Desegregation busing
From Free net encyclopedia
Desegregation busing, sometimes referred to as forced busing by some, is the concept of achieving racial or economic integration in American public schools by transporting schoolchildren to schools outside their area of residence.
Contents |
Rationale
After desegregation laws proscribed legally-enforced segregation of public schools by states and municipal authorities, schools in many parts of the country continued to be segregated by race. Many times, supporters of segregation argued that neighborhoods retained racial imbalances and there was no intent to discriminate, but many times those arguments were shown to be specious when school construction pattern and the drawing of district lines were analyzed. A federal court found that in Boston, schools were constructed and school district lines drawn to intentionally racially segregate the schools. In the early 1970s, a series of court decisions found that the racially imbalanced schools trampled the rights of minority students. As a remedy, courts ordered the racial integration of school districts within individual cities, sometimes requiring the racial composition of each individual school in the district to reflect the composition of the district as a whole. This was generally achieved by transporting children by school bus to a school in a different area of the district.
The "forced" adjective describes how the mandates generally came from the state government or courts and were often opposed by white city residents and local government. Court-ordered busing to achieve school desegregation was used mainly in large, ethnically segregated school systems, including Boston, Massachusetts, Cleveland, Ohio, Pasadena, California, Richmond, Virginia, San Francisco, California and Wilmington, Delaware. Proponents of the plans argued that with the schools integrated, minority students would have equal access to equipment, facilities and resources that the cities' white students had, thus giving all students in the city equal educational opportunities. They also pointed out that the United States Supreme Court had found that separate but equal schools are inherently unequal.
Criticism
The most controversial aspects of court-ordered desegregation involved claims that children were being bused to schools in dangerous neighborhoods or to previously integrated schools, or busing them from integrated schools to partially-integrated ones. Opponents claimed busing compromised the quality of the students' education. In some cities, the tendency of people to move to the suburbs as their incomes reached middle class status became known as white flight. Although the trend away from the inner city areas far predated court-ordered school desegregation busing, white flight was highly exacerbated due to this.
Most desegregation programs brought out critics who used code words to advocate for continued racially-segregated schools, citing complaints from parents due to the long rides, claims of hardship with transportation for extra-curricular activities, and separation of siblings when elementary schools at opposite sides of the city were "paired," (i.e. splitting lower and upper elementary grades into separate schools). However, there is little empirical evidence to support the idea that desegregation weakened public education.
Effects of busing
Busing and desegregation orders have in many cases led to white flight into suburban school districts or private schools. In some communities, the parochial schools refused to allow whites to flee to the church-run schools to avoid going to school with blacks. Many court-ordered desegregation programs only required integration of schools within a particular city because the Supreme Court held that requiring students to be bused across district lines is unconstitutional. Some whites claim that busing led to a decline in the population of many large cities (especially those with large African-American populations) and helped fuel the rise of suburbs. The political autonomy enjoyed by suburbs granted them considerable immunity due to the case of Milliken v. Bradley wherein the Supreme Court declared that forced busing between separate school districts (such as between the inner city and the suburb) was impermissible. Rust Belt cities in particular experienced the largest population declines, with declines of fifty percent or more between 1950 and 2000 in Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. These cities were already experiencing population declines before forced busing came into effect, but busing increased the rate of decline.
In Boston and California, where land values are higher and property tax structures less favorable to relocation, it became more common for parents to enroll their children in private or parochial schools.
One of the most disasterous effects of school busing has been the disruption of community ties to local schools. Whearas before busing students would likely go to a school which was located within their designated school boundary area, after busing there was no logic to school boundaries other than to achieve racial balance. Thus, students living next to one elementary school might not go to school there, but to a school as far as 25 miles away. This caused for great strains in community-school relations.
Historical Examples
Boston
In the Boston metropolitan area, the term "forced busing" is primarily used by critics of a remedy prescribed by Massachusetts US District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. after finding a consistent and recurring pattern of racial discrimination in the operation of the Boston public schools in a 1974 ruling. Garrity's ruling found the schools were unconstitionally segregated. As a remedy, he used a busing plan developed by the Massachusetts State Board of Education to implement the state's Racial Imbalance Law, that had been passed by the Massachusetts state legislature a few years earlier, requiring any school with a student enrollment of more than fifty percent "non-white" to be balanced according to race. The Boston School Committee had disobeyed orders from the state Board of Education to obey the law. Garrity's ruling, upheld on appeal by conservative judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Court and by the Supreme Court led by conservative Warren Burger, required school children to be transported to different schools to end the pattern of segregation that had been illegally fostered by the school committee.
