Beyond Busing
Wednesday, July 21, 1999

By Tamar Jacoby

Last week the Boston School Committee abandoned race as a factor in deciding which schools children attend. The decision marked the end of an era. Race-based busing is now extinct in Boston, and dead or dying in many of the other school districts where it once stirred intense controversy.

No one who lived through the 1970s can forget the busing wars: the irate mothers, the innocent-looking black children, the bitter white teenagers throwing bottles and screaming, "Niggers, go home!" Looking back a quarter century later, we'd like to think it was somehow worth it—or, at the very least, that busing's failure taught us something. But the tragic irony is that busing turns out to have been largely irrelevant, a monumental distraction from the real progress we've made on race and from the task, as daunting as ever, of improving the school performance of impoverished black children.

Almost a Dirty Word

Well-intentioned is almost a dirty word today, at least when applied to another era's social policy. But busing to achieve desegregation was an earnest and, it seemed at the time, even ingenious idea for speeding up black inclusion in the mainstream. Putting black kids at desks next to white kids would equalize their educational opportunities and eradicate their sense that they were second-class citizens. What's more, it was hoped, if we brought black and white children together early enough, their experience of each other would inoculate them against prejudice, and middle-class whites' goals and study habits might even rub off on their poorer classmates. With one easy stroke, society would eliminate bigotry and inequality. We now know that it was too good to be true. But looking back on the promise, it's easier to understand the arrogance with which supporters of busing thought they could upend and reorganize the lives of millions of families.

It took nearly two decades after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision for the nation to grasp just how difficult desegregation would be in practice. It wasn't until 1971 that the Supreme Court finally tired of Southern resistance to mixed schooling and ruled, in a case from North Carolina, that local courts could impose involuntary busing. That decision set off a wave of lawsuits nationwide, appealing to local judges to order segregation plans. And it was that autumn, when courts began enforcing busing plans in Northern cities, the national controversy erupted in earnest.

Thousands of parents went to the barricades in cities from Delaware to Denver: dramatic, angry acts of civil disobedience that captivated the press and shocked the rest of the nation. That winter, the frenzy spread to Congress, where Democrats and Republicans alike scrambled to support anti-busing measures—bills to amend the Constitution, delay local court orders and even cut off funding to pay for gasoline for buses. Busing was the engine behind George Wallace's impressive showing in the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries. Then, in 1974, the fury erupted more fiercely than ever in Boston, where Judge W. Arthur Garrity overrode the School Committee to institute a citywide busing plan.

The venom generated in those years scarred the nation indelibly. Neither black nor white parents were particularly enthusiastic about busing; even the most liberal among them feared the hostility that might await their children at a distant school. Public opinion favored the end but not the means; polls showed more than 75% in favor of mixed schooling, and a matching three-quarters staunchly opposed to busing. And yet, despite this shared uncertainty, busing became the wedge issue of the '70s, deeply exacerbating the divide between blacks and whites. "I'll never forget the hatred I saw in those faces in Boston," psychologist Kenneth Clark said later. It didn't matter what white people told pollsters about integration. It didn't matter that many antibusing mothers were angrier at what they saw as an imperious, meddlesome judge than at the black children appearing in their neighborhoods. For Clark and millions of other blacks like him, the anti busing movement proved that white America was irredeemably racist.

The debate about results began almost immediately. Black children's reading and math scores showed no appreciable improvement as a consequence of busing. Supporters ignored this, focusing instead on the fact that white children's performance was not suffering. Some researchers noted that blacks in mixed schools showed more ambition and interest in mainstream success. Still, though black school performance edged up nationwide over the years, there was no change that could be traced to desegregation.

Finally in 1983, University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman ended the debate. Seventeen years after his influential defense of busing on the grounds that black kids would benefit from exposure to middle-class whites' study habits, Coleman unequivocally reversed himself: “The assumption that busing would improve achievement of lower-class black children has now been shown to be fiction." As for the claims that racial mingling would teach black and white children to get along, that too proved elusive in many schools where students resegregated as soon as they got to the lunchroom, and inequality in academic performance often only deepened white kids' prejudice.

Meanwhile, outside the classroom, integration—a more natural kind of integration—was slowly spreading across the land. With legal barriers eliminated, blacks prospered in school and on the job according to their abilities. The black middle class nearly quadrupled over four decades; the number of blacks in college grew by a factor of 10. By the mid-1990s, blacks were as likely as whites to graduate from high school—a huge change from the pre-civil rights era—and, in two parent households, black family income was almost 90% that of whites. Even residential segregation is slowly fading.

This doesn't mean, of course, that all is happy between black and white. There is still much to be done, particularly in the inner city, and much anger and alienation to overcome—on both sides. But with crime rates down, employment rising in the ghetto as elsewhere, and whites of all ages entertained and inspired by black achievement (think Michael Jordan, Lauryn Hill, Colin Powell, Oprah Winfrey), even the most skeptical blacks are beginning to acknowledge progress. "By a wide array of measures," Ellis Cose declared recently in Newsweek, "now is a great time—the best time ever—to be black in America."

What all this proves—something we should have known all along—is that artificially engineered racial balance won't achieve the larger promise of real social integration. As anyone who has gone to school or worked alongside someone of another race knows, such contact is the best way—maybe the only way—to overcome racial fears and stereotyping. But as the psychologist Gordon Allport warned decades ago, the process only works when the people involved are social equals who have reason to respect each other independent of race.

Martin Luther King Jr. warned in the early 1960s that desegregation means little if "elbows are together and hearts are apart." Nearly 40 years later, we're still a long way from Dr. King's vision. But the good news is that most Americans have come to share in the dream. The failure of busing doesn't change that, and there is no need to mourn its ending.

Scant Progress

The bad news is that we have made scant progress toward busing's arguably most important goal: closing the school-performance gap between black and white children. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 12% of black highschool seniors are proficient in reading and arithmetic. Blacks score on average some 200 points lower than whites on the Scholastic Assessment Test, and twice as many blacks as whites drop out of college. In today's high-tech, high-value-added economy, this academic gap threatens to undermine all the other racial gains of recent years.

What to do isn't entirely clear. Money alone is not the answer, any more than desegregation was. Contrary to popular belief, the average black child and average white child live in school districts that spend almost exactly the same per pupil. But society at large still has an important role to play, creating the conditions for poor kids to learn and insisting that all children be judged by the same high standards. There is no way now to recoup 25 years wasted in foolish pursuit of a shortcut to educational equality. But at least with the distraction of busing gone, parents and educators can devote themselves to the challenge that really matters.

Ms. Jacoby, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, is author of “Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration” (Free Press, 1998)

©1999 The Wall Street Journal

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