Questions Still Ride With Buses After Years of PWT

Every morning hundreds of school buses crisscross the thoroughfares of South and East Los Angeles, carrying nearly 24,000 minority students to white neighborhoods, mostly in the San Fernando Valley.

The youngsters board the bus not because the far-away schools offer specialized educational programs, but because their parents want them to attend schools that are racially integrated and, in their view, safer and intellectually more challenging.

With little drama, these students have made the Permit With Transportation program the cornerstone of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s court-ordered effort to desegregate its schools.

Along with students who participate in a variety of other integration-oriented programs, they have quietly turned a region that was once the heart of an anti-busing movement into one of the few areas in Los Angeles County with a large number of desegregated schools.

In 1973, when the Permit With Transportation program was in only its second year, 110 of the Valley’s 180 schools had white enrollments of 80% or more. Today the region’s population is still largely white and middle-class, but only two Valley schools have white enrollments that high.

Questions Remain

There is some question about whether these numbers mean that students are truly integrated in the academic and social lives of the schools they attend.

Educators in the minority neighborhoods have always disliked PWT. They think the daily migration takes away their best students and cries out--wrongly, in their opinion--that inner-city schools are inferior to Valley schools.

However, the desegregation brought about by PWT is obvious to anyone who walks onto a Valley public school campus.

In Northridge, where 87% of the residents are white, Calahan Elementary School has a minority enrollment of more than 48%.

In Woodland Hills, where 94% of the residents are white, nearly one-fourth of Hale Junior High School’s 1,461 students are black, and Latinos make up 8% of the school.

“It is not the creamy Valley anymore, at least in terms of public education,” said Tony Rivas, superintendent of the school district’s administrative region that covers the northern Valley.

The school district first provided bus rides for voluntary integration in 1968. The Permits With Transportation program officially began in 1972 through the merger of this effort and one developed to provide transportation for students displaced from schools damaged in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake.

In 1978 the school district came under a state Supreme Court desegregation order and began to reassign students. Many white parents withdrew their children from the public schools. In some neighborhoods there was a surge of interest in voluntary desegregation. White parents tried to attract enough minority children to produce an acceptable racial balance in their neighborhood schools and thereby keep their children near home.

Constitutional Amendment

Mandatory busing ended in 1981 after California voters approved a constitutional amendment that prohibits busing for desegregation unless a school district is found to be in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

But Los Angeles was still bound by the original state Supreme Court ruling. To comply, the school district enlarged its small Permit With Transportation program, so called because pupils need a permit to attend schools in other neighborhoods and the district provides transportation. The district also created “magnet schools,” specialized learning centers to draw students of all races.

The effects of all these efforts fall short of the comprehensive citywide desegregation being sought by the NAACP, which is trying to get the segregation case tried in federal court. The desegregation here is not as encompassing as courts have required in Boston, Milwaukee, Seattle or even Bakersfield, where desegregation programs have made schools in all sections of these cities racially balanced.

Moreover, the impact on racial balance has been felt only in the Valley, where four-fifths of all PWT students attend school, and in some predominantly white neighborhoods in the Westside and Harbor areas. Any student is eligible to change schools under the PWT program if the move would improve the racial balance at the receiving school. But virtually all participants are members of minority groups, and two-thirds are black.

While some minority students bear the burden of desegregation, the vast majority stay behind in schools that are segregated under the court’s definition, having minority enrollments of 70% or more.

“What happened in Los Angeles is that blacks won the court case that brought about desegregation, but it is the white schools that are receiving the benefits of desegregation,” said Charles V. Willie, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of “School Desegregation: Plans that Worked.”

Enrollment Figures

About 16,000 of the 115,000 black students in the school district are enrolled in PWT, a 1983 school district survey showed. Only 6,000 of the district’s 279,000 Latino students and 1,800 of the 42,000 students of Asian background are enrolled. The 1983 survey showed that Latinos were then enrolling in the program faster than any other ethnic group.

In interviews with dozens of parents, the most commonly stated reason for putting their children into the program was a desire to have them attend integrated schools.

Next came purely personal reasons, such as that of the mother of a slightly retarded son who wanted him away from gangs, and the protective father who thinks his three daughters will “stay little girls longer” in the Valley.

“I disagree with the black principals’ claims that PWT makes people think schools in Los Angeles are inferior,” said Deborah Reis, a resident of Southwest Los Angeles whose daughter attends John F. Kennedy High School in Granada Hills.

