Forced bussing is good. We should bring it back.

Great Debates
21

You do know that even forced bussing didn’t result in “equal” right?

For example, in my neighborhood the younger students were bussed out to the 'burbs, and the older students were bussed from the 'burbs to the inner city. Result: 5-year-old minority children having to catch the bus at 6:45 a.m. and then being miles away from their parents, so if they got sick–and the parents didn’t have transportation or a job they could leave–they were pretty much stuck.

So even if the school was better, there was a big downside, as almost nobody wants their K, 1- and 2-grade students that far away, and the minority areas got the short end of the stick there, as usual.

Meanwhile a good many of the older kids (by which I mean 8- to 11-year-olds) from the 'burbs got sent to private schools so they wouldn’t be bussed into the “ghetto.” (As, I should note, did my K and 2nd grader, because the hell with that long bus ride.) It was a great time for private schools. They sprang up everywhere.

It depends on what you want. Integration for its own sake, or a good education for all. Integration can always be fixed later. The kids only get one education though. So it should be good, for everybody. That should just be the default.

A couple of year ago the Denver Post had an article whinging about how Denver Public Schools lost all these students when people moved to avoid bussing, and they never came back. It very much sounded like “We lost all the white kids and they’re gone forever.” How about providing a good education for the students you have and not whining about what color they are?

Maybe Delaware and Kentucky have the highest levels of racial integration. How are their graduation rates?

22

Maybe it is an inherent downside of this policy that policymakers can manipulate it to harm students of color. But I’m not convinced that makes them worse-off than the current system. Generally, when bussing was eliminated, parents of students of color opposed that change and favored bussing.

I’m curious what you mean by this.

Yeah. That’s white flight. It happened everywhere. Bussing only makes that worse if you limit bussing to within the district. When it goes beyond district boundaries, the effects of white flight are massively mitigated, and there is less incentive for white flight in the first place.

Both states rejected integration once the federal court lifted supervision. But at the height of integration, overall academic achievement was better than it had been.

23

No offense, but the question was specifically about the effects of forced bussing, not simply integration. I didn’t see studies about that. Did I miss it?

Regards,
Shodan

24

No offense taken. What is the theory for how bussing-based integration (which succeeded at integration where it was tried) would result in a different kind of integration from the population’s studied in the studies contained in the research brief?

You can look at what happened in DE and KY if that is the evidence you want. But I don’t know why you would limit it that way.

25

My children would go to a private school before being bussed to a dangerous poorly functioning school. If you want to fix education in poor areas bussing is not the solution, though I do hope Dems push it, then you need to fix the underlying problem. That is you need real, rigorous standards for getting through each grade and getting a diploma. The parents who were failed by schools and their own parents in the past need to be bussed and educated. There are some very poorly educated people trying to raise children. Schools can’t fix that.

26

This is, I believe, a common view.

Those of you who don’t agree with octopus’s premises might ask yourselves whether you are implicitly adopting them.

27

Cite?

And I’m not just trying to nitpick here. This really is the crux of the whole issue. If you can convince parents that their kid really will get a better education if he attends a more racially-diverse school, you won’t have to resort to forced bussing, you’ll have parents waking up early to drive their kids across town to the school voluntarily, gladly even, because they know little Johnny will be getting a better education than he would’ve gotten in the lily-white school around the corner. Parents generally care deeply about the education of their children. If you can use that care as motivation to drive the behavior you want, you won’t have to turn to government mandates.

The problem, I suspect, is that you can’t actually show that little Johnny is better off in the racially-diverse inner-city school than the lily-white one in the suburbs. But I’m open to being persuaded. What’s your evidence to support the claim?

28

See the second link in my reply to John Mace above.

There is a whole literature on the effects of integration. I too am open to persuasion. I do not see a lot of evidence running contrary to the stuff cited in that link.

29

See also: http://www.school-diversity.org/pdf/DiversityResearchBriefNo8.pdf

I acknowledge that the organization presenting this research has an ideological agenda. So if there is countervailing evidence, I’m all ears.

30

withdrawn while I review your follow-up link.

31

“Integration can always be fixed later.” Okay, what I mean by this is that integration, as practiced where I lived, seemed to be based on the idea that black and Latino children could benefit by being put into mostly white schools. So it turns out that that doesn’t really work, at least in the lower grades, because, not to put too fine a point on in, the black and Latino kids were, in general, way behind the white kids from the get-go. Which meant that the teachers had to teach a range from “knows how to read at a basic level” to “doesn’t know the alphabet yet.” (And it was not only the minority kids who were low in this regard, but it was mostly.) The teacher in the class my kid was in, for the year we tried it, was white, well-meaning, and teaching the class in both English and Spanish. Even I, with only the Spanish I had picked up from living in the neighborhood, could see the deficiencies in this lady’s college Spanish. But that didn’t really matter so much because she mainly needed it to communicate with the parents, because just as I picked up some Spanish from living there, so did the Latino kids pick up English.

