Forced Busing and White Flight

New school study seems to link them closer than ever

Back in 1975, Chicago Sociologist James Coleman, having looked at the early figures, felt called upon to report what most Americans thought they knew already: court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance in large U.S. cities and to ensure that more blacks and whites go to school together was causing a great deal of David Armor white flight from city schools.

If the finding came as no great surprise, its source was a considerable shock. Coleman was the man whose 1966 report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, had served as the main academic proof of the values of desegregation. Yet here he was, questioning the usefulness of busing. Coleman, of course, was merely asking whether, in the long run, "forced busing might not defeat the purpose of increasing overall contact among races hi schools."

To many people, though, the question seemed virtually unAmerican. For months sociologists kept busy stomping all over Coleman's findings. His conclusions were premature, they said. There was no hard proof that white flight from city schools, already a phenomenon before the threat of busing, was significantly increased by busing. And even if such a connection might one day be proved, the condition was likely to be short-lived. In any case it would take years to measure the matter adequately. Three years have passed. Now comes a new study that has the advantage of being able to see the effects of busing in a slightly longer perspective. Produced by Harvard-trained David Armor, 39, a senior sociologist at the Rand Corp., the report seems to bear out many of Coleman's early fears.

Armor measured white flight over a six-year period in 23 Northern and Southern cities that had court-ordered mandatory busing. They also had accessible suburbs, school districts with an enrollment of at least 20,000 students and a large minority population (more than 20%). Then he compared his figures with a projected loss of white students that would have taken place without forced busing, based on established demographic patterns of white exodus and predictable birth rates. The results were remarkably consistent.

Against a projected white-student loss without busing that varies roughly between 2% and 4% over the six-year period, the average rate of real white loss quickly rose toward 15% for the first year of busing, then dropped some, to about 7% to 9%, during the next three years. Predictably, the highest rates of white loss occurred in districts where large numbers of whites were forced to bus into predominantly nonwhite schools. "The size of the flight is both large and long-term," Armor concludes, and he estimates that 30% to 60% of it is due to forced busing.

Critics have already begun finding fault with Armor. He has been taken to task for not running more comparative studies in districts where results proved favorable to busing. He has been accused of exaggerating the influence of busing on white flight. His most significant contribution, the projection of white-flight levels likely to occur without busing, has been challenged. Above all, he has been reminded that the problem is complex, that nobody can tell how long white-flight loss percentages will stay high.

Nonetheless, there is now considerable academic consensus that in large cities a significant linkage exists between white flight and forced busing. The fact that sociologists show signs of catching up with everybody else's common-sense observation should be reassuring. But in the spectrum of hope for improving the education of minorities and for guaranteeing constitutional rights that have been violated for a century, Armor's report is depressing. Finding forced busing counterproductive, at least in inner cities, he offers evaluations of alternative measures.

The first is the "metropolitan plan," which tries to block white flight by incorporating suburbs under city control, then busing whites back into town to achieve balance. The courts have struck down such plans in Detroit and Richmond. Armor adds another glum note. After studying inconclusive results of the one metropolitan-integration plan tried so far, in Louisville, he says it does not seem to work. Whites, denied escape to near suburbs, move farther away, or flee into private schools. Even in sprawling Los Angeles, where, Armor thinks, some sort of metropolitan plan should be instituted and might work, the chances of getting approval seem small.

Armor has often testified in court hearings about mandatory busing plans. His personal hope for further progress boils down to a mixture of mandated school improvements--for instance, a court-ordered increase in the number of "magnet" schools to draw qualified whites and blacks from all corners of a city--and vigorously promoted voluntary school integration. The only hopeful example he gives, however, is San Diego. Using a voluntary system, the city has kept the level of white flight down (below 6% per year). But the increase in the actual number of whites and nonwhites going to school together--the real aim of integration--has been small. A similar failure to achieve much actual integration occurs in many forced-busing cities, as Armor keeps pointing out, but at a much greater cost in pain, dislocation and plain cash.

Perhaps significantly, Armor does not confront a fact that most parents, blacks especially, need no sociologist to remind them of. Without the constant threat of busing and the steady prodding of the courts, the amount of "voluntary" school integration in San Diego and elsewhere would probably have never occurred. qed

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