The Man Behind Busing : Education: Former L.A. school board President Robert Docter doesn’t regret the pro-busing stand he took in the late 1970s, even though it dramatically ended his political career.

Fifteen years ago, Los Angeles school board President Robert Docter had the dubious honor of announcing the creation of a mandatory busing plan to integrate the district’s public schools. He didn’t realize the firestorm he was about to ignite.

The busing plan tore the district apart, brought a sudden, spectacular end to Docter’s political career and, in the opinion of Docter’s critics, launched the school district into a long, downward trajectory from which it has not yet begun to recover.

Today, at 63, Docter is a semi-retired professor of educational psychology at Cal State Northridge. He also works as a counselor to the chemically dependent and an adviser to the Salvation Army newspaper. He is rumpled, erudite and wittily self-deprecating.

“Oh, please,” he reassured a reporter who apologized for taking up so much of his time. “There’s nothing I enjoy more than the sound of my own voice. So few have listened to it recently.”

Despite the voters’ repudiation of mandatory busing, Docter doesn’t regret the stand he took in the controversy. “It makes me feel good about myself,” he said in a recent interview. “But it did bring my political career to a dramatic ending.”

It did more than that. It also caused tens of thousands of parents to move out of the district or pull their kids out of Los Angeles public schools. Hard-to-replace experienced teachers upped and quit rather than accept mandatory reassignment. The anti-government feeling that it inflamed helped ensure the passage of Proposition 13. The Anglo population of the school district, which had been at 55% in 1963 (when the first school desegregation suit was filed), declined to 13% by 1991. The academic consequences of busing, anti-busing activist and former Rep. Bobbie Fiedler says, were “an unmitigated disaster.”

Docter doesn’t dispute that some tactical errors were made in the busing for integration movement, but the goal, he says, was always a worthy one. “I believe in a multicultural, multiethnic society. I was looking for sensible ways to achieve this.”

After a 13-year legal battle, starting in 1963, the state Supreme Court decided the Crawford case, which required the Los Angeles schools to integrate.

“I had the pleasure of announcing the Crawford decision in 1976,” Docter said. “I was the bearer of bad news, and as that kind of messenger, I became a political scapegoat.”

It was about as close as the San Fernando Valley ever came to municipal civil war. People were polarized, fearful. “You couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone with a strong opinion,” school board member Roberta Weintraub said. “Everyone’s feet were set in concrete. Each side thought the other was totally wrong. You couldn’t vacillate. There were no points for seeing it from both sides.”

The rallying cry was neighborhood schools, and a major part of this was the fear of many white middle-class parents that their kids would be robbed and beaten if they had to go to school in minority neighborhoods. But it wasn’t just whites.

“You had black families as frightened as white families,” Docter said. “And Hispanic families going in all directions.”

Also, Docter says, the board made mistakes. In its zeal to integrate both the students and faculty, he said, it unwisely took on the issue of teacher seniority, “which is sacred to the union. It created tremendous tensions. Teachers did not want to move.”

It was a difficult time for Docter, hard on the stomach, requiring him to endure interminable community meetings, late nights, constant tension and non-negotiable demands. He received many letters and many threats.

During the worst times, school security personnel sometimes stayed outside his Northridge house all night. The feelings ran so high, a landlord once refused to accept a rental deposit check from Docter’s brother, Cal State Northridge psychologist Richard Docter, just because he was related to the infamous Robert Docter, the hellbent-on-busing school board president.

“People were anxious, confused,” Docter said. “They were concerned about the lack of control: ‘I bought my house in this neighborhood so my child could go to this school!’ They were bitter. Many felt betrayed.”

As a result, when an Encino housewife named Bobbie Fiedler started a movement known as Bustop, 30,000 people signed up in just a few months.

In 1977, Fiedler ran against Docter for the school board and easily defeated him 56% to 44%.

Docter blames his defeat on the nature of modern political campaigns. The practice of branding people with labels and communicating in 30-second sound bites can bring “even the finest public official down,” he said. “The person who defeated me solely on the busing issue did not finish a full term and then ran against a distinguished and experienced congressman and defeated him on the same issue.”

The problem, he says, was that there was no way to adequately explain the issues in 30 seconds for the 11 o’clock news. Instead, the opposition would brand a person with a label, and the person was politically dead.

“I made my values and choices known publicly at a difficult time,” he said. “The majority who voted did not endorse them, I suspect primarily because of sound bites and media images rather than a clear understanding of the ideas.”

Fiedler, now a business consultant, takes strong exception to the implication that her victory over Docter was a result of voter confusion.

