Making (some) busing work:

...White children could be bused to schools like these thirty (and in a few they are), although neither blacks nor whites appear to desire it strongly...

...A recent study at Loyola University of Chicago reveals the preliminary results of considerable cross busing in an attempt to achieve racial balance...

...Chicago has 180,000 black children in its primary schools, 70,000 white children, and 80,000 Spanish-American youngsters...

...4. Busing is not the only educational strategy that works, nor can it be expected to carry the full burden of overcoming the educational disadvantages suffered by black Americans...

...First, desegregate as many black children into all-white schools as can be done without causing massive white flight or changes in school performance, with minimums of fifteen to twenty percent integration in every previously all-white school...

...It can achieve the educational goals of raising reading scores of black children bused out of poorer schools without diminishing the educational performance of previously white schools which are part of a busing program...

...In short, there have been no significant changes in these outlying schools now integrated...

...population...

...Doubts and fears about busing are not going to go away tomorrow, and they must be taken into account when desegregation plans are designed...

...The exact terms of the settlement were not spelled out...

...On the contrary, there not only can be and will be, but for the calculable future there must be all-black schools - and there must be good ones - for those black families who prefer to live in all-black areas and want to educate their children in all-black schools...

...In sum, the thrust of the big-city programs for improving the education of minority children will have to be three-fold...

...Second, achieving any substantial integration will involve the overturning of the Supreme Court's Detroit decision banning city-suburban integration...

...Integrated schools on this basis have been promulgated by HEW, for the last several years, and by the U.S...

...Until black schools and neighborhoods are massively improved - something we must begin now where it is not under way - it is sheer futility to try to force the white children into these black areas, although clearly any white children who want to attend all-black schools have always been welcome...

...Many of the attempts in the big cities to desegregate the schools by extensive cross busing of white children to black schools, and black children to white schools, has, in fact, resulted in massive flight of white families to the suburbs and to private schools...

...But Justices Powell, Rehnquist, and Stewart have repeatedly indicated in dissenting opinions, while Brown v. Board of Education upheld the rights of black and other minority children to an equal education, decreeing that America's version of "apartheid" should be eradicated, it did not, nor could it, abrogate the right of people to move where they wanted or to send their children to private schools of their choice...

...but undoubtedly the fact that the Chicago board is chaired by Ken Smith, a prominent black minister, and has a majority of black and Spanish-speaking members gave the Department of Justice confidence that the desegregation program to be worked out would not be unacceptable to the courts or the federal government...

...Louis...

...This federal program has aimed at desegregating all big-city schools by trying, through cross-city busing of whites to black schools and blacks to white schools, to achieve in every school a racial mix approaching that of the school system as a whole...

...However, Milwaukee has been wise enough not to bus more than a few white youngsters from their good schools to poor-performing black schools - something that the courts and federal departments have insisted must be done in many other cities, with catastrophic results...

...Yet a changed approach toward busing may have already been signaled last year when, on President Carter's orders, the school desegregation logjam between the Chicago Board of Education and the U.S...

...Clearly not all, nor even the majority, of black children can go to integrated schools in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, or New York City in the calculable future...

...When the federal Department of Education or the courts seek to go further than this "inchoately demanded quota," white families vote with their feet...

...Black children from poor schools (or some small proportion of such children) are being bused to good white schools to improve their educational opportunities...

...To buttress the point, a recent study by Loyola University's Department of Urban Studies conducted in Chicago schools shows that black youngsters in thirty all-black schools in middle-class black areas are presently performing virtually up to the national median in both second and eighth grades, with remarkable improvements noted in the last three to four years...

...This is not to say that there should not be all-black schools...

...Those designing and implementing busing efforts must have the flexibility - and courage - sometimes to pull back, so that a system can desegregate without "getting the bends...

...In many cases these doubts may have a racist component...

...3. Americans, both black and white, entertain considerable doubts about busing...

...With these propositions in mind, let us look specifically af the Chicago school situation, one that is duplicated in many other places...

...but they also involve other attachments and fears, about neighborhoods, educational quality, and safety...

...seem to be self-defeating: the busing of white children into black schools where whites will be a minority...

...It can achieve the social goal of racial integration...

...A good many Americans are waiting, some anxiously, some hopefully, for the answer...

...Certain patterns of busing simply J. S. FUERST is assistant director of urban studies at Loyola University in Chicago...

