Coleman: Some Second Thoughts

Busing as a means of achieving racial balance in the schools may well be the most unpopular institution imposed on Americans since Prohibition. Nevertheless, some U.S. communities have obediently -if not happily -accepted busing as part of the law of the land and carried it out peacefully. Last week in Stockton, Calif., for example, under a court order, 1,500 pupils were bused across town to three high schools without visible opposition or incidents. At the same time, in Charlotte, N.C., 23,000 students -fully one-third of the public school enrollment -were being bused in the final phase of a federal court busing plan that the city has followed faithfully ever since 1970.

Yet even in communities that have fully obeyed the courts, the fear of busing often precipitates the flight of whites, who move to the suburbs or take their children out of public schools to escape desegregation. During the three years busing has been used to desegregate the Atlanta schools, 40,000 white students have fled the system and city schools have gone from 56% to 87% black. In Memphis, enrollment in private academies increased from 13,000 in 1973, when a federal court ordered the city schools to desegregate, to 35,000 today, while the public school enrollment tipped from 50% black to 70% black. Even in Charlotte, home of the most successful and widely acclaimed busing plan in the U.S., enrollment in private academies has more than doubled in the past five years of court-ordered busing; today one-sixth of all white school-age youngsters in Charlotte attend private school.

Much of the intellectual impetus for busing came from the 1966 report by University of Chicago Sociologist James S. Coleman, which demonstrated statistically that black students learn more in integrated classrooms. (A major tenet of the Coleman report, often overlooked, is that poor children learn more when they go to school with middle-class students; the report's conclusions about social class were as significant as those about race.)

Early this summer Coleman incurred the censure of many academics -who charged that he used suspect statistics -when, after a new study of racial data in U.S. public schools, he announced that at least in major cities, "busing has not worked" as a means of desegregation. His reason: busing ordered by the courts often drives whites out of the schools, thus actually increasing segregation.

Last week Coleman carried his white-flight argument one step further. In an antibusing affidavit filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals on behalf of the Boston Home and School Association, he said that court-ordered busing in Boston caused a 12% increase in the number of white children leaving the public schools. Said Coleman: "The greater the disparity between the racial composition of the central city and the suburbs, the greater the acceleration of white loss." In other words, the blacker the city and the whiter the suburbs, the faster the remaining whites will try to leave town.

Whether busing works to raise black pupils' test scores or drive whites out of town, a growing number of blacks and whites believe that the emphasis should now be on improving the schools. Says Wilson Riles, California's black superintendent of public instruction: "For 20 years we have been mesmerized with school integration. We have not given as much attention as we should to making the schools more effective."

Thomas Atkins, president of Boston's N.A.A.C.P., and many others who support busing agree. Many blacks and whites now believe that merely moving pupils from one school to another is not enough of an answer -particularly if the schools to which students are bused are not significantly better than the ones they left. Atkins says that "people are looking for different kinds of things to happen as a result of school desegregation." What do they want? Says Atkins: an improved curriculum, some choice in selecting teachers, better vocational courses and more accurate counseling.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.