Why didn't court ordered busing as part of desegregation mandates work?

In reading the wiki on busing the other day and I was surprised to see that busing was considered a more or less a complete failure in terms of it’s effectiveness in improving the academic performance of minority children much beyond the primary grades. Why is this? Wiki does not say why it did not accomplish these goals, only that it didn’t, and that eventually both whites and African Americans came to the conclusion it was a failure.

I had kind of assumed that even with white flight taken into account busing was accomplishing something if they continued it for over 20 years.

My guess would be because even if the schools do a better job teaching it’s kind of hampered by time lost to increased travel times. Distances seems alot longer in the city because of low speed limits and lots of traffic lights.

Another guess is you have issues about how much individual students value academic success, plus resources of the family to help them.

Since when is Wikipedia regarded as Inerrant Holy Writ?

At least the phrase “forced busing” had been removed from the article. But I see you included the phrase in the title of your GQ thread on the subject.

Busing only existed for as long as it did because it was ordered to exist by the courts. Places that voluntarily used busing as a method to reduce segregated education settings stopped doing it well before 20 years, for the most part.

Busing failed because of two reasons: 1) the assumptions that were made to support busing as a method of integration were incorrect and 2) “white flight” and use of private schools prevented busing from achieving its goals of integrated school settings.

Busing was chosen as a method of integrating schools on the theory that integration of school populations, in and of itself, was an important enough goal to impose otherwise less-than-optimal schooling situations on children. Children do better in local schools of smaller size, all the research supports this, so sending the child to a location outside the community, especially when this forces the child into lengthy bus rides that use up portions of the day which otherwise could be devoted to study and/or family time, is not helpful. But it turns out that merely creating diverse school populations is not sufficient; you have to create diverse school environments. Otherwise, all that happens is the imported population (“black” or “white”) simply stays insular, and gets little of value from the fact it is in a new school. If you aren’t providing a diverse group of educators, if you aren’t emphasizing diversity in your curriculum, etc., just putting “whites” and “blacks” together doesn’t do too much.

Of course, “white” families reacted predictably to busing schemes. Some reacted with overt or implied racism: no way my kid is going to a black school! Others reacted with more reasonable feelings: No way is my kid attending a school that’s crumbling apart and has no heat in the middle of the city! Either way, the result was to take the students out of the district. In some areas, this involved simply moving out of the city limits, in others, it involved moving out of the county (school districts in the south are primarily county-wide, so if you want out of the Charlotte school district, for example, you have to get out of Mecklenburg County). Still other parents simply started sending their kids to private schools. By removing a substantial part of the “white” population from the district, busing stopped being an effective integration method because there weren’t any schools to bus the “black” kids to, and create a 50 - 50 population, or anything like it.

What is your point? Are you asserting that busing schemes were effective at integrating school populations, contrary to the assumption of the OP? Or are you asserting something else?

The term “forced busing” is still in the linked article. The term “forced busing” is commonly used in newspaper articles and other discussions about busing over the years, even somewhat sympathetic ones, as a factual definition of what is occurring.

see

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEED8143DF934A2575AC0A963958260&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/M/Matsch,%20Richard%20P.

Our district uses the magnet school approach. Even that leads to some weird dynamics.

One of the schools that does best in our district on NCLB measures has a very low low income/minority population, despite being just across the road from a housing project. The school I teach at is in a very wealthy neighborhood, and has a very high low-income population.

The reason for this is that busing is only offered to students who attend school at least 1 mile from their residence (I think it’s 1 mile; it may be 1/2 mile). And the road that separates the school and the project is an interstate, with only a narrow, rusted, awful-looking footbridge to cross it. Parents in the housing projects don’t want their children to have to cross this dangerous bridge every day, so they send them to the more distant school, allowing their kids to ride the bus to school.

It’s weird. Forced busing doesn’t work very well, but it seems like any system you set up will have funky consequences.

Daniel

Parents want neighborhood elementary schools even if desegregation isn’t relevant. Try to close an elementary school, just to send the kids to the adjacent one with the same demographics, and you’ll get complaints. Add in a longish bus ride and it’s even worse. I don’t want my kids on the bus for 30-45 minutes each way, if there’s a school right near by.

Where I lived, we just opened a new High School, third for the district. We’re geographically closer to the new one, and so are in its attendance area, but because of the roads, it’s a longer drive to get there than the one we had been going to. About ten minutes longer. To a brand new High School. You should have heard the complaints.

I think that “forced busing” is a legitimate term when applied to a discussion of the topic. I would tend to agree that it should only be a footnote in an article in an encyclopedia (where absolute neutrality is desired), but even the advocates of busing frequently used “mandatory busing.”

As to its failure: it had two initial goals (which were not necessarily both spoken in official documents).

In the first goal, people noted that black kids were often segregated into the poorest, oldest, most run-down facilities, (generally because the schools were located in the poorer, run-down neighborhoods that the whites had largely abandoned as they began to suffer the ravages of time*), not necessarily because they had been built poorly with the intention of holding black kids. The twin ideas associated with that problem were that shuffling kids around to different schools would ensure that the accident of birth would not dictate how poor a school one attended and, at the same time, if white kids were sent to the same schools, the parents would do a better job leaning on school boards to improve the physical structures of the older buildings while also making sure that teachers with good reviews would be scattered among all the schools rather than allowing them to use seniority to “escape” to the better schools.

The second goal had the intention of simply mixing up white kids and black kids in a way that each group would have enough association with the other that it would be harder to stereotype the other group as “bad” since each kid would associate with so many individuals that they would recognize how few other kids fit the stereotypes.

