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Commentary By Jason L. Riley

Today’s School Board Fights Recall the 1970s Busing Battles

Education Pre K-12

The left is again trying to impose racially divisive educational policies in a top-down fashion.

Disgruntled parents, school board acrimony, and simmering racial tensions—these are the reactions to social activists who are trying to remake public education to their liking. For an older generation, however, this moment also recalls the busing wars of a half-century ago, a history no one should want to repeat.

Court-ordered busing of schoolchildren began in the South in the early 1970s, and the objective was to achieve more racial balance in public schools. The practice was controversial in part because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 stated explicitly that children must be assigned to schools “without regard to their race” and that desegregation did not require students to be placed in schools “to overcome racial imbalance.” The goal was to open schools to all races, not dictate where families could send their children.

Regardless, activist courts ignored the letter of the law at the urging of liberal elites and began signing off on school-integration plans that equated any racial imbalance in classrooms with de jure segregation. Soon, cities from San Diego and San Francisco to Minneapolis, Omaha and Cleveland were found guilty of operating deliberately segregated schools. The remedy was to bus students to whatever schools needed more members of a particular race to get the “right” mix. It was color-by-numbers, using children.

Aside from the dubious legality of these interventions, they were wildly unpopular with parents. Whites overwhelmingly opposed busing, and even though black civil-rights leaders supported it, most black parents—in whose name these actions were being taken—did not. This was a policy rammed down the throats of Americans by arrogant social engineers. The blowback was fierce, and race relations regressed.

Boston became ground zero for the busing wars. Books like Ronald Formisano’s “Boston Against Busing” and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s “America in Black and White” lay out the ugly details for anyone interested. White parents in Boston boycotted schools after the court-ordered busing began. Angry mobs threw rocks at buses full of black kids headed to majority-white schools. A high school in South Boston was closed for a month, and even after it reopened, state troopers were present there for the next three years to keep the peace.

Not all of the antibusing sentiment was racially motivated. The arguments varied. “I want my freedom back,” said one parent at the time. “They took my freedom. They tell me where my kids have to go to school. This is like living in Russia.” White and black parents alike said that racial mixing to them was less important than having good schools conveniently located nearby. The black middle class had expanded rapidly in the 1960s, enabling many blacks to leave urban slums for safer neighborhoods and better schools in the ensuing decades. These middle-class blacks, along with their white counterparts, understandably objected to the importation of low-income students from places they had scrimped and saved to escape.

We are by no means destined to repeat this unfortunate history, but all the ingredients are there. Progressives are again trying to impose racially divisive education policies in a top-down fashion. They want critical race theory, which promotes racial discrimination, to be taught in schools. They want to eliminate standardized tests like the SAT, do away with high-school entrance exams, and scrap special programs for high-achieving students—all in the service of more racial balance. Anyone who disagrees with this agenda is dismissed as a bigot.

Like the school-busing proponents who preceded them, today’s progressives have little use for democratic processes and little interest in how their race-conscious schemes might affect a multiracial society that’s growing more so every day. Teaching schoolchildren to obsess over their racial differences is wrong at any time and in any context, but doing so as the nation becomes increasingly diverse is sheer madness.

A poll released earlier this year by the Economist and YouGov found that most Americans who had heard of critical race theory viewed it unfavorably. Nevertheless, the Biden administration was planning to offer grants to school districts that implement CRT, before reversing course following pushback from GOP lawmakers. And liberals applauded President Biden’s recent decision to sic his Justice Department on parents who dare to speak out against racially tendentious education policies and scientifically suspect Covid protocols at school board meetings.

One upshot of the busing controversy was that it hastened the exit of middle-class families from urban school districts, thus exacerbating the racial and economic disparities in the system that the political left likes to decry. A focus on teaching students “social justice” when most of them can’t even read and write at grade level probably isn’t the best way to attract the “diverse” student body that the left craves.

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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal