Judging Where the Bus Can Stop

By Jerome Cramer/Washington

Across the U.S., few issues have caused more bitterness than, or led to such disagreements over means vs. ends as, the court-ordered busing of students to end patterns of racial discrimination. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there were at least some limits beyond which busing need not go. By a 5- to-3 vote, the Justices decided that school systems could be freed from judicially mandated plans if they have "complied in good faith" with the desegregation order and eliminated the "vestiges of past discrimination . . . to the extent practicable." The ruling effectively put the delicate issue back in the hands of the lower federal courts that monitor some 500 affected school districts around the country, many in the South and Southwest.

; Civil rights leaders were quick to stress that the ruling in the case of Oklahoma City Board of Education v. Dowell was no broad-brush renunciation of busing. Rather, it was a declaration that the existence of single-race schools did not necessarily amount to incontestable evidence of continued racial discrimination. The Justices emphasized that before a federal busing order could be lifted, schools must first convince courts that they have met the test of good-faith compliance and have erased all traces of past discrimination owing to segregated schooling. "This is a fairly high standard," said Janell Byrd, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "School systems that have been discriminating for 65 years are not likely to easily prove that 10 years of busing have healed all wounds."

The case before the court involved an Oklahoma City busing program that began in 1972, nine years after a finding that both schools and housing in the city were intentionally segregated. In 1985 the Oklahoma City board adopted a policy that ended busing for kindergarten through fourth grade in favor of attendance at neighborhood schools. Single-race patterns of enrollment re- emerged in some neighborhoods; 11 of the city's 64 schools now have student bodies that are 90% or more black. Local civil rights leaders argued that the pattern was proof that the original desegregation program failed. School-board attorneys claimed that the racially unbalanced schools were the result of economic trends and patterns in housing, not of intentional segregation.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority, overturned a 1989 ruling by a federal appeals court that refused to hand back the Oklahoma City schools to local control. The appeals court, he said, had held the school district to an overly strict standard in determining when the desegregation order could be dissolved. Rehnquist declared that such court control of schools was not meant "to operate in perpetuity," even though a court was entitled to examine "every facet of school operations" before lifting a busing order.

Writing in dissent, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that the existence of one-race schools in a previously segregated district was "inherently unequal," regardless of the reason. In view of the "unique harm" associated with school segregation, he said, the offending district should be held accountable for any taint of separateness until it had been entirely removed.

By and large, school administrators across the country applauded the court's decision, but few immediate changes are likely. Some districts receive millions of dollars to operate court-ordered integration plans that work without much dissension. And local courts are unlikely to move quickly as a result of the decision, since they would continue to have an obligation to enforce the nondiscriminatory tenets of the Constitution.