Busing to achieve school desegregation has poked its head out of the ash heap of history. Just when we thought the next 16 months would be consumed with the Green New Deal, Medicare For All and the Mueller Report, comes this ghost of issues past, an oldie-but-not-a-goodie.
What was undoubtedly intended as a metaphor for the generational and experiential gap between two Democratic candidates – Senator Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden – quickly mushroomed into something much more, namely the painful reality that America’s schools remain as segregated today as they were 50 years ago.
Harris, in the first round of the party’s primary debates, went after Biden for his self-inflicted wound incurred by boasting about his good working relationships with long dead segregationist senators. As the only black candidate on the debate stage that night, Harris made it personal, identifying herself as “that little girl” who was bused to a white neighborhood school 50 years ago in order to get a better education. Had Biden and his old racist Senate colleagues had their way, Harris argued, she would have been stuck in an inferior segregated classroom.
The aftershocks from that debate are still being felt. Biden eventually offered a rare apology for his remarks about working with the segregationist senators, but defended his position on busing, saying that he was never opposed to it on a voluntary basis, but abhorred the idea of the federal government forcing the practice on local school districts. For her part, Harris noted how Biden’s defense was taken from the segregation playbook, the one that insisted the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery.
Yet, asked after the debate whether she would support forced busing today, Harris initially said she would if states failed to desegregate its schools. Days, later, however, she modified that position by saying she supported only voluntary busing, a stance not terribly different than Biden’s back in the 1970s. Alas, busing has never polled well. Welcome to a strong jolt of déjà vu, at least for those of us old enough to remember the political perils of busing.
Through the first half of the twentieth century, public education in this country was structured around race. Black schools were mostly run down and dilapidated with inadequate and inferior resources. White schools, for the most part, offered a vastly superior education. The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1954 landmark ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, said such a separated and segregated system was inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional. And then for the next 17 years, nothing much changed. In response to that inertia, the Supreme Court, in 1971, went a step further and said segregated school districts needed to bus students to other schools in order to achieve a racial mix.
That’s when all hell broke loose. The reaction to the judicial edict made Roe v. Wade look like a walk in the park. It wasn’t just the schools that were segregated back then, it was virtually every neighborhood of every major city in the country. Through decades of predatory real estate practices such as redlining and blockbusting, this country was literally and figuratively divided by race. Yet, the courts were limited to remedies involving only the schools since that was the legal predicate of the Brown case.
Many white northern liberals, who cheered the court decisions because they saw them directed at the segregated south, went apoplectic when they learned their kids were about to be bused into a black neighborhood school. There was major turbulence, ranging from riots to recall votes of local school board members, in places like Boston, New York, Detroit, Chicago and Los Angeles. Like Biden, many Democrats who supported busing as a concept quickly reversed course in response to constituent outrage.
Eventually, as the makeup of the Supreme Court changed, and as the country’s angst over busing continued to grow, there came a series of partial reversals to court-mandated busing. By 1999 only 15 percent of the country favored busing for integration purposes. A few years later, the Supreme Court issued a decision that substantially reduced the circumstances in which local districts could use race as a basis of moving students from one school to another. For all practical purposes, busing was nothing more than a bad memory of failed policy.
It was not, however, a failure for black children. The racial test score gap was cut in half for many black students. Longitudinal studies showed that black kids in integrated schools were far more likely to graduate from high school, get out of poverty and even live longer than their counterparts in segregated schools.
Sadly, many of those educational improvements underwent severe setbacks as structured desegregation plans fell by the wayside. According to several studies, a number of school systems are more segregated today than they were a half century ago. Not only that, but black children are now more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods and have lower achievement test scores than back in the busing days.
None of this is surprising. Neighborhood schools have long been touted as the shining exemplar of American public education. Busing was seen as the enemy of that system. Ignored in such thinking, however, is this fact: The ugly underbelly of neighborhood schools is a funding mechanism – the property tax – based on real estate values. We have chosen an arrangement in which the quality of a child’s education is based on the income of their parents. As a result, we are left with a bifurcated system every bit as separate-but-inherently-unequal as the one condemned in Brown v. Board of Education.
In a far more perfect world, the remedy for centuries of post-slavery racism and bigotry would have been deeper and broader than simply busing kids from one segregated neighborhood to another. How about integrating the neighborhoods themselves? How about equal funding for all schools, regardless of local property values?
As Joe Biden said last week, in his ongoing attempt to extract himself from his busing brouhaha, “There should be first-rate schools of quality in every neighborhood in this nation.” Since we, as a country, have never come close to such a standard, maybe it’s time to ask this question in the next presidential debate: Would you support federal control of public schools in order to assure that all students have an equal opportunity to a quality education regardless of race or family income? If nothing else, it might make busing look more palatable.