The conflict in Boston over busing primarily affected West Roxbury, Roslindale, Hyde Park, Charlestown, Dorchester, the North End, and South Boston (the latter being traditionally Irish-American but also having a sizable Polish/Lithuanian community). It also affected the mostly black community of Roxbury. (To a lesser extent, schools many miles away in Springfield, Massachusetts were also affected by Judge Garrity's order, but the plan caused little overt controversy there as public officials obeyed the rule of law).
The integration plan aroused fierce criticism among some Boston residents. Opponents personally attacked Judge Garrity, claiming that he lived in a white suburb, thus, his own children would not have been affected by his ruling. To their credit, Garrity's community welcomed black students under a program known as METCO which sought to assist in desegregating the Boston schools by offering places in suburban school districts to black students. Many civil rights supporters noted that blacks were, as a matter of fact, more welcome in Garrity's white suburb than in some of the all-white neighborhoods of Boston.
There were a number of incidents of protest that turned violent. In one case, a black attorney named Theodore Landsmark was attacked by a group of white teenagers as he exited Boston City Hall. One of the youths, Joseph Rakes, attacked Landsmark with an American flag, using the flagpole as a lance. A photograph of the attack on Landsmark, taken by Stanley Forman for the Boston Herald-American, won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography (known at that time as Spot News Photography) in 1977. [1] Today the Boston Public Schools are eighty-six percent African American and Hispanic. According to the 2000 census, Boston's white population is 54.48%, whereas Boston's black and Hispanic populations together total 39.77%. White families in the city have comparatively fewer children, and some white parents prefer to send their children to private and parochial schools rather than have their children attend public school. Boston's South Boston High school (now the South Boston High complex) was declared "dysfunctional" by the State Board of Education.
![[1]](http://www.bppa.net/events/dec03/forman1.jpg){kind=link}
Pasadena, California
In 1970 a federal court ordered the desegregation of the public schools in Pasadena, California. At that time, the proportion of white students in those schools reflected the proportion of whites in the community, 54% and 53%, respectively. After the desegregation process began, large numbers of whites in the upper and middle classes who could afford it pulled their children from the integrated public school system and placed them into private schools instead. As a result, by 2004 Pasadena became home to sixty-three private schools, which educated one-third of all school-aged children in the city, and the proportion of white students in the public schools had fallen to 16%. The superintendent of Pasadena's public schools characterized them as being to whites "like the bogey-man," and mounted policy changes, including a curtailment of busing, and a publicity drive to induce affluent whites to put their children back into public schools.
San Francisco
San Francisco, California also compels children to attend schools outside their own neighborhoods in order to promote racial diversity; however, in San Francisco the practice's most vocal opponents are not whites, but rather Asians, particularly Chinese-Americans, who have been the group most affected by the city's plan.
Wilmington, Delaware
In Wilmington, Delaware, located in New Castle County, segregated schools were required by law until 1954, when, due to Brown v. Board of Education, the school system was forced to desegregate. As a result, the school districts in the Wilmington metropolitan area were split into eleven districts covering the metropolitan area (Alfred I. duPont, Alexis I. duPont, Claymont, Conrad, De La Warr, Marshallton-McKean, Mount Pleasant, New Castle-Gunning Bedford, Newark, Stanton, and Wilmington school districts). However, this reorganization did little to address the issue of segregation, since the Wilmington schools (Wilmington and De La Warr districts) remained predominantly black, while the suburban schools in the county outside the city limits remained predominantly white.
In 1978 the U.S. District Court, in Evans v. Buchanan, ordered that the school districts of New Castle County all be combined into a single district governed by the New Castle County Board of Education. The District Court ordered the Board to implement a desegregation plan in which the students from the predominantly black Wilmington and De La Warr districts were required to attend school in the predominantly white suburb districts, while students from the predominantly white districts were required to attend school in Wilmington or De La Warr districts for three years (usually 4th through 6th grade). In many cases, this required students to be bused a considerable distance (12 to 18 miles in the Christina district) due to the distance between Wilmington and some of the major communities of the suburban area (such as Newark).