But anyway. This particular teacher was not up to the task of teaching such a wide range. Maybe there would have been some other teacher who could have managed it. But my kid came out of first grade not knowing one thing more than he knew when he went in, and having him there had been an incredible drain on everybody in the family. (Example: I took the bus to work. When he got sick, they would send him home in a cab, but only if I was home when the cab left the school. So I had to leave work, bus home, and then decide whether to have them put a sick, throwing-up kid in a cab or go get him, and I usually went to go get him. But I had a car. Some of the parents in my neighborhood didn’t have cars. Some of them would lose their jobs if they left work. Some of them couldn’t even be reached at work because they were out blowing leaves out of somebody’s lawn.)

So, while I had been a big advocate of public schools, when it came to my children, who only got one education, I chose a private school.

The thing is, maybe you can force integration in the schools, but you really, really can’t force integration where people live. Except for poor people. People with money will always have more choices, nothing you can do about it. By removing my kids from the public school I lowered the scores of that school, and that is not bragging, that is a fact. Other people moved out of the neighborhood, and honestly, that also lowered the scores, because the people who moved were the more well-off and educated to begin with. All of us who chose private schools or moving to another neighborhood were better educated and our kids were ahead. Fact.

I also know at least two families in that neighborhood who gave up other things to send their kids to a private Catholic school. In one case, they gave up cable TV and their telephone, so they could afford tuition. Come on, nobody should have to make that kind of choice to get an education.

Now when you get into high school and kids are playing sports, it turns out that being on the same team is one of the best integration methods ever. So integrate the high schools, and work on improving the education and not the racial mix while they’re still learning their ABCs.

32

Leave it to a liberal to think a few studies is enough justification to experiment with radical social programs that put millions of children’s childhood educations in jeopardy.

Whether bussing has genuine benefits that can’t be achieved otherwise, or whether there is strong consensus from a variety of sources not pushing specific agendas that this sort of thing would meaningfully improve student outcomes is mostly irrelevant. When the practical truth is bussing can’t work, can’t be made to work, will never survive the political process and etc, it’s basically a non-starter.

33

There is apparently some countervailing evidence right in your own cite:

I suspect that’s a painful admission for an organization with their ideological agenda to have to make.

All is not lost though, they included this hopeful paragraph:

There’s even a footnote:

I went and looked it up and found this link pointing to a 99-page PDF. The relevant section would appear to be found midway through:

Anyways, that’s about as far as I can be bothered to pursue the thread at the moment. If someone wants to pick it up where I’m leaving it, you could look at the 12 studies mentioned in the paragraph I quoted above. There are references in the footnotes

34

I don’t often agree with you, but that’s a good point. In an SNL sort of way, I’m imagining that Depak Chopra publishes a book about the advantages of integrated education, and you’ll have all the white parents you need lining up to enroll their kids in an integrated school, or demanding funding for minority kids to be bused to Whitehaven Elementary school.

Richard: I will look at your cites later, but what really would help is if you could simply quote some test scores for, say, reading and math to demonstrates the assertion about diversity in education, that would help a lot.

35

I choose social science over highly racialized gut intuitions. I acknowledge that lots of Americans feel otherwise.

I do find it interesting that some people have such visceral reactions to this topic.

36

Well, yes - “We are going to take your children and bus them to a distant school with or without your consent, because we know better than you what is good for society and good for your kids.”

37

I think racial equity is a separate goal from educational outcomes. They could move together, but they don’t necessarily have to. A school could be homogeneous and have both great and terrible educational outcomes. A school could be heterogeneous and have both great and terrible educational outcomes. Of the four pathways there, I’d prefer the ones with better educational outcomes, regardless of the demographics of the population. To me, the education outcomes are the #1 priority, and racial equity, while important, is not a close contender.

Of all the articles you’ve linked, the primary benefit to non-minority students is not academic. So to pursue this proposal, I think the primary goal must not be academic, is that a fair assessment?

38

It’s not like we have controlled double-blind experiments here. The evidence is what it is. HurricaneDitka summarized part of the math score evidence, which is mixed, but generally shows somewhere between neutral and good outcomes for white students.

The simplicity you are looking for doesn’t exist. If you want something more than synthesized summary conclusions, you gotta roll your sleeves up.

39

Who is the “we” in that sentence?

40

I do not agree with that assessment. First, I don’t think “academic” ought to exclude things like vocational and problem-solving skills. And second, even if you limit academic to math scores, the evidence is that there is benefit and the evidence is mixed as to magnitude.