Nikole Hannah-Jones: Busing Did Not Fail, We Did

In this article, Nikole Hannah-Jones reviews the history of racial desegregation and the term “busing.” This article is a good reason to subscribe to the New York Times. Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine.

“Court-ordered desegregation worked. But white racism made it hard to accept.”

When Senator Kamala Harris confronted former Vice President Joe Biden at the second Democratic presidential debate about his support of bills to ban busing for school desegregation during the 1970s and early ’80s, he gave a sort of denial. “I did not oppose busing in America,” he said. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”

This quickly became one of the most talked-about moments of the debate. Many pundits suggested it was unwise for Ms. Harris to dredge up the racial hurts of a decades-old “failed” policy at a time when the Trump administration is caging children along the border and when Democrats are seeking to retake the White House.

But tellingly, there was little discussion about busing’s efficacy, at least not with facts, or about whether or not busing served its purpose of breaking apart the educational caste system.

That we even use the word “busing” to describe what was in fact court-ordered school desegregation, and that Americans of all stripes believe that the brief period in which we actually tried to desegregate our schools was a failure, speaks to one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the last half century. Further, it explains how we have come to be largely silent — and accepting — of the fact that 65 years after the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, black children are as segregated from white students as they were in the mid-1970s when Mr. Biden was working with Southern white supremacist legislators to curtail court-ordered busing.

The term “busing” is a race-neutral euphemism that allows people to pretend white opposition was not about integration but simply about a desire for their children to attend neighborhood schools. But the fact is that American children have ridden buses to schools since the 1920s. There is a reason the cheery yellow school bus is the most ubiquitous symbol of American education. Buses eased the burden of transportation on families and allowed larger comprehensive schools to replace one-room schoolhouses. Millions of kids still ride school buses every day, and rarely do so for integration…

During the late 1950s and early ’60s, white politicians used every possible means to challenge the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and subvert its integration mandate. They siphoned state tax dollars — dollars that black residents also paid — to fund a separate system of all-white private schools that came to be known as segregation academies, paying teacher salaries and offering white children tuition vouchers to attend. All-white legislatures shuttered schools and entire school systems rather than allow a single black child to attend a “white” school.

Starting in 1959, Prince Edward County in Virginia went without a public school system for five years until the Supreme Court finally ordered the schools to reopen. What happened there is perhaps the most glaring example of the absurdity of Mr. Biden arguing on the debate stage that he did not oppose busing, just federal intervention. The federal government got involved precisely because local and state governments had openly rebelled against the Supreme Court, refusing to undertake even token desegregation.

Just a few years before Mr. Biden was attempting to curtail desegregation, white Southerners were bombing schools. They beat children and civil rights activists. They blackballed parents who dared sign their names to lawsuits suing for compliance with Brown, keeping them from employment and evicting them from their homes. Mobs blocked the doors to schoolhouses to keep handfuls of carefully selected black children from entering….

Many white Northerners initially applauded the Brown ruling, believing it was about time the South behaved when it came to its black citizens. But that support hinged largely on the belief that Brown v. Board of Education did not apply to them and their communities. When black activists in cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Dayton, Ohio, pushed to dismantle the de jure segregation that existed in their cities, white support for the integration mandate of Brown faded….

By the early 1970s, the South had been blanketed in desegregation orders pursued by the Justice Department and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and put in place by federal judges who often faced down death threats and political and social ostracization with stunning courage.

It was a remarkable time…

Mr. Biden flipped. Between 1975 and 1982, he teamed up with ardent segregationists in Congress, including Mr. [James O.] Eastland, to support no fewer than five antibusing measures. Despite Mr. Biden’s recent claims that he only opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education, the bills tried to curtail the ability of federal courts to order busing and even to limit busing in places where courts had already ordered it.

