If Not Busing, What?

For all its political appeal, President Nixon's proposed busing moratorium raises troubling questions for the nation's educators. Since 1954 they have been guided by the U.S. Supreme Court's historic ruling that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Last month, amid the latest uproar over busing, Nixon proposed that Congress prohibit new busing and concentrate $2.5 billion on improving inferior schools. Apart from constitutional dilemmas, the Nixon stand immediately reopened two hard questions:

> Can substantial school integration be achieved without more busing?

> Can racially separate schools be made equal at any price?

To be sure, Nixon did not rule out all busing. About 40% of U.S. schoolchildren would continue riding the ubiquitous yellow machines, most for reasons of distance, not race. Thus a city like Boston, which sends 85% of its students to high school by bus or public transportation and maintains de facto school segregation (TIME, April 3), probably could integrate with no increase in busing--not that it wants to. Small towns where all children walk to school could balance schools racially by following the example of Westfield, N.J., which integrated its schools simply by reassigning blacks to white schools and hiring three new crossing guards to get them there safely. But Boston and Westfield are hardly typical. New Jersey education authorities, for example, estimate they could racially balance schools in 36 districts without new busing, but they could not do so in the 15 largest cities, where up to three-fourths of the state's nonwhite schoolchildren live. The situation is similar in other densely populated states.

But this new busing would not necessarily mean the "massive busing" that most Americans assume integration would require; increasing evidence demonstrates that it is needed only in rare cases. One study, by HEW'S Office for Civil Rights, found that 19 districts operating in 1970-71 under court orders to integrate had to increase the number of pupils bused to school by only 9%.

Another, financed by HEW and released after Nixon spoke, found that substantial integration--even in large cities like Cleveland--can be accomplished by redrawing school-attendance zones; little additional busing would be necessary. That study, by the Lambda Corp., a technical research firm in Arlington, Va., assumed that no school-bus trip should take more than 35 minutes after the last child is picked up. The Lambda report also assumed that existing school-district lines would be retained, except in cities where a white majority in the city schools could be achieved only by exchanging students with nearby suburbs.* Even then, little new busing would be required. Researchers fed census figures, road maps, busing schedules and other data into a computer. They found, says Project Director George E. Pugh, that "in most cases where the courts ordered desegregation, people put together plans that were highly inefficient, involving more busing than was necessary."

Pugh claimed that the report's generalized conclusions are loosely applicable to all 29 urban areas studied (among them: Atlanta, Denver and San Francisco), though detailed analyses for each have not been completed. In one "typical" but unnamed city of 1,000,000, which already buses 22% of its elementary school students, the Lambda researchers found that assigning three-fourths of the black students to predominantly white schools would require only a 2% or 3% increase in busing.

No Way. Nixon's moratorium, however, would not permit even that, for the real issue is not busing but white fears of integration. As a last resort, the Nixon policy would permit the courts to order busing, but only for children above the sixth grade and only as a five-year expedient while other ways of achieving racial balance were worked out. As alternatives to new busing the President proposed: 1) redrawing attendance zones, 2) building new schools convenient to both black and white neighborhoods, or 3) establishing high-quality "magnet" schools to make integration more attractive.

Actually, applying the Nixon alternatives would often require some increase in the number of children bused to school. Attendance lines have been redrawn annually in Manhattan, for example, but because the white public school population borough-wide is so low, next year all but one of its eight academic high schools will have 80% or higher nonwhite enrollments. Some 35 U.S. cities are setting up or planning magnet schools by building educational parks, large central campuses to which all of a district's pupils would travel, many by bus. John Ito, civil rights adviser to Los Angeles County schools, can list 14 different desegregation techniques, but notes that each requires some additional busing. Says Ito: "A busing moratorium would prevent integration from taking place. There is just no way around that fact."

Without busing, the only real solution is neighborhood integration, which would take years to accomplish even if it were to be adopted as an all-out national goal--and that is unlikely. Since Johns Hopkins Sociologist James Coleman's celebrated study in 1966, all research has suggested that a child's home environment--his family's educational and economic status--has more effect on how well he learns than anything he encounters in school.

Critical Mass. Nevertheless, school integration can accomplish a great deal. Since Coleman's investigation, researchers have verified that poor black children do at least marginally better in white-majority classrooms, presumably because they pick up their middle-class white schoolmates' learning skills and attitudes toward education.

Because home environment and school integration appear to be so important, critics of the Nixon proposals question whether "compensatory education"--extra spending on disadvantaged children--will ever close the learning gap between black and white. Integration does not solve nonwhite children's learning problems, but the research shows that it gets them closer to equal educational opportunity than spending money to improve segregated schools. However, Nixon argues that by focusing $2.5 billion on those children who need it most, to produce a "critical mass" of $300, each student's lot will improve markedly. Is the idea sound?

A bewildering array of studies of these Johnson-era programs has failed to prove that compensatory education is the answer to poor schooling. Rand Corp. researchers found that for every study identifying a school program that worked, another equally good study concluded that the same educational practice was ineffective. Nixon acknowledged the confusion two years ago when he told Congress that "the best available evidence indicates that most of the compensatory education programs have not measurably helped poor children catch up." No research since then warrants any other conclusion; the only development since 1970 has been the emergence of busing as a potent political issue.

Weak Evidence. Even the evidence used by Administration officials to back Nixon up was contradictory. HEW Secretary Elliot Richardson cited a report that low-income children read better after going through special programs in 42 California schools. But the study's author, Indiana University Economist Herbert Kiesling, retorts that only disadvantaged children in schools with middle-class student majorities did well on a standard test, and that "if it's an argument for anything, it's an argument for busing." Nixon himself emphasized only one study: a report that 94% of 10,000 California children in special reading programs that cost over $250 per child gained more than a year in ability, while those in programs that cost less showed less improvement. However, that survey omitted the ten largest programs in the state. Stanford Education Professor Michael Kirst, who serves as a HEW adviser, calls it "a loosely done, uncontrolled study" with "very weak findings," and concludes: "The Administration is picking any straws it can gather." A. Harry Passow, a Columbia educationist, is only slightly more sanguine about compensatory education. "If you spend money properly, it can help," he says. "But it can help more if you integrate."

The Nixon busing moratorium may well serve the President's short-term political need, but it may already have irretrievably damaged the cause of integration and better education for black and Spanish-speaking children. Even if the bill fails in Congress, it will have discouraged imaginative initiatives. And if it passes, Acting Attorney General Richard G. Kleindienst told the House Judiciary Committee last week, it could reopen every school desegregation case already decided. Says Passow of the President: "He's wiping out 18 years of efforts to integrate and making everyone who has worked toward desegregation look like a goddamned fool." That is a bitter view, but plainly those who believe that education must include close contact with other races are in for several years--at least--of discouragement and frustration.

*The 15 largest U.S. cities with nonwhite majorities in their schools are: Washington, 96% black or Spanish-speaking; Newark, 88%; San Antonio, 79% ; New Orleans, 73% ; Oakland, 73% ; Atlanta, 72% ; Baltimore, 68% ; St. Louis, 68% ; Detroit, 67%; Chicago, 65%; Philadelphia, 64%; New York, 62%; Cleveland, 60% ; El Paso, 60% ; and Birmingham, 57%.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.