Seattle Renews Attempt to Make Busing Work : Schools Test ‘Controlled Choice’ Plan; Some Parents Call It ‘Controlled Chaos’

School officials have a name for the new racial busing plan that went into effect last month: controlled choice.

Some unhappy parents have another name for it: controlled chaos.

Either way, the attempt to revive a faltering 12-year effort at school racial integration is being quickly tested before facing a non-binding referendum of the electorate in November.

Seattle is now the biggest school district in the nation to try controlled choice. The busing plan was first designed by Cambridge, Mass., as an alternative to the 1970s mandatory busing in neighboring Boston that fostered violence and resistence. At least nine cities nationwide are believed to be trying some form of the plan.

May Be Litmus Test

After a summer in which an alleged resurgence of racism was a hot topic in movies, television documentaries and the media, this renewed attempt by Seattle to make busing work--in a liberal, mostly white city--may prove a litmus test of school integration.

Controlled choice offers parents a carrot: “magnet” schools that offer varied curriculums to lure students across town. But if the magnets fail to draw enough students, mandatory busing to achieve racial balance still can be imposed.

The district recently won $3.3 million in federal funds to help create magnet schools with specialties in subjects from performing arts to careers in the aircraft industry.

Parents can choose from schools located in one of several geographic clusters in the city, but getting their choice hinges on whether it will enable a school to meet the district’s integration guidelines. Schools are not supposed to be more than 70% minority or have more than 50% of a single minority.

The new program got off to a rocky start Sept. 6. Some angry parents waited four hours at school district information centers before being told an overburdened computer system could still not place their late-registering children in schools. Hundreds of students throughout the district were left unregistered.

Others parents complained their kindergartners were riding buses up to 2 1/2 hours for 2 1/2 hours of school.

And 3,000 expected students initially didn’t show up at all.

But problems are being ironed out. Students are assigned and parents are less confused. Although figures are still being compiled, school administrators believe the enrollment is growing.

Seattle’s school district says that under controlled choice, 93% of the students got their first or second choice of schools this September, many of them closer to home.

The district says only 13% of the students are presently bused solely for racial integration as compared to 50% under the old plan.

“People are feeling quite good,” school district Supt. William Kendrick said. “We’ve greatly reduced the number of students with mandatory busing assignments.”

“It’s going to save a lot of money on transportation we can put into education,” promised Ellen Roe, a school board member who was the lone board opponent of Seattle’s 1977 mandatory busing plan and a crusader for this replacement.

Kendrick, who has spent his three years at the helm of Seattle’s schools pushing the new plan into place, was optimistic it could stem the erosion of students from his district.

Numbers Drop

In the past 12 years of mandatory busing, Seattle’s student population has fallen from 54,000 to about 42,000--leading to painful budget cuts--and the percentage that is minority has climbed from 33% to 54%.

But the debut of controlled choice was hampered by an administrative snarl as overtaxed administrators and computers struggled to juggle the students into racial, academic and geographic balance.

T. J. Vassar, the black chairman of the school board, said controlled choice should not be judged from the first-day confusion. “The job is bigger than we thought it was, and we’re suffering from its magnitude,” he said.

As the experiment progressed, Vassar said the parent reaction to the new plan “may be 50-50 pro and con, judging from what I have heard personally.”

But a formal judgment is not far away. On the November city ballot is a citizens’ initiative that in effect calls on Seattle to abandon racial busing and go back to open enrollment and neighborhood schools.

“Busing is ignorant of human nature,” said Kathy Baxter, a white parent spearheading the initiative. “It ignores what people are likely to do and pays attention to what people ought to do.”

She contends busing has driven out the middle class from a community that didn’t have serious racial problems in the first place and replaced it with a city “resegregated economically.”

The busing issue has become a factor in school board races, with busing opponents hoping to elect three members this fall who would provide the margin to abandon controlled choice. It also has become the central issue in the mayoral race, even though mayors have no control over schools. A white Republican and controlled choice opponent, Doug Jewett, is facing off for the mayor’s seat against a black Democrat, Norm Rice, who favors the program.

If school integration can work in any big city, it should work in Seattle. The city of approximately 490,000 is just 23% minority, with Asians and blacks at about 9% each and the remainder Native Americans and Latinos. And politically, the Emerald City’s population is largely liberal, voting heavily Democratic.

Escapes Court Order

So it wasn’t surprising when in 1977 the Seattle school board voted 6 to 1 to adopt compulsory busing after a voluntary plan had failed. Seattle was the first big city to do so without a court order. (In contrast, the Los Angeles Unified School District underwent nearly three years of court-ordered mandatory busing that ended in 1981 and now offers voluntary integration programs, including magnet schools and a transfer policy that allows students from racially isolated neighborhoods to attend the school of their choice.)

Seattle’s compulsory busing program swiftly ran into problems. Some of the richest, whitest neighborhoods were effectively exempted from busing of elementary children to maintain political support.

And the same geography that makes Seattle a pretty city made it a nightmare to thread buses through. Long and narrow, Seattle is cut by hills, waterways and bridges.

Bus rides were long, and their administration often nonsensical, some parents charged. Minorities in white neighborhoods, or white children in black neighborhoods, were sometimes bused across town instead of helping balance neighborhood schools where they already were.

Some whites and blacks who applauded the social goal moved in frustration to the suburbs.

“Statistically,” said former Mayor Wes Uhlman, “there’s no question that the plan hasn’t really worked. I view it as a failed experiment, though a noble one. We accelerated white flight with the experiment.”

Despite integration and repeated reforms, minority test scores have stayed stubbornly 20 to 40 percentage points below that of whites. And blacks were also disciplined twice as often as whites, district studies found.

Worst of all, the rising ratio of minorities meant balancing numbers got harder, not easier. By 1988, Seattle had the same number of schools flunking integration guidelines as when busing had started.

Yet despite all these problems, public hearings on Seattle’s busing program did not turn up a consensus to abandon it, even though the threat of court-ordered busing seemed more remote. In fact, a recent Chamber of Commerce poll showed general satisfaction with the schools.

If controlled choice works as hoped, busing will not be eliminated. But students who once could expect to be bounced among two or even three elementary schools are now guaranteed the chance to stay through all six grades. Ditto for junior high and high school.

Opinion remains sharply divided in Seattle on busing’s cost and benefits. Uhlman, for example, said busing seemed to worsen the racial attitudes of his own son, and Baxter, the anti-busing initiative leader, blames it for emptying some heavily targeted white neighborhoods of families.

Others say the city’s changing demographics had little to do with busing. “I don’t think we have a white flight problem,” Vassar, the school board chairman, insisted.

Evidence of busing’s effect on students has been equally conflicting. There are many accounts of students making friends across racial lines, countered by others where students separated in seating and socializing by race.

And some believe that school integration has promoted more social and residential mixing of adults.

Now, “a lot more minorities live all over the city,” said school board member Roe.

“It has allowed people to get together, not only kids but parents as well,” said high school Principal Andres Tangalin, who has been in the district 17 years. “Through that they get new impressions and insights they didn’t have before.”

Oscar Eason Jr. was chairman of the citizens committee that led the three-year effort to junk the old busing plan and try controlled choice. While he hopes the new system works, the black activist does not agree with critics of the old plan.

“Nobody likes busing,” he said, “but history has shown that separate is not equal. Minority schools simply deteriorate.”

Is Seattle’s experience, then, a success?

“Yes,” said Eason. “If we hadn’t had busing, I’d shudder to think what racism would be like in our society today.”

Bill Dietrich, a reporter for the Seattle Times, wrote this story for the Los Angeles Times.