Minority Gains Limited in L.A. Busing Program : Integration: Achievement suffers in comparison to other students. Gap ‘wide and persistent,’ official says.

More than 20 years after the Los Angeles Unified School District began its original busing program to integrate schools, the minority pupils in that program are doing little or no better than the students they leave behind in segregated schools, and much worse than their white classmates.

Nine years of district evaluations reveal that children bused under the voluntary program have lower reading and math scores than the neighborhood students sitting beside them. They go on to college at lower rates. Teachers expect less from them. And they suffer low self-esteem.

District officials are aware of the disparity, but little has been done to improve the academic performance of the 13,000 minority students bused under the plan, called Permits With Transportation (PWT)--one of several busing programs the district maintains.

PWT “was never meant to be an academic improvement program,” contends school Supt. Leonard Britton. “We said we would provide an integrated experience for the children, not necessarily an improved education. But in the back of some people’s minds was the thought that great things would happen if they put their children on the bus.”

Admits school board President Jackie Goldberg: “We have not shown great leadership. We have to be able to say something more than, ‘Oh God, the scores are low again,’ which has traditionally been our response.”

Over the years, thousands of minority parents who sought the promise of a better education signed up for the program, which allowed their children to attend schools made up predominantly of other races or ethnic groups.

Patsy Boston, like many parents, expected great things when she signed her daughter up to travel from South-Central Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley seven years ago. “I wanted her to experience different cultures and other environments . . . but mostly, I wanted her to get a better education, and I believed the Valley schools were better.”

Now, she says, after watching her daughter’s grades drop and her attitude turn sour, she plans to pull the 13-year-old out of the program and return her to their neighborhood high school next fall.

“Why should I put her through all this?” she said. “To go someplace where she’s not wanted and they don’t care whether she succeeds or fails?”

Since the district began evaluating the program in 1981, the achievement gap between PWT students and their suburban counterparts has remained “wide and persistent,” according to Winston Doby, UCLA’s vice chancellor, who reviews the program for the district each year.

While students bused to magnet schools under the district’s other voluntary busing program perform above the district average, PWT students “appear to complete first grade achieving below districtwide norms and never manage to catch up,” Doby’s report two years ago warned. “The district must seriously reconsider its approach to educating these students.”

But the PWT program has been a linchpin in the system’s court-approved voluntary desegregation plan since mandatory busing was stopped in 1981, and any major changes might mean the district would have to go back to court.

This “is the only program that desegregates white schools,” explained attorney Peter James, who heads the district’s desegregation legal team. Other district busing programs relieve overcrowding or serve integrated schools.

PWT “was intended to reduce segregation within the district, and it’s working as well as anything we’ve got,” he said. “The achievement results have not been what we’ve hoped, but it is desegregating.”

Or, as Doby explained in a report on PWT several years ago: “The treatment is successful, but the patients are still dying.”

Britton acknowledges that while the students are “not doing any worse than they would have in their home schools, they’re not doing any better” than if they’d skipped the long bus rides and stayed in their own neighborhoods.

The district has poured millions of dollars into those low-achieving, inner-city schools--lowering class sizes, adding preschool programs that give youngsters a better academic foundation and teaching parents how to help their children succeed in school.

Conversely, most of the West Side and San Fernando Valley schools that receive PWT students get only an additional $50 per year per bused student--an amount unchanged since 1981.

“We don’t do much at a (receiving) school for PWT students,” concedes Britton. “We don’t provide much of anything. So much depends on the attitudes and the individuals at those schools.”

Although the educational experts who have reviewed the PWT program have recommended several specific support services--such as weekend and evening tutorials, teacher training, peer counseling and in-class tutoring--receiver schools spend about 90% of their integration funds to hire classroom aides.

And while the district monitors those schools to make sure each has a plan to educate the students, no one evaluates a school’s success or failure to adequately perform the task.

Goldberg said that must change. The board plans to begin hearings on its integration programs this summer, and Goldberg said schools should be given guidance and adequate support services, then held accountable for producing results.