“I won every single council district in Los Angeles except 8, 9 or 10,” she said. “He was smashed by a total political novice. It wasn’t me that beat him. It was the people. He was the epitome of the left-wing, social-planning liberal. He was on the wrong side of the issue. He was out of touch.”

And the result of his being out of touch, Weintraub said, was a mandatory busing plan that “almost destroyed the entire school district. We lost public support for education. It devastated the middle class. There was a massive exodus from the school system. We lost those kids during busing, and they did not come back.”

Docter agrees that the plan that the school board implemented after his forced retirement was a disaster. “It started youngsters in the integration process at the worst time possible in adolescence--fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades. All the data on school integration indicates that if you don’t start it very young, it is not going to succeed. We should have started in the primary grades. And it should have been introduced on a voluntary basis to dispel fears among the majority population and resist white flight.”

In a sense, Docter still longs for the good old days; there was so much hope and anticipation and optimism in the air, he says. Today, in contrast, “there seems to be more desperation. People seem to feel controlled by forces outside themselves.”

Which was the problem during the riots after the verdicts in the Rodney King case. “We had representatives of a generation of people on the street whose values did not reflect a commitment to the democratic ethic,” Docter said.

And part of the blame rests directly on the schools. “The great desire to make schools something that produce high numbers on a standardized test eliminates those aspects of the curriculum which have the potential of delivering some kind of a values base to youngsters which could result in moral and ethical behavior. For many youngsters the family hasn’t done this. For many the church has failed. What other institution of society is available except the schools?”

But rather than teach values and ethical behavior to the overwhelming majority of youngsters who are more than willing to make major sacrifices for the good of society, the media incessantly harps on standardized test scores, Docter said. And the result, he says, is that “we now firmly believe that what is taught is only valuable if it is measurable. If it doesn’t show up somewhere on some state test or SAT score or college board exam, it isn’t worth teaching.”

“We have de-professionalized the role of the teacher. The teacher is a mechanic, and school is now a series of workshops--’How to get past the SATs.’ And what has fallen from the curriculum are those things most crucial to human development.

“We look at music in the public school curriculum. It has all but disappeared. You look at commitment to the fine arts. There is minimal development within public education. You look at the humanities. English is valued only to the degree that it pays off on some essay exam.”

At the same time, Docter says, whole aspects of critical thinking are being neglected--recognizing and dealing with propaganda, finding ways to critically examine media. “There is no way that a youngster can be helped by today’s schools to determine what is good on TV and what is drivel,” he said. “The schools don’t help students make life choices that are meaningful. They don’t help kids achieve some measure of identity. They’re too busy teaching them how to score,” meaning to place high in test results.

“Maybe this 15-year-old is needed more as a baby-sitter than as a student in school. These students are not going to perform well on tests. So the message we give them is that they are bad, negative, ineffective people.”

Such messages, Docter says, are unintentionally destructive to minority children’s self-esteem. “Those same youngsters perform much better in other skills, but those skills aren’t measured. How to get home safely from school. How to cash the welfare check. How to cross major boulevards and intersections without getting hit. How to send certain messages in dangerous situations to protect oneself. How to understand different dialects.”

The problem, he said, is that “those skills aren’t measured on the achievement tests, so the kids appear dumb when actually they are not.”

To Fiedler, on the other hand, it is the emphasis by people like Docter on social issues rather than education that is responsible for the mess the schools are in today. “The schools aren’t teaching. They aren’t supporting the teachers’ academic needs. I don’t care what ethnic or racial background you are talking about; they are not teaching children to read, write and compute. They spend all their time debating social issues, whether they ought to give condoms, as opposed to providing them with a basic education.”

One problem with major social experiments is that the consequences can be far different from what anyone intended. The attempt to integrate the schools through mandatory busing may have contributed to what Docter considers public education’s “biggest disaster of all”--Proposition 13, the property tax limitation initiative that took away from school boards the right to control their own resources.

During the busing controversy years, inexorably rising property taxes were generating a huge $4-billion budget surplus in Sacramento at a time when many people were desperately struggling to find the money to pay the taxes to keep their homes. When the school district then tried to impose mandatory busing and teacher transfers on top of this, a lot of people suddenly felt that the government was out of touch and out of control.

“The anti-government feeling that was pervasive against the school board got carried into other areas of government,” Fiedler said.

As to what Docter considers his achievements from his eight years on the school board, the one clear success, he says, was the elimination of corporal punishment: “I did get the paddle out of the principal’s hand.”

What he regrets now is not the principle of integration through busing but rather the counterproductive way the goal was put into practice.

“It didn’t fail,” he said. “We just never tried it.”