Mr. Biden, echoing a sentiment repeated again and again by progressive and conservative commenters in the past few weeks, says he is not and was not opposed to desegregation, just the tool most likely to achieve it…

When people call busing ill conceived or the worst means of ensuring integration, they conveniently obscure that busing was almost always a tool of last resort, mandated by courts only after lengthy battles with school boards and state officials, by black parents and civil rights groups, failed to produce even modest integration for black children. Judges and attorneys and activists were trying to destruct a racist and segregated educational system in the face of enormous resistance, subterfuge and violence, even in the most ostensibly liberal places…

For years, North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, where the community decided to make busing work, were some of the most integrated in the country, and both black and white students saw achievement gains. The district was forced to return to neighborhood schools after a white family brought down the desegregation order, and Charlotte is now the most segregated district in North Carolina. We should question why in the narrative of busing we remember Boston but not Charlotte.

To summarize: Black children attended schools that were typically under resourced in comparison to schools for white children. Oliver Brown sued so his daughter Linda could attend her neighborhood school in Topeka, which was designated as whites-only. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1954 Brown decision that segregating children by their race was unconstitutional but allowed states to move slowly in dismantling segregation. Over time, federal district courts and federal appeals courts demanded demonstrable compliance with the Brown decision and struck down evasions like choice programs. Eventually, the south became the most desegregated section of the nation, and the northeast became the most segregated. Today, New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Michigan are the most segregated states, in relation to schools.

It is now evident that “busing”—that is, desegregation—worked. Test scores rose for both black and white children, and the gap between them narrowed significantly. But white racism never abated, and as the courts became more conservative, they retreated from their commitment to enforce desegregation. Resegregation increased, reversing the gains of the 1970s and early 1980s, because white racism remained strongly opposed to desegregation.

It was not “busing” that whites opposed. It was desegregation.

Carrie says:

July 16, 2019 at 12:29 pm

Desegregation, aka bussing, was the best thing that could have happened to (white) me and my peers. The only people of color we had grown up with were our maids and gardeners, or a few workers at our parent’s companies. Being thrust into junior high with these kids opened up our world: new friends (some lifelong), cultural awareness and understanding, and most importantly, we lost the prejudice that our parents were raised with.

Kids have an innate curiosity and little fear of the unknown. Without exposure to “others,” they grow up in a dangerous vacuum that explodes into episodes like Charlottesville.

My former schools are now charters, and have excluded the lower classes of color again. Home to movie stars, politicians, and tech upstarts, they’ve forgotten (or not) how good we had it when our schools were more diverse culturally. Why spend the money on private school when you can turn your neighborhood public school into something just as exclusionary and save on tuition? It is beyond sad. It’s disgusting.

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Bob Shepherd says:

July 16, 2019 at 1:13 pm

Amen. Beautifully said, Carrie.

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retired teacher says:

July 16, 2019 at 12:54 pm

Integration works! It is a powerful antidote poverty and racism. It is a powerful solution to the under funding that majority black schools face. It decouples red lined real estate from education.

Biden has stated that he is not opposed to busing, but, frankly, a lot of white people are. That is why we have failed busing because we no longer have the political will to pursue it. Biden also said he opposed federal busing except when states actively oppose it. Racism is often subtle and insidious like red lining which according to my interpretation of Biden’s comments is why we continue to ignore it. If the states refuse to enforce civil rights, shouldn’t the federal government step in? Even Kamala Harris has “clarified” her comments so as to not interfere with the party line. Maybe the new Democratic motto should be “Don’t rock the boat.” https://time.com/5620793/kamala-harris-busing-stance/

Bob Shepherd says:

July 16, 2019 at 1:14 pm

This, alone, should disqualify Biden from becoming the Democratic candidate. It’s appalling.

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- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  July 16, 2019 at 1:29 pm
  
  The shocking thing is that Biden wasn’t at all repentant about about his segregationist past–about standing with the likes of George Wallace.
  
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retired teacher says:

July 16, 2019 at 1:45 pm

BTW, the state with the most segregated schools remains New York, and seven of the most segregated states are in the North.

A legitimate study on integration confirmed that busing helped to cut the racial score gap in half.

