Forced busing is a term used by critics of a remedy prescribed by Massachusetts state Supreme Court Judge Arthur Garrity for perceived racial inequities in Boston public schools in a 1973 ruling. Garrity's ruling applied a state law, called the Racial Imbalance Law, that had been passed by the Massachusetts state legislature a few years earlier, requiring any school with a student enrollment of more than fifty percent "non_white" to be balanced according to race. The ruling ordered schoolchildren to be transported (presumably by bus, hence the term) to schools in different neighborhoods, in order to eliminate the racial segregation that had come about.

The conflict in Boston over busing primarily affected Roslindale, Hyde Park, Charlestown, Dorchester, the North End, and South Boston (the latter being traditionally Irish-American but also having a sizable Polish/Lithuanian community). To a lesser extent, schools in Springfield, Massachusetts were also affected by Judge Garrity's order, but the plan caused little overt controversy there.

The State Board of Education took a differing view, agreeing with the Boston School Committee, chaired by Louise Day Hicks, that if any segregation did exist, it was residential, i.e., caused by families' housing choices, and not planned.

The most controversial aspects of the policy involved busing children to schools in dangerous neighborhoods or past already-integrated schools, or busing them from integrated schools to partially-integrated ones. Opponents claimed busing compromised the quality of the students' education.

Today the Boston Public Schools are eighty-six percent African American and Hispanic. South Boston High school (now the South Boston High complex) was declared "dysfunctional" by the State Board of Education. Busing continues in the Boston area under the rubric of Controlled Choice, allowing any student to go to a school outside his or her own neighborhood so long as the move is conducive to achieving racial balance.

Other cities in the United States, including San Francisco, also compel children to attend schools outside their own neighborhoods in order to promote racial diversity; in San Francisco the practice's most vocal opponents are not whites, but rather Asians, particularly Chinese-Americans, who have been the group most affected by that city's plan.

Busing and desegregation orders have in some cases led to a form of white flight out of public school systems and into private schooling. For instance, in 1970 when a federal court ordered desegregation of the public schools in Pasadena, California, the proportion of white students in those schools reflected the proportion of whites in the community, 54 percent and 53 percent, respectively. After the desegregation process began, large numbers of whites in the upper and middle classes who could afford it pulled their children from the public schools and placed them into private schools instead. As a result, by 2004 Pasadena was home to sixty-three private schools, which educated one-third of all school-aged children in the city, and the proportion of white students in the public schools had fallen to 16 percent. The superintendent of Pasadena's public schools characterized them as being to whites "like the bogey-man," and mounted policy changes, including a curtailment of busing, and a publicity drive to induce affluent whites to put their children back into the public schools.

In cities such as Richmond, Virginia, when a massive program began in 1971, parents of all races complained about the long rides, hardships with transportation for extra-curricular activities, and the separation of siblings when elementary schools at opposite sides of the city were "paired," (i.e. splitting lower and upper elementary grades into separate schools).

In an effort to satisfy parents concerned about mandated long bus rides, many districts such as Richmond later modified their pupil placement plans to provide attractive programs in "magnet schools", and built new school buildings and reconfigured older buildings to develop logistically more favorable attendance plans which met desegregation goals. Combined with changes in housing patterns, the forced busing programs were gradually eliminated as the courts nationwide released districts from orders under old lawsuits.

Today, school buses are still used in most of these districts, but this is much more due to reduced walking zone distances, concern for pupil safety, and a wider choice of programs and locations for many students than requiring a pupil to ride to a school when a closer one was within walking distance.

See Also

• School bus

External Link

• http://videoindex.pbs.org/program/all_chapters.jsp?item_id=5853