the minority was not the whites. I was able to retrieve a lot of information from this exerpt and found it very interesting to read.