These are two big points in the article for those that cannot read it.

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- LisaM says:
  
  July 16, 2019 at 4:16 pm
  
  I live in MD (one of the top 4 states). The county that I live in is the most segregated in the state per data. Some schools have been allowed to become overcrowded while others have remained full or under enrolled for years because the BOE doesn’t want to rock the boat. Every time redistricting comes up, the fighting begins and elitism and racism rears it’s ugly head. The data shows that this is a “busing” issue and that white, wealthy students spend more time on the bus so that they can go the “better” schools….meaning the parents don’t want their children to go to schools with “those other kids” who bring down the” test scores”. I am so glad that I only have 1 year left in this public school system.
  
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- retired teacher says:
  
  July 16, 2019 at 5:09 pm
  
  The second part of reducing the gap is important for white families to understand. The presence of minority students does not hurt the scores or education of the white students. Integration is a hot button issue, maybe more so in the north, where there are many competitive, high achieving districts surrounding the cities. Many parents fear “those students” will keep my little achiever out of the ivy league.
  
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Bob Shepherd says:

July 16, 2019 at 1:12 pm

On Saturday, July 2, 2019, at the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, our stable genius president again demonstrated his breathtaking command of U.S. history and racial politics. The subject of busing had been bruising for Status Quo Joe Biden during the second Democratic Presidential Debate, and Trump was asked by reporters about this. His answer: “There aren’t that many ways you’re going to get people to schools.”

In other words, IQ45 thought that busing, in this context, was a reference to whether we should use school buses.

Elizabeth K. Burton says:

July 16, 2019 at 1:59 pm

My problem with the busing concept is that, like most such ideas with good intentions aimed at ending segregation, it presumes segregation is solely a function of racial disparities. Which, as anyone who didn’t grow up in the suburbs in a comfortable middle-class lifestyle knows, isn’t true.

Why is it no one asks the students who’ll be removed from their neighborhood schools, where they live among people of their own class, whether they want to be injected into what is going to be not only a foreign but a likely unfriendly “country”? In other words, when busing is set up, does it consider the element of class in determining where the students will go?

It’s well past time that programs intended to address racial disparities stop the pretense there’s no serious class problem in the US as well, and plan accordingly.

retired teacher says:

July 16, 2019 at 2:43 pm

Busing does not solve segregation, but it does provide better educational opportunities for minority students.

I grew up in a white. blue collar neighborhood. My suburban cousins felt sorry for my brother and me. Our local schools were known for needing improvement. My city had a couple of selective, integrated high schools that were magnet schools where I got an excellent education. Sometimes we need to accept something different to move forward and make progress.

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FLERP! says:

July 16, 2019 at 4:34 pm

Well put.

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Teachingeconomist says:

July 16, 2019 at 6:16 pm

Elizabeth,

When the families living in the Normandy School District were given the option to ride a bus to a white school district thirty miles away, 1,000 students chose to catch a bus at 5:00 am every morning. That was 25% of all students in the Normandy School District.

See https://www.thisamericanlife.org/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-one as reported by Nikole Hanna-Jones

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Laura H. Chapman says:

July 16, 2019 at 3:07 pm

And here we go with the new progressive agenda for schools.

Almost every week Neera Tanden, President of the Center for American Progress (CAP) appears on television to opine about the presidential elections. Tanden is a former aide to Hillary Clinton. CAP is supposed to function as a think tank for Progressives, especially Democrats. On July 2, 2019, CAP published: A Quality Education for Every Child: A New Agenda for Education Policy.” The press release asserted: “The Next President’s Education Agenda Must Center Racial Disparities in Educational Opportunity.”

I have been studying this report. It is highly critical of K-12 education. It is also calculated to mislead casual readers. The authors claim the report is “a bold and comprehensive approach to K-12 education.” I think not. Many of CAP’s favored policies endorse two decades of federal demands for accountability. Think Arne Duncan and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF).

