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Friday, July 26, 2019

The Busing Conversation We Should Be Having

Originally posted at Forbes (June 29)

So apparently, thanks to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, we're all going to talk about busing some more. That's a conversation many Americans have been having, sort of, for a long time.
When Joe Biden was a freshman congressman, I was a high school junior. In my rural small town and mostly white high school, we were aware of racial and racist strife as something that happened somewhere else. Probably someplace Southern, we assumed. But when my senior year started in the fall of 1974, we were amazed to see a huge blow-up over forced busing--in Boston. Because that was in the news, one of my classes was assigned an essay about busing, or as it was more commonly called at the time, "forced busing." I can remember the broad strokes of what I wrote--something about how if black and white students sat in classes and grew up together then racial strife, like the riots that we remembered from our childhood days, would be a thing of the past. I was, like many white kids of my generation, a poster child for extreme ignorance about the history of segregation and racism in this country. Heck, in my own small town it would be decades before I learned about a petition circulated in the sixties to keep black home buyers out of certain neighborhoods. At the time, I thought that if children of all races just grew up together, we'd all treat each other with respect and kindness and the world would be a better place. It seemed so simple; but then, most things seem simple if one is ignorant of the weight of history.
I was a college freshman when Joe Biden was denouncing forced busing as racist. It was in college that I first heard a black classmate say that he didn't want desegregation--he just wanted the same resources and opportunities the white kids had without giving up his own culture. I was starting to understand that busing and segregation were way more complicated than my high school self had ever suspected.
Almost nobody has ever liked busing. Mostly what people want is a good school in their own neighborhood. And for every complicated position on busing, there are good reasons and bad. White families have repeatedly shown that they will take measures to keep their kids away from black students. But why should black families have their children shuttled all around just so that white families can check off  "diversity" on their school experience list? The argument has been made that diverse school populations make white elites better at being elites, which is a terrible argument for integration; at the same time, research suggests that black students achieve more in diverse school settings that in segregated ones. And it matters that for some white folks, "I'm opposed to mandatory busing" was just a way to get away with saying, "I'm opposed to integration."
The experience of a diverse student body is important because it best mirrors the country that students will grow up to live in. But the most damning part of segregation is not the social and cultural apartheid--the most damning part is that the segregation of students is too often followed by the segregation of resources.
In a 2015 interview, Warren Buffett offered this observation: "If the only choice we had was public schools, we'd have better public schools." In other words, if everybody, including the wealthy and elites, had to send their kids to the same public schools, and they all had skin in the game, we'd have better schools. Desegregation through busing offered that kind of leverage, a calling of white folks' bluff. If all schools are separate but truly equal, then let's send your kid over there to the "black" school and see if you are perfectly happy, or if you will suddenly start working hard to guarantee that school the same level of support and resources that your child currently enjoys. Unfortunately, that bluff calling failed to anticipate another possible response--sending the student to a segregation academy or moving out to the suburbs or enrolling in a select private school.
The segregation of students and resources still goes on today. Consider the stunning case of five Pinellas County schools in Florida. As revealed in a 2015 investigative report by the Tampa Bay Times, the county school system first moved its black and LatinX students into five segregated elementary schools and then proceeded to starve those schools of necessary resources and funding. The resulting "failure factories" were a disgrace to the system and destructive to the students. There are other cities where student segregation simply follows from housing segregation, and school funding based on real estate taxes means that resource segregation is baked in--and none of that "just happened."
Do those schools need more forced busing, or more resources and support?
School choice advocates cite all these issues as reasons for charters and vouchers and other mechanisms for parental choice, but none of those policies address the central issue--the lack of resources. School choice is the Daylight Savings Time of education reform; it is based on the notion that by shuffling the same old resources around, somehow there will be more of them.
So by all means, let's have some more thoughtful and nuanced conversations about busing and racism and opportunity. Let's talk about Kamala Harris's own busing story, and how it is a powerful reminder of what good busing has accomplished. Let's discuss Joe Biden's history with busing and what he's learned since then. But let's not stop there. Let's discuss why we still have schools that students need to be bused away from in the first place, and what a President can do about it. We can talk about how having school populations as diverse as our nation can be a good thing, but let's also talk about how segregation is not only apartheid for social purposes, but a tool that makes it easier to deny certain parts of the population their rights as U.S. citizens. Let's talk about how to equitably share scarce education resources (and why those resources are scarce in the first place). Let's talk about the effect of regularly pairing "forced" or "mandatory" with "busing," but rarely with "segregation." And let's talk about how white Americans are the ones who have most often thwarted the aims of desegregation. Many of us have learned at least a little bit since the 1970s; now would be a good time to put it to use in a larger conversation than simply whether busing is good or bad.

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