However, the process of handling an entire metropolitan area as a single school district resulted in a revision to the plan in 1981, in which the New Castle County schools were again divided into four separate districts (Brandywine, Christina, Colonial, and Red Clay). However, unlike the 1954 districts, each of these districts was racially balanced and encompassed inner city and suburban areas. Each of the districts continued a desegregation plan based upon busing.
The requirements for maintaining racial balance in the schools of each of the districts was ended by the District Court in 1994, but the process of busing students to and from the suburbs for schooling continued largely unchanged until 2001, when the Delaware state government passed House Bill 300, mandating that the districts convert to sending students to the schools closest to them, a process that continues as of 2005.
Richmond, Virginia
In Richmond, Virginia, when a massive busing program began in 1971, parents of all races complained about the long rides, hardships with transportation for extra-curricular activities, and the separation of siblings when elementary schools at opposite sides of the city were "paired," (i.e. splitting lower and upper elementary grades into separate schools). A number of assignment plans were tried to address these concerns, and eventually, most elementary schools were "unpaired."
Prince George's County, Maryland
In 1974, Prince George's County, Maryland became the largest school district in the nation forced to adopt a busing plan. The county, a large suburban school district east of Washington, DC, was over 80 percent white in population and in the public schools. In some communities of the county close to Washington, there was a higher concentration of black residents than in more outlying areas. Through a series of desegregation orders after the Brown decision, the county had a logical neighborhood-based system of school boundaries. Even with this, the NAACP was still not satisfied, because they believed that housing patterns in the county still reflected the vestiges of segregation. Against the will of the Board of Education of Prince George's County, the federal court ordered that a school busing plan be set in place. A 1974 Gallup poll showed that 75 percent of county residents were against forced busing, and that only 32 percent of blacks supported it.
The transition was very traumatic as the court ordered that the plan be administered with "...all due haste." This happened during the middle of the school term, and students even in their senior year in high school were transferred to different schools to achieve racial balance. Many high school sports teams' seasons and other typical high school activities were disrupted. Life in general for families in the county was disrupted by things such as the changes in daily times to get children ready and receive them after school, and transportation logistics for extra curricular activities, and parental participation activities such as volunteer work in the schools and PTA meetings.
The Prince George's County case provides a counter to the argument that the reason school districts that had forced busing were declining in white population was that they were suffering from white flight from urban areas anyway, because Prince George's County was entirely a suburban area. The white population was growing until school busing was started, and then dropped significantly afterward. The county population is now less than 25% percent white, and more than 65% black. The statistics for the 136,095 student school district changed even more, and it is now less than 8% white, and more than 77% black. Academic achievement in the school district diminished significantly shortly after busing was started. Only since the busing order was lifted have test scores begun to rise.
The federal case and the school busing order was officially ended in 2001, as the "...remaining vestiges of segregation..." had finally been erased to the court's satisfaction. Logical school boundaries were finally restored. The Prince George's County Public Schools was ordered to pay the NAACP more than $2 million in closing attorney fees, and is estimated to have paid the NAACP over $20 million over the course of the case.
The Prince George's County case highlights many of the the disastrous effects that court-ordered desegregation school busing programs had on many other communities as well.
Elimination and Aftermath
In an effort to satisfy parents concerned with mandated long bus rides, many districts later modified their pupil placement plans to provide attractive programs in "magnet schools", built new school buildings and reconfigured older buildings to logistically develop more favorable attendance plans which met desegregation goals. Combined with changes in housing patterns, forced busing programs were gradually eliminated during the 1990s as the courts nationwide released districts from orders under old lawsuits. The population of most cities affected by forced busing continues to decline and many anchor cities are now one of the poorest cities in their respective metropolitan area. Busing continues in the Boston area under the rubric of Controlled Choice, allowing any student to go to a school outside his or her own neighborhood as long as the move is conducive to achieving racial balance.
Ironically, today school buses are still used in most of these districts, but this is much more due to reduced walking zone distances, concern for pupil safety, and a wider choice of programs and locations for many students than requiring a pupil to ride to a school when a closer one was within walking distance. In an era where many families have working parents, the school bus is seen as a safe and protected way to and from school, whether the trip is to the closest school or another.