CAP is on record as favoring teacher unions and higher pay for teachers, especially for those who work in low-income communities. However, CAP is also all-in for charter schools, known to be antiunion. This contradiction is one among others this report. The writers also bury important details in the endnotes. For example, CAP wants students to meet “challenging standards.” The endnote cites the Common Core. In addition, CAP’s website has over 50 articles pushing the Common Core, the latest in 2019. This affection can be explained by the $14 million CAP has received from the B&MGF, main financier of the Common Core, and specific grants: In 2013, $550,000 “for implementation of the Common Core,” and in 2016, a cool $2 million for “enactment of the College and Career/Common Core agenda, and to reduce opposition to it and associated high quality tests.”

CAP’s policy recommendations for the next President are bad news for public schools. The Introduction claims that a bipartisan consensus exists on key elements of education reform—standards-based accountability; teacher evaluations that include test scores of students; and school choice. The authors then say that these three reforms are not the problem. The real problem is that improvements have not been made “at the pace needed to give every student a fair shot at success in college and career.” CAP elaborates on all of these claims in five policy priorities for a new administration.

Applying An Explicit Race Equity Lens To Policy Development. “This means specifically looking at potential impacts on communities that do not identify as white or that have large concentrations of families with low incomes, without conflating the two.” This section is an argument on behalf of increasing opportunities for historically disadvantaged communities, schools, and students. CAP’s discussion of race ends in naming groups who are underserved: Students who are non-white, Black, Latinx, Native American, and some Asian American and Pacific Islander children, students from families with low incomes, students with disabilities, students who identify as LGBTQ, and students who are English language learners.

“A new administration must begin with a comprehensive strategy for addressing disparities in educational opportunity” (ideally) ”coupled with a comprehensive economic development strategy beyond the educational system.” CAP calls for $200 billion to modernize school buildings; a grant program to promote “culturally responsive pedagogy”; state audits of schools and districts for “disparate educational opportunity,” and USDE guidance to state legislatures on equitable funding.

Equitable funding seems to mean “filling the annual $23 billion gap in funding between predominantly white and predominantly nonwhite school districts.” I found the source of this estimate. It is EdBuild. EdBuild promotes “a weighted student funding formula” so that money goes to the school a student attends, aiding school choice, including vouchers. ALEC, the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange has also pushed this system of funding since 2010.

It turns out that CAP as a financial supporter of EdBuild. CAP and EdBuild also receive money from the same foundations: The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation; Carnegie Corporation of New York; Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Helmsley Charitable Trust; Walton Family Foundation; Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and W. K. Kellogg Foundation among others. CAP traffics in ideas and money devoted to undermining public education.

Preparing All Students For College And The Future Workforce. CAP dwells on the economic return on investment from college and high-value work credentials. The report calls for states with “college-and career-ready academic content standards” (aka the Common Core) to make sure a K-12 ladder prepares students for careers “in the new economy.” Districts should make sure that families with children in kindergarten know requirements “for the future of work.”

CAP also wants “a new federal-state-industry partnership” empowered to identify middle and high school models for accelerated college credit and a meaningful workforce credential. This partnership is also supposed to ensure that career and technical education (CTE) programs “reflect upcoming, well-paid, in-demand jobs” in regions where the programs are offered.

CAP’s thinking about CTE is not bold. It is not progressive. It assumes that labor markets are predictable and that schools should be responsible for job training desired by potential employers. CAP’s policy ideas are vintage 1990s workforce training proposals from the National Center for Education and the Economy. They ignore the civic mission of schools and what life may offer and require of students beyond getting a job. http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Americas-Choice-High-Skills-or-Low-Wages.pdf
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3. Modernizing And Elevating The Teaching Profession. Here is the major claim: “If states and school districts raised teacher pay to match that of other professions, provided training to help teachers meet the needs of the changing student population, and increased the selectivity of the teaching profession, the national narrative about and respect for the teaching profession would shift. A comprehensive policy agenda to achieve this goal should be multifaceted and must ensure that teachers are given the necessary training and resources to meet a higher bar.”