...On the other hand, there can be no more all-white schools, except of course in places like Minnesota or North Dakota or very distant suburban areas where there are few, if any, blacks in die area...

...Integration of schools on an across-the-board basis has to mean not only that black children in large numbers are placed in all-white schools but also that most white children will be taken out of their schools and placed in what are at this moment inferior schools where they will form a substantial minority...

...Probably the most poignant example of this occurred in Milwaukee despite the efforts of an enlightened federal judge and an equally enlightened education administration, plus a more or less acquiescent population...

...It has attempted to do this with no reference to the present quality of black schools nor to the effect this busing will have on white parents required to send their children to those black schools that currently have significantly poorer performance levels...

...But when integration takes place, as it must, it should be with a number of black children reasonably calculated not merely to end up creating resegregation...

...Similarly, too many black children in the white schools can have the same effect...

...After 1976 court orders, virtually no schools contained less than ten percent blacks, and most had a considerably higher percentage...

...the busing of too large a percentage of black children into white schools...

...2. Not all busing works...

...One can reasonably assert the following propositions: 1. Busing can and does work...

...A recent Gallup poll showed that while many blacks expressed qualified approval of busing, over half believed that it "has caused more difficulties than it is worth...

...It must be noted that in both Milwaukee and Chicago (which has carried on a limited busing program for black children for some ten years) when previously all-white schools have received black children up to fifteen to twenty percent of the school population, little white flight has occurred nor was there any decline of reading or mathematics scores...

...busing where receiving schools are not prepared...

...While busing of blacks and not whites may seem unjust and, to some, conceivably unconstitutional, it is in fact no such thing...

...more important, white children are withdrawn from the school system-which makes integration impossible...

...Most white families, while not eager for busing, have come to recognize the necessity for some integration, with the one caveat that their schools must have a white majority that roughly corresponds to their proportion in the U.S...

...In the Dallas case, as well as in the Columbus and Dayton cases, Judge Powell explicitly pointed out that the greatest limitation on attempts to place masses of white children in all-black schools is simply that the white parents will exercise their right to take their children out of the system...

...But the truth about busing is not simple...

...Third, justice demands an intensive program now of radical improvements in all-black schools so that black children who want to remain in their own areas can do so, and white youngsters who want to benefit from integrated education can also do so...

...In the absence of numerous other measures, especially economic ones, that would maintain the civil-rights momentum of the sixties, so much attention has focused on busing (as on affirmative action) that it has often come to be seen as a yes-or-no, for-or-against issue...

...This parental right cannot be ignored...

...The idea of the courts that no schools can be all-black is an overzealous attempt to correct what was, and in many cases is, a brutally unjust educational and social system, by bringing all schools into racial balance without regard to the fact that all-black schools can be as good as all-white schools...

...At the least, education is not enhanced...

...That should not be a cause for lamenting...

...Supreme Court, at least in three of the recent majority opinions (Dallas, Cleveland, and Wilmington) where the District Court's breaking up of all-black schools in all-black neighborhoods has been upheld...

...Schools that are all black, or predominantly black, can be, and must be, sharply improved...

...In spite of Milwaukee's relatively cautious approach, in all schools except those where the racial mix of the school population was less than twenty-five percent black and the remainder white, there has been substantial white flight - and a forty-six percent decline of white students in the overall system, plus a corresponding decline in reading and math scores in schools with massive increases in black students...

...There are models of successful all-black schools to be built upon-although their successes are clearly linked to improving economic opportunities for blacks and other minorities...

...On the contrary the many corrective actions necessary to bring the education of black and other minority children up to par can more easily be taken if they do not overlook essential realities.ok essential realities...

...The dissenting opinions of Powell, Rehnquist, and Stewart (who may soon represent a new majority on busing cases) and the settlement with the Chicago Board of Education may well presage the steps to be taken by the new Secretary of Education, Terrell Bell...

...Even more, if the "federal education engineers" continue to be blind enough to insist upon moving white youngsters from educationally average schools to inferior all-black-attended schools, white families, by moving, turn Northern cities into ghettos and public schools into the scholastic equivalent of public housing projects...

...This has been the case in Detroit, Pasadena, Cleveland, and St...

...The breaking of the Chicago logjam is vitally important if it means that the federal government has recognized it cannot pursue the kind of busing program the Department of Education has tried to push during the last few years...

...Departments of Justice and Education was broken...