Until now, there has been little pressure on the board or district officials to improve the academic performance of PWT students.

Because the board did not conduct public hearings on the program until this year, parents have not realized that the academic failings were so serious or widespread. And it has been hard for district officials “to single this out in a district that’s facing so many other problems,” Britton said.

Indeed, the problems of the PWT students seem to pale beside those of the 25,000 minority children--many newcomers to the country who speak little or no English--who are involuntarily bused to relieve overcrowding in their neighborhood schools, and score lowest of all the district’s pupils.

They disappear in the glow over the success of the 98-school magnet program, which provides enriched, specialized curriculum to about 28,000 students, who consistently score above district and national norms on achievement tests.

“PWT has been ignored,” contends board member Rita Walters, who represents the South-Central Los Angeles area that provides many of the program’s students. “I think it’s been viewed as something that has to be tolerated, but the things that need to be done to make it a successful program as far as achievement goes have never occurred.”

The program was started in the mid-1960s by a handful of black parents who got permission to transfer their children from their neighborhood elementary schools to virtually all-white West Side schools. The parents provided their own transportation until 1968, when the district agreed to bus the 550 participating students.

At its peak in 1984, about 23,000 PWT students were bused each day. The program pairs minority schools with integrated receiving schools so that groups of neighborhood children travel together to their new schools.

The program initially appealed to middle-class black families, eager to expand their children’s horizons beyond their mostly black neighborhoods. But as the black population in the district dwindled and magnet schools siphoned off many potential students, the program has shrunk and become more popular among Latino and lower-income black families. Few white students ever have participated.

Many parents say they selected PWT because they believed schools on the West Side and in the Valley were safer and better, with more experienced teachers, broader course offerings, more rigorous college preparation programs and fewer gang and crime problems.

“Now, a lot of us are wondering whether it’s worth it,” said Gloria Jenkins, a Windsor Hills mother whose twin sons were bused to a West Side elementary and junior high until one was kicked out for disciplinary problems this spring. He now attends an all-black private school, where he is thriving socially and academically--scoring several points higher than before on standardized tests, she said.

Parents tell stories of children worn out by long bus rides, frustrated by the sense of not belonging in their adopted schools and embittered by what they feel is racist treatment in the receiving schools and communities.

“My children never heard (racial slurs) until they went to the West Side,” Jenkins said. “As a parent, you feel that you constantly have to be on guard to protect them . . . and make sure they get educated like everyone else, and that’s very hard to do when you’re 40 miles away.”

Interviews with students and teachers and reviews of data in the district’s evaluations of its integration programs bear some of that out.

PWT students wind up in remedial classes more often than resident students and are less likely to take advanced courses or participate in extracurricular and leadership activities.

White students at some schools told district interviewers that although their black and Latino classmates “are fine as individuals,” the minority students were frightening and “intimidating” when they congregated in groups.

Teachers had lower expectations for their black and Latino pupils and believed that white and Asian students from the neighborhood were favored because they dominate the gifted classes and their parents are more involved in the schools.

“I wouldn’t say the teachers set out to treat (PWT students) differently, but it’s a tough situation on both sides,” explained Brenda Creed, dean for traveling students at Taft High School, the district’s largest receiver school, with almost one third of its 2,800 students on the PWT program.

Many suburban teachers have been at their schools for 10 years or more and remember a time when schools such as Taft were almost all white and upper-middle class, Creed said. It has been difficult for some to adjust to the changing demographics and needs of their new student population.

PWT students are handicapped by the physical rigors of the long bus rides they must endure and are sometimes late for class or not as well prepared as neighborhood students, Creed said. “Some teachers are quick to bounce (PWT students) out of class” when there’s a problem. “Some are not real sympathetic to all these kids have to go through.”

But despite the busing program’s academic failings, there are some success stories.

There are Valley high school valedictorians who are bused from inner-city neighborhoods. There are friendships between white and minority students that transcend the differences and enlarge the vistas of both.