CAP’s discussion of teacher strikes, low pay, and other discontents has little bearing on a “comprehensive agenda to raise the prestige of teaching and improve teachers’ working conditions.” For teacher education programs CAP says: Be more selective in accepting candidates for teaching and explicitly seek diversity among candidates, provide high-quality clinical training and more rigorous coursework of use in modern classrooms.
For states and districts, CAP says: Align requirements for licensure with candidates’ observable readiness to teach; invest in supports for new teachers, such as high-quality induction and mentorship programs; provide dedicated time and support for professional development that improves student outcomes; and identify career pathways so excellent teachers can expand their effectiveness.

There is nothing daring or innovative about these recommendations. The puffed-up “elevating” language comes from a Obama/Duncan 2012 RESPECT program conjured by McKinsey & Company https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/obama-administration-seeks-elevate-teaching-profession-duncan-launch-respect-pro Some of the same points appear in CAP’s 2015 report “Smart, Skilled, and Striving: Transforming and Elevating the Teaching Profession.” Here is a scathing review of this warmed over Obama scheme from the National Education Policy Center. https://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-tprep

4, Dramatically Increasing Investments And Improving The Equity Of Existing Investments In Public Schools. CAP writers note that about eight percent of public schools funds come from federal sources. Title I funding is dedicated to schools were many students are from families with low incomes. CAP wants Title I funding increased and full funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Act.

CAP’s big new policy idea is this: “The federal government should appoint a commission to determine a specific set of critical education resources that are typically present in privileged communities but missing from historically disadvantaged schools and districts. These resources could include guidance counselors, school nurses, mental health professionals, art and music classes, or extracurricular enrichment opportunities.” (I found no endnotes or details about who would appoint the commission, with what authority, or how their deliberations might be acted upon.)

CAP proposes federal “public education opportunity grants” as a way to address inequities. This is not a new idea. Such grants are available under Title I, Part A Improving Basic Programs Operated by Local Educational Agencies. The grants are for schools with a high proportion of students from low-income families. In 2018, these grants were funded at $15,759,802,000. (CAP does not seem to have ideas on state and local funding other than money follows the student.)

Bringing A Balanced Approach To Charter School Policy. To its credit, CAP does not support for-profit on-line charter schools. It also urges the next administration to “include strong authorizing and accountability policies for charter schools as well as efforts to proactively address the shortfalls of the sector. These efforts should include solutions for pain points, such as issues related to backfilling enrollment during the school year, providing service to students with disabilities, and maintaining transparency in financial operations—to name a few.” (Pain points? Shortfalls? Not a single endnote refers to well-documented and rampant corruption in charter schools. Not one).

CAP is on record as favoring charter schools. CAP’s 2017 “The Progressive Case for Charter Schools,” offers praise for Teach for America and Relay Graduate School of Education. CAP’s 2018 “Charters and the Common Good: Spillover Effects of Charter Schools in New York City” includes this astonishing claim: ”There is suggestive evidence that spillover effects (from co-location) are larger if the charter school appears to be of high quality, (defined) as either having high average scores on annual 4th-grade math and reading exams or being operated by an established, respected charter management organization such as KIPP, Success Academy, or Uncommon Schools.” (Respected? Franchise cookie-cutter schools are great?)

According to CAP, charter schools represent a solution to racial and economic inequities in education. “In too many places across the country, there are not enough good seats in schools, especially for Black, Latinx, and Native American students, as well as students from families with low incomes. A strong charter sector is a critical component to expanding the number of good public school seats, and high-quality charter schools are a valuable strategy to address that problem.” (CAP refuses to acknowledge that charter schools are not legally equivalent to public schools. They are now and historically have been a means to further segregation. “Seats” is shorthand for a calculation used to market charter schools in any community where schools are ranked A-F or in league tables. The enrollments in all schools not rated A or B, or an equivalent system are counted as all of the “seats” that could be replaced by the imagined “high quality seats” in charter schools).

