Milwaukee played a role in today’s talk on busing

Judge ordered MPS to desegregate in 1976

Who would have thought school desegregation by bus would become a hot issue in the current presidential race.

But there it’s been the last couple weeks, thanks to an exchange during a debate between Sen. Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden. Harris criticized Biden’s opposition to busing in the 1970s and said her education in that era was boosted because she was used to increase integration in Berkeley, Californa.

Since then, it feels like every national news outlet and commentators of all views have chimed in, recounting the history of busing for desegregation and considering what might be done now to reduce school segregation.

The crisis of huge gaps in school success along racial and economic lines continues after all these years. And the need, locally and nationally, to address the issues continues.

But I can’t picture how reviving debate about integration plans used 40 to 50 years ago is going to change things. Whatever should be done — or at least tried — now, busing isn’t it.

For one thing, the history of busing is really not good, including how strong the opposition was. For another, there is no reason to think that Congress or the president (even if there’s a different president in 2021) is going to take action. And the court system which generated most of the plans of the past is just not going to revive this.

But there are lessons to be learned from that era, generally pointing to why busing didn’t solve the problems it was intended to address.

Here is a brief summary of Milwaukee’s piece of that history:

In 1965, a lawsuit was filed arguing Milwaukee Public Schools had been intentionally segregated and action was needed to correct that. It wasn’t until January 1976 that then-federal Judge John W. Reynolds ruled against MPS and ordered that a plan be created to integrate the schools.

By September 1976, implementation was underway. It focused largely on creating specialty schools (some of them still successful) and busing children (mostly black children) so that a large number of schools met definitions of integration.

School integration, at least by enrollment numbers, went fairly well for several years and then declined.

In the meantime, an accompanying set of actions, including an out-ofcourt settlement, led to the growth of a voluntary city-suburban racial integration plan (known as Chapter 220) that, through most of the 1990s, meant more than 5,000 African American children who lived in the city attended suburban public schools each year. Then that plan faded, too.

Milwaukee's white flight

Here a few facts about that period: White flight. School desegregation was not the only reason, but it was one of them underlying a jaw-dropping decline in white residents of the city. In 1960, Milwaukee’s population was 743,301, and 674,103 were white. By 2000, the population was 596,974, and 270,989 were white. That’s a drop of more than 400,000 in the white population in 40 years.

MPS demographic make-up. MPS was about two-thirds white at the time

of the Reynolds’ decision. By September 2018, only 10.5% of MPS students were white. Just over half were black and more than a quarter were Hispanic.

No major change in black-white achievement gaps. The lawsuit that led to Reynolds’ ruling focused on segregation by race and did not deal with academic success.

But the underlying goal was for black kids to get the same shots at success as white kids. The gaps remain huge and proficiency indicators have barely budged.

The Milwaukee area remains strongly segregated. It’s the most segregated area in the U.S., a Brookings Institution report said recently.

Schools in the city and in the outer rings of the suburbs generally remain filled with students predominantly of one race or ethnicity, whether they are black, white, Hispanic or Hmong.

If you’re looking for schools that are more diverse, at least by the numbers, look to the inner ring of suburbs.

The school buses continue to roll. The desegregation efforts of the late ’70s accelerated the use of buses to get Milwaukee kids to school.

For a bunch of reasons, the city remains very busing oriented, even though the reasons now have little to nothing to do with integration. Efforts to shrink busing have had limited success. And the notion of neighborhood schools has not rebounded from the impact of the desegregation era.

Desegregation by decree — it's not that simple

Two quotes from Reynolds stand out in my mind. One is from the concluding section of his 1976 decision: “I shall accordingly order that the Milwaukee school system be integrated.”

If only it had been that simple, that a judge could decree desegregation, that the momentum of plans and social change would propel it.

It didn’t happen. Because we gave up? Because racism is too entrenched? Because there are too many other factors that shape how people lead their lives and where they send their kids to school? Because of so many other reasons?

The other is from an oral history interview Reynolds gave in 1997 for the historic records of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, based in Chicago.

Reynolds, who died in 2002, refused to talk publicly about the legacy of the 1976 decision but spoke about it in this interview, which, to my knowledge, received no public attention until a colleague of mine found it recently.

“The fact is you can issue all the orders you want to, but the people aren’t going to comply with them unless they want them,” Reynolds said.

All of the issues that underlay the school busing era in Milwaukee and nationwide remain urgent today.

But solutions seem far away — especially if so many people don’t really want them. Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu. In the current issue of Marquette Lawyer, the Marquette Law School magazine, Borsuk describes the Reynolds’ decision and its legacy and Mike Gousha, a distinguished fellow at the law school, writes about his father’s tenure as superintendent of MPS from 1967 to 1974. The magazine may be found at law.marquette.edu.