“It’s given my son an opportunity to learn some things I could never teach him,” said Jay Berger, a white parent whose son attends a Canoga Park elementary school with many bused-in students. “He’s more aware and connected to the world than a kid who grows up isolated in this artificial white, middle-class community.”

And parents such as Jenkins and Boston believe that their children will be better equipped for success because of their PWT experiences.

“I’m not sorry I sent them,” Jenkins says of her two sons. “They experienced things they never would have experienced in their neighborhood schools. They went to private parties, bar mitzvahs . . . things that exposed them to different ways of life. They went scuba diving, and on a trip to Catalina Island for the weekend. I think they’ll value that all their lives.”

The reasons for the poor academic performance of PWT students are complicated, district officials and educational experts say. But the barriers posed by the integration process--the long bus rides and lack of opportunity for parental involvement--contribute mightily.

Some schools, such as Taft, work hard to maximize the involvement of PWT parents, holding night meetings in the neighborhoods their children are bused from and calling parents immediately when traveling students miss school or have problems.

But the distance between the school and the community makes it difficult for all but the most determined parents to participate, particularly for low-income parents, who may not have the transportation, child care or free time.

“It makes a big difference when you can just walk down the street to your child’s school to talk with a teacher and visit a classroom, rather than having to take a day to drive” across town, said Pam Bruns, a Pacific Palisades parent who has been active in support of busing programs that have paired her neighborhood schools with minority schools.

Studies nationwide have identified parental involvement as a key element in raising student achievement, but the Los Angeles district has done little to make it easier for parents of traveling students to have a voice in their schools.

Schools provide buses to get parents to campus on special occasions, such as Back to School night, but there is little opportunity for regular interaction between the inner-city parents and their children’s suburban schools.

But the root of the achievement disparity between bused children and their neighborhood classmates undoubtably lies in the economic differences between the groups, experts and district officials say.

National studies have consistently demonstrated a correlation between socioeconomic status and school achievement, and systematic--and often expensive--intervention usually is needed to break the cycle of low achievement among low-income students.

Low-income students generally have parents who are not well-educated and cannot provide the kinds of support or resources, such as reference material or help with homework, that middle-income families provide their children.

The children’s language skills often lag far behind their middle-class counterparts, because a foreign language or non-standard English is spoken in the home.

And their families are likely to be larger and crowded into small homes or apartments. Basic needs, such as a quiet place and time to do homework, often are lacking for poor students.

But programs to overcome those problems would require lots of money, and that is in short supply in a district struggling to cut educational programs to eliminate an expected $220-million shortfall this year.

The board is discussing a plan to divert about $1.5 million of the more than $93 million the district spends busing students to fund support services such as supplemental language instruction and after-school study halls at receiving schools.

But even that will be only a drop in the bucket, since more than 60,000 students are being bused on the district’s various integration programs.

TEST SCORES FOR BUSED STUDENTS The Los Angeles Unified School District uses the national, standardized Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) to measure student achievement. Scores are expressed in relation to the performance of all students tested nationwide. For example, a student ranking in the 65th percentile has scored at or above the level of 65% of the students taking the test nationwide.

The chart lists the 1988-89 percentile rankings on the CTBS reading, language and mathematics tests of students bused to integrated schools under the PWT program, neighborhood students attending schools that receive PWT students, students attending predominantly minority schools, and all students in the district.

READING

GRADE 4 5 7 8 10 11 Bused PWT student 28 29 32 34 25 31 Receiver-school resident 60 57 57 58 45 52 student Minority-school student 27 31 31 32 24 31 District overall 34 37 37 39 32 37

LANGUAGE

GRADE 4 5 7 8 10 11 Bused PWT student 30 30 37 40 32 37 Receiver-school resident 63 57 59 64 53 57 student Minority-school student 29 32 36 37 32 36 District overall 36 39 41 45 41 45

MATHEMATICS

GRADE 4 5 7 8 10 11 Bused PWT student 33 39 40 44 41 51 Receiver-school resident 67 64 69 65 69 73 student Minority-school student 34 41 40 39 42 43 District overall 41 45 48 48 45 52