Is Bussing Self-Defeating?

Civil rights activists contend that as long as segregated housing patterns prevail, any meaningful and democratic integration of U.S. public schools must be achieved by bussing white and Negro children hither and yon. Critics fear that the net effect is a drop in educational quality, since such integrated classes inevitably tend to take the pace of the culturally backward slum kids. This fear, moreover, leads many white parents to move away or send their children to parochial and private schools, thus heightening segregation even more. Long after most goals of the Negro Revolution have been generally accepted, the pro-bussing argument remains an open issue.

A symptom of the durable opposition to forced integration came last week in Albany. By a 41-to-19 vote, the New York state senate approved a bill that in effect sought to ban bussing. Supporters of the bill called the vote a victory for the "neighborhood school concept." But Brooklyn's Negro Assemblyman Bertram Baker, chairman of the Education Committee, who bottled up a similar bill previously, pronounced that the senate version "does not have a ghost of a chance" of getting to the assembly floor for a vote.

Richardson Dilworth, onetime liberal Democratic mayor of Philadelphia and now president of the city's Board of Education, warned that if present trends continue, public schools in the big cities will be almost entirely made up of non-white students within 20 years. He offered Philadelphia as a good example: "Fifty-seven per cent of the public school pupils are nonwhite" in a city that is 70% white, and there are more white kids in "parochial and private schools than there are in our city's entire public school system." . Concluded Dilworth: "I cannot think of a greater blow to our democracy."

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