Advice on Transfer

Reis said that, when her daughter attended 96th Street Elementary School, “she had a great teacher. He did wonders. He was the one that recommended that she go into the PWT program. He said the schools in the area were boring to her and that she might get more stimulation in programs at schools in the Valley.”

Mattie Leon of southwest Los Angeles said history played an important role in her decision to place her 14-year-old daughter in a Valley junior high.

“Black folks have never been able to depend on the power structure to provide an equal education for our children. Whites have,” she said. “If it takes my daughter an hour every morning and an hour every night to go to a school that I know the power structure pays attention to, then she’ll ride a bus.”

Leola Howard, whose two sons attend Kennedy High instead of Manual Arts High School in southwest Los Angeles, said: “I don’t think it is a problem with the school itself. It’s the area outside of the school. It is the riffraff out there that filters in that causes the problems.”

Whether the bus carries youngsters to a better education is open for debate. School officials say they haven’t tracked a group of PWT students to compare their performance with a similar group in neighborhood schools. However, the program has undergone several evaluations that point to a gap between the resident and non-resident students.

A 1983 report by the school district said PWT students were taking fewer college preparatory courses than resident students, had lower self-reported grade-point averages and scored lower on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a standardized test used for college entrance.

“PWT students were less prepared for college,” the report said. “As a result the proportion of resident students estimated to be eligible to attend the University of California and the California State Universities was double” that of PWT students.

Counseling Groups

At some Valley schools, PWT students complain that teachers often believe that they are less capable to handle advanced academic work. In response, students and teachers have formed groups that provide counseling and tutoring.

The school district has tried to combat stereotypes about inner-city pupils with workshops and staff meetings.

“But sometimes it is the one-on-ones in the faculty lunchrooms that are more important,” Rivas said. “It’s when a teacher takes another teacher aside and explains how a point of terminology or an action might get in the way of the learning process.”

Rivas illustrated his point with the word “punk.” Telling a white pupil from Encino that he is “punked out” or a real “punker” might be taken as a compliment. But telling one from black Los Angeles that he “looks like a punk” would be insulting: In black street vernacular “punk” is a derogatory term linked to homosexuality.

It is questionable how much social mixing occurs among the ethnic groups.

Some early literature on school desegregation predicted that children who attended desegregated schools from early childhood would grow up indifferent to race, “color blind.”

But the 1983 PWT evaluation said that, even among students who have been in the program since elementary school, “the highest interaction was observed in the elementary schools and the least in the senior high schools.”

Such a pattern isn’t surprising, says James P. Comer, professor of psychiatry at the Child Student Center at Yale University. But he thinks race may not be as important as a walk through the schoolyard suggests.

“Social pressures such as dating often cause resegregation among secondary-school-age students, but this is fairly normal,” he said. “In fact, these type of group associations are more often than not based on social status, academic achievement and styles of dress. Because we are such a race-conscious society, the race of the group is what jumps out at us.”

Some Valley school principals and staff members disagree with the evaluation. They say the interaction between racial groups is frequent, natural and genuinely friendly.

“You know the program is working when you see black and white kids going home with each other,” said Marvin Borten, coordinator of the PWT program and a former principal of Taft High School in Woodland Hills.

Many inner-city principals think busing is taking away their best students. Seeking to limit PWT enrollment, they have voiced their displeasure to school board members and administrators. The district’s response is that it is operating under a court order to desegregate. Unless that changes or a replacement for PWT is found, there will be no cap on the number of students who can enroll.

Inner-city principals have won some minor victories. The number of community presentations made by Valley and Westside principals at inner-city schools, viewed by principals of minority schools as recruiting trips, has been quietly reduced.

“The tragedy that has happened is that kids are told where they are going is so positive and where they come from is negative,” said George McKenna, principal of Washington Preparatory School in Los Angeles.

School board member Rita Walters, a plaintiff in the lawsuit that led to the desegregation order, disagrees.

“When they say that PWT in and of itself has made people feel that inner-city schools are inferior, they ignore the reasons it was started in the first place,” Walters said. “Schools were overcrowded; there weren’t adequate textbooks; there weren’t regular teachers, and we really had a dual school system. Parents were looking for an equal educational opportunity and were willing to assume this burden of transporting their kids to schools beyond their neighborhood.”

One way inner-city schools are trying to stem the emigration is by trumpeting new programs that place a greater emphasis on academics. For example, Washington Prep and the elementary and junior high that feed into it have adopted a series of strict disciplinary and academic rules. As a result, administrators say, the number of students from those schools who have enrolled in PWT has decreased slightly.