Mayor’s Plan to Rework Busing Stirs Boston’s Racial Waters

Almost in passing, Mayor Thomas M. Menino recently announced in his state of the city address that he plans to return Boston to a system of neighborhood schools.

“The key thing is to give parents the choice where to send their child to school,” he declared. “Parents should make that decision. Not the politicians.”

The statement was hardly revolutionary: Neighborhood schooling is the current buzz phrase among many who study urban education, and Menino is no one’s idea of a firebrand. But in a city whose resistance to school desegregation 25 years ago made it a national symbol of Northern racism, Menino’s proposal spurred low-key but searching debate.

Many wondered: If the schools are inadequate, how worthwhile is it to spend $30 million a year to bus students from one part of town to another? On the other hand, why walk your child to a low-quality neighborhood school? In a district where only 20% of students are white, what does desegregation mean, anyway? Has busing become a symbolic anachronism? And if neighborhood schools are instituted, does that mean the end of busing?

To that last question, Jacque Goddard, a top Menino aide, replied: “As we know it, yes.”

Another Look at Neighborhood Schools

Around the country, neighborhood schools are the vogue among educators and civic leaders who hope nearby classrooms will encourage parental involvement and turn school buildings into mini-community centers. But neighborhood schooling also was the fashion in the bad old days before busing, said Washington civil rights lawyer William L. Taylor.

Upholding arguments that schools have accomplished the desegregation they set out to achieve, courts in Denver, Cleveland, Oklahoma City and other cities have lifted school desegregation orders in recent years, Taylor said. After working on school desegregation programs all over the country, Taylor said he worries about the “unself-consciousness” with which neighborhood schools are being considered.

“As you know,” he pointed out, “they have been a euphemism for racially segregated schools, and often deliberately racially segregated schools.”

Here in Boston, the caldron of race-based inequity simmers steadily at the center of most discussions about education. Because of its painful history--marked by images of white parents hurling rocks at buses filled with African American pupils--Boston often is viewed as a model for how not to assign students to city schools, said UCLA education professor Amy Stuart Wells.

Boston public schools were 50% white in 1975 when mandatory busing was instituted as part of a court-ordered desegregation plan.

Many community activists and civil rights advocates maintain that white students continue to be favored in admissions to the city’s famed test-in schools, such as the venerable Boston Latin School, which has been the subject of intense litigation. Advanced work programs that prepare younger students for these secondary schools also remain less accessible to minority students, these critics charge.

They are no less forceful in their condemnation of Menino’s call for neighborhood schools. The mayor’s proposal is vague, they maintain, calling for five new schools to be built over a six-year period from funds that have yet to be identified.

“The mayor is being disingenuous,” said Leonard Alkins, president of the Boston chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. “In order for the number of children of color here to have neighborhood schools, you would have to build over 30 schools, not five. The whole discussion about neighborhood schools is nothing but a smoke screen.”

School busing became an option, not an imperative, when a “controlled choice” method of assigning students to Boston schools was introduced in 1989. In Boston today, 55% of students ride buses to school, compared with 60% nationwide.

Harvard sociologist Charles V. Willie, a professor of education and urban studies who developed the controlled choice plan, said a 1995 study showed that most Boston parents select schools to meet their children’s educational needs. Only 20% indicated that location--having a school in their neighborhood--prompted school choice.

In responding to this narrow but often vocal contingent, Willie cautioned, Menino’s plan might cause more problems than it solves.

“If he goes back to a neighborhood school assignment, all hell will break loose,” Willie warned. “Unfortunately, he probably doesn’t realize that.”

Boston City Council member Peggy Davis-Mullen was a high school freshman the year desegregation was ordered here. Rather than attend the newly integrated high school she was assigned to, Davis-Mullen fled to a private school in the city’s serene Back Bay.

Davis-Mullen still lives in South Boston, site of the worst busing protests, and sends her children to parochial schools.

She concedes that “major pushing by myself” and others helped coax the mayor toward the concept of neighborhood schools. Two years ago, Davis-Mullen championed the cause by gathering 11,000 signatures for a city ballot initiative urging a return to neighborhood schools. When compromise seemed feasible, she dropped the initiative.

“Politically, people don’t want to touch this subject with a 10-foot pole,” Davis-Mullen said. “It’s just too volatile.”

The topic is taboo, she said. “We haven’t been able to recognize that we have a minority school system. It’s a segregated system. Twenty-five years ago, we began this journey because we were going to have schools that were desegregated and academically excellent, and we have achieved neither.”

Gary Orfield, director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, said the prospect of neighborhood schools troubles many minority parents.

“What blacks and Latinos especially are worried about is that they are going to get trapped into extremely high-poverty schools or have no schools in their neighborhoods,” Orfield said. “I think those are legitimate worries. That will happen.”

Orfield voiced concerns as well about what happens when “old symbols,” such as busing, get “dragged across new realities,” such as controlled-choice school assignment. Unlike the days of mandatory desegregation, “basically what is going on now [is] voluntary, choice-driven desegregation--efforts by local school boards to retain some vestige of racial contact.”

But “talking about it in the language of 25 years ago” is “kind of like taking out the bloody shirt,” he said. “Opening up serious racial cleavages without really thinking it through is kind of reckless in a combustible setting.”

Adjusting to Changing Needs

Because of changing urban demographics, Boston School Committee Chairwoman Elizabeth Reilinger said busing may have outlived its usefulness. “The idea of using busing as a way of mixing up population groups is not relevant because they are already mixed up.”

Voluntary or otherwise, she continued, busing may be an unaffordable luxury in a system where funds could better be spent elsewhere. Excluding the busing of children with special needs, Boston spends $30 million each school year on a busing plan so intricate that many vehicles carry only a few students.

Reilinger defended the mayor’s neighborhood school proposal “not as a repudiation of busing but as an evolution.” “The times of the ‘70s required dramatic action to desegregate the schools. The times of the ‘90s require dramatic action to improve the schools.”

Racial imbalance goes beyond school population percentages, Reilinger said. In many ways, the “fairly dramatic achievement gap between white students and ethnic and racial minorities” represents an equally troubling form of racism.