Hard-learned lessons about busing
Now that it’s been more than a week since the Democratic primary debate in which Sen. Kamala Harris dressed down Joe Biden for opposing busing to desegregate schools in the 1970s — and several days since Harris’ own clarification that she doesn’t herself support federally mandated busing — can we talk honestly about this contentious but vital policy?
Harris aimed at Biden’s opposition by invoking her own bus ride, in 1969, from Berkeley’s hardscrabble flatland to an affluent hillside neighborhood, and the world of opportunity she said it opened for her. The crowd applauded. Twitter went wild.
It’s ironic that busing turned into a rallying cry in a TV minute, since the practice was widely reviled during its heyday. “Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”: then-Sen. Biden’s 1975 outburst captured the prevailing attitude.
Busing polled in the single digits in an early 1970s Gallup poll, and while pundits now predict that Biden’s stance will hurt him with black voters, Gallup reported that, at that time, fewer than one in 10 African Americans favored the practice.
I was a newly minted lawyer back then, filing lawsuits against segregated school districts, certain that busing was the only way to secure racial justice.
We knew a lot of constitutional theory but not much about what makes for a good education. Our big mistake was to concentrate on racial balance, a matter of cold statistics, while paying scant attention to what happened in the classroom. In retrospect, it’s unsurprising that black parents were almost as likely as whites to reject this strategy.
Berkeley, where Harris traveled a long distance to attend an integrated school, was a different story: The decision to bus students came about through biracial consensus, not because of a court decree. When he learned about Berkeley’s audacious plan, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that “hope returned to my soul and spirit.”
Yet even in Berkeley, this liberal vision was under siege almost from the start.
Black activists decried busing as racist, contending that disaffected minority students would fare better through “strategic withdrawal” to a blacks-only
academy. This was catnip for Arkansas Sen. John McClellan, who insisted that “this new rationale for resegregation should be made known to the entire American public.”
So virulent were the accusations and counter-accusations that, just a year after young Kamala Harris began her education, a school board member ruminated over whether integration was “the wave of the future or the last gasp of the past.”
Yet busing continued in Berkeley, and by 1980, integration was once more seen as a goal worthy of pursuit.
Nationwide, busing, though reviled, succeeded on its own terms. The segregation of black students declined significantly between 1968 and 1980.
But the practice was consigned to the trash-heap of failed social policies once the courts stopped demanding it. Even as a 1999 Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans had come to appreciate that busing had improved the education of black students, public schools grew increasingly segregated.
Now, with the advent of sophisticated new research methods, we have learned that discarding desegregation was a monumental mistake. In his new book, “Children of the Dream,” Berkeley Prof. Rucker Johnson draws on a massive data set to show that black youngsters who were bused to newly desegregated schools, with better teachers and smaller classes, fared better than those who didn’t have the same experience. They were significantly more likely to graduate from high school and college, to earn more, to stay out of prison and to stay healthy.
What’s more, these lifechanging effects have proven to be intergenerational: Their children are also better off.
Integration is only part of the bigger policy picture. But for hundreds of thousands of African-American children, the opportunity to attend racially mixed schools proved a lifechanger. We are paying the price for having jettisoned that policy.
Kirp is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and author of “The College Dropout Scandal.”