The second effort was doomed, simply because the whites often picked up and moved away from the cities to avoid the situation, leaving the school districts and the courts to play games moving enough of the remaining white kids around to give some appearance to “integration.”

The first intention was also probably doomed for much the same reason. If all the schools are poorly funded by a diminishing tax base (as voters/taxpayers moved out of the cities in droves, leaving lower property values as housing changed hands so quickly**), there was less money to spend on the physical structures to begin with and there were more problems with getting parents to pay attention to the schools since it was so much hassle for parents to even participate. (For example, if you have parent-teacher meetings for kids in multiple grades in three separate schools several miles apart, it is tough to pay much attention to them. If you have to take multiple cross-town busses to get to a kid’s school, returning home well after dark on the same system, you have less incentive to go to the meetings.)

While “white flight” played an enormous role in sabotaging the (not well thought out) plan and while racism played a serious part in “white flight,” it would be gravely inaccurate to say that racism was the only (or even, perhaps, the primary) cause. The flight to the suburbs had begun well over twenty years earler, not as a way to “escape” black neighborhoods, but as a way to trade up from living in over/under duplex houses on 40’ x 80’ lots with no front yards, no side yards, and a 40’ x 20’ back yard or living in apartment buildings with tiny (or no) playgrounds to having a private house with its own basement on a 70’ x 150’ (or larger) lot where the kids had room to run around and there was room for a driveway for the car, etc. The busing issue (with the civil disturbances/riots that preceded bussing by a few years) simply exacerbated the trend as people genuinely feared that their property values (i.e., their single largest investment) would fall or that their kids would receive inferior education, not because they would have black classmates, but because it took no genius on the part of parents to recognize that they would have a much harder time handling parent-teacher conferences or retrieving sick kids from widely scattered schools and all the other issues that removing kids from “neighborhood schools” would cause. Of course, racism did play a large part in the problem, but it was one factor of many, not the sole cause.

  • Of course, the poorer schools often did receive poorer maintenance and upkeep, some based in racism, some based in simple “taking care of our own” in white majority school boards.

** In the U.S., schools have traditionally been financed through property taxes. Falling property values corresponded directly to lower revenue. This has only begun to change in the last few years, but it remains true for well over 90% (perhaps over 95%) of U.S. school districts.

Because academic performance has far more to do with the student (and the student’s home environment) than the particular building the classes are held in.

My town has a magnet school system, no neighborhood schools, all schools are racially proportionate. There is still a HUGE achievement gap between whites and blacks, absolutely huge. This is true even though the school system puts black and white students in the same classrooms in the same schools from kindergarten on up.

On a more base level, I think forcing anything is usually a bad move in a free society. It’s one thing when you deliberately segregate schools by telling a black pupil who lives right next door to a white school that he has to go across town to another school.

While diversity is a laudable goal, you are doing the same damn thing when you tell a pupil, white or black, that he can’t go to the school next door, but he has to go across town for diversity purposes.

If people in a community live apart along racial lines, don’t expect everything to go well when you force them together by judicial fiat. I think we can see that almost 30 years after forced busing ended, blacks and whites are going to the same schools, and for the most part is is becoming accepted, especially with a new generation of parents (like me) who went to integrated schools…

O, you are saying that it actually succeeded? :smiley:

No. After it failed miserably, and the debate over integration/busing went away, people started to accept each other as humans and quit doing things (for the most part) like moving out of the county and enrolling their kids into private schools to keep them away from black.

While my school was integrated, it was never forced bused.

In what alternate universe do you think integrated schools exist??:confused:

Most Eastern and Southern United States major cities continue to have issues with integration of schools. White flight continues to this day in most of them. Further, the current experiment with “school choice” is being disproportionally utilized by those who are “white” to put their children in alternative schooling situations, away from minority children.

Where schools have “integrated,” they mostly have done so because some third group has intruded, such as in influx of Hispanics. But inner city schools in major cities in the US are not in any way substantially integrated.

So your position then that participation was voluntary? It wasn’t. Opting out required appealing to school boards and waiting for their ruling.

When my parents found out that I was going to be sent to a middle school across the city when I was nine, they fought to have me placed in the school adjacent to my babysitter’s home instead because the school I was supposed go to not only had a horrible reputation, but had kids there up to age 15. If it was voluntary, they wouldn’t have had to appeal to the school board. Fortunately it was decided that the school my parents wanted was mixed enough to be to be an acceptable aternative.

Well, educate me. Please tell me the states or counties that still have segregated schools. One where a black child will be met at the front door with an old white principal, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, telling him to go to the colored school down the road.

Sure, some white families take steps to keep their kids in predominately white schools. You live in SC…I went to SC elementary schools in the late 70s. There were a lot of blacks in my class…in Myrtle Beach.

Are you saying that 30 years later there are no integrated schools in your state?

Succeeded in mingling black and white students, yes. Succeeded in improving the academic performance of black students, not so much.

It’s easy to force students to share a classroom, it’s getting them to learn that’s tough.

I’m curious too. I went to high school for two years in South Carolina in the '90s, and it was approximately half black, half white. Every high school we competed against in band competitions was also integrated.

The courts recognized that separate was unequal. It was an attempt to equalize the playing field. I am not so sure it failed. It was not an event but a process. As it went on many schools were integrated and blacks and whites were mixed. So for some they actually met and dealt with each other on a daily basis.That is and was progress and it paid some dividends .
But the rich were not having any part of it. They moved and separated themselves. So not everybody was affected. Some were. That means some are more comfortable in mixed groups and are less likely to be bigoted. Progress. Not a solution.