CAP wants the next administration to “apply a race equity lens to public school choice policies generally and charter schools specifically, with a focus on equitably expanding access to opportunities for underserved students. This means that decisions on where to locate schools and programs and how to make enrollment decisions—for example, boundaries, admissions requirements, and lottery rules—should be analyzed with a race equity lens.“ (CAP assumes that school choice is an uncontested and established policy. Notice the absence of any reference to elected school boards. Decisions are “just made” as if from some invisible decider).

“This approach should include a balanced assessment of potential charter growth and the impact on traditional districts. This assessment should always focus on how to increase the number of good seats for students but may imply different specific recommendations in different places and circumstances.”

CAP’s eagerness to endorse school choice and charter school growth is not just in accord with Trump/Betsy DeVos’ policies. It also responds to the wishes of key funders of CAP. For example, the Walton Family Foundation has sent CAP $1,228,705 in three grants for K-12 education, with a 2017 ”special projects” grant of $453,705 for work on “Supporting High-Quality Charter Schools” and “Implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act.”

CAP’s report is designed to promote charter school growth and double down on every misguided policy of the last two decades. I have left a ton of references and rants on the cutting floor. By the way, all five of the authors of this Report had staff positions on the Hill and four worked in Obama’s Department of Education. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2019/07/02/471511/quality-education-every-child/

retired teacher says:

July 17, 2019 at 7:36 am

Private charter schools are no solution to solving segregation or disparities in educational opportunity. Private charter schools are more segregated than public schools. While private charter schools, may provide better opportunities for a few, it reduces opportunity and curricula options for the many public school students that lose funding. How is that “increased opportunity?” It is a rob Peter to pay Paul heist. CAP and their ilk should try reading some legitimate research before announcing their great “policy.”

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ira shor says:

July 16, 2019 at 6:33 pm

A brilliant, competing essay in the Sunday NYTimes, a must-read, sets the record straight. Here in Montclair, NJ, we have been busing to desegregate for 40 years. Kids of all colors go to school with kids of all colors. Much more is needed to end white supremacy in school and society, but busing to desegregate was an historic step in the right direction which the Democratic Party with Biden and such politicians as well as teacher union leaders failed to defend.

retired teacher says:

July 17, 2019 at 7:44 am

My district also rezoned about forty years ago so that each of the three elementary schools had about the same number of minority students, and the downtown students, both black and white, were bused. That is integration by design. We are a small district so we only have one intermediate, middle and high school.

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Dunce Me says:

July 16, 2019 at 7:08 pm

Funny how just a month or so ago you quoted a blog post about the Browns not really feeling like filing a lawsuit, and that not only whites, but many blacks were against busing. What some call ghetto other call diaspora. Not all blacks lived around other blacks just because they could not get out, some preferred to live among their own, after all Chinatown and Korea Town and Armenian Village and Brighton Beach do not make anyone raise their eyebrows.

What should have been done is getting rid of redlining, of unequal pay, of unequal jobs, etc. People of all colors should have been allowed to move wherever they wanted and to apply to jobs without discrimination by color or sex or political affiliation. Instead, the government chose the simplest approach — busing — that did not solve underlying problems, because if it did, we would not need special admission policies for minorities in 21st century.

Shouldigobackin? says:

July 16, 2019 at 8:12 pm

Question for anyone who can answer:

How common was it for white children to be bused to black schools? The only place I know of this happening was in Wichita, KS. My grandmothers, both college-educated African American teachers at black schools in the south, lost their jobs once schools were integrated. Did any other places utilize both busing AND more equitable resourcing of black schools to achieve 2-way school integration?

retired teacher says:

July 17, 2019 at 7:52 am

Good question! I do not know for sure the answer. However, often times the “black school” is in the oldest part of town that has already experienced “white flight.” The “black” school is often the most delapidated so it is the school that gets closed. I have heard of white students getting bused to majority black magnet schools in some cities.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones: Busing Did Not Fail, We Did

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