Integrating America’s schools: time to bring back “bussing”?
The race for the Democratic presidential nomination has only just begun in America, said Gregory J. Wallance in The Hill, but already it has succeeded in putting “a racially explosive issue from long ago” firmly back on the political agenda. That issue is “bussing” – the controversial system widely enforced in the late 1960s and 1970s under which, in the name of ending racial segregation, black students were driven to predominantly white schools in neighbouring communities, and white students were driven to predominantly black ones. In the recent Democratic presidential debate, Kamala Harris dramatically wrong-footed her rival Joe Biden by taking him to task over the stand he took at the time against Washington imposing these bussing rules on local governments. Biden’s campaign still hasn’t recovered, but Harris may herself come to regret opening this “Pandora’s box”.
To woke progressives, it’s self-evident that Biden was on “the wrong side of history”, said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe. But that view is grossly simplistic. The reality is that instead of encouraging integration, federally mandated bussing sparked an ugly racial backlash, with many whites fleeing to the suburbs or moving their children to private schools. White and black parents alike resented their lack of say in their child’s education. Look what happened in Boston, for example. Before bussing began, the average black child in that city attended a school that was 24% white. By the mid-1990s, it was down to 17%.
We shouldn’t romanticise bussing, agreed Sandy Banks in the Los Angeles Times. Like Harris, I was also “a little black girl in a classroom full of white faces”, and I reaped the benefits of being offered more opportunities and better facilities. But bussing was not popular among black Americans: in a 1973 poll, only 9% said bussing was the best way to achieve school integration. A third thought the best solution was to build lowincome housing in middle-class neighbourhoods. But just look at what bussing achieved, said Nikole Hannah-Jones in The New York Times. Studies show it dramatically improved the test scores of black children without harming white children. It led to more resources being spent on educating the most disadvantaged. Black people still tell stories about the day workers arrived to fix up their dilapidated schools to prepare for the arrival of white students. Today, thanks to the legacy of bussing, Southern schools are some of the most integrated in the country. Ironically, it was northerners in all-white neighbourhoods who derailed court-ordered bussing with their steady resistance. School integration peaked in the late 1980s, after which a series of Supreme Court decisions allowed districts to back away from bussing, undoing all the good work. Sadly, most black students now go to schools that are as segregated as the ones their grandparents attended. “Bussing did not fail. We did.”
It’s disgraceful really, said Amanda Marcotte on Salon. How can we claim America has somehow overcome racism when our children grow up with almost no exposure to people of different colour skin? Harris deserves credit for calling for the resumption of “aggressive school integration” measures. It’s a “brave” move that “risks alienating many white liberal voters who fancy themselves anti-racist but who, when the rubber hits the road, may baulk at living in communities or sending their kids to schools that have more than token diversity”.
Of course we need more integration in schools, said Jake Novak on CNBC.com. But the main point of the exercise is to provide equal, better quality schools; and bussing doesn’t necessarily deliver this. A better way would be to create more charter schools (independently run state schools equivalent to the UK’s “free schools”) and to provide minority and poorer families with government vouchers to pay for private education. Instead of spending on buses, give the money “to parents who want better opportunities for their kids, and leave the driving to them”.