A Tale of Four Cities

After eight years, busing has neither passed nor failed

With the last of legal maneuvers exhausted in a seven-year battle against court-ordered school busing, officials in Columbus last week set about transporting some 35,000 pupils newly reassigned to different schools. The whole community mobilized to make the operation a great success. On the first day of school Mayor Tom Moody was able to announce: "We may not like what's happening, but we're going to work hard on it."

The quiet in Columbus and the possibility that busing may get a fairly smooth start this week in beleaguered Cleveland stood in marked contrast to Septembers past, when busing began in cities like Louisville and Boston. But busing remains one of America's most tense and torturous topics. Even in Columbus, police added earplugs to their antiriot gear to help them keep calm in case they encountered a screaming mob of irate parents.

Discussion and disputes about busing continue. Opponents say it is costly and ineffective. Its backers urge it as the only way of achieving integration. Others feel it is about to disappear, simply because it does not work or because they resent Government control. Proponents correctly note that just such Government control, as law, has been the main cause of school integration in the U.S. since the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. A third of American children now go to school in districts that have adopted desegregation plans. Both those who favor busing and those who hate it hardened their positions long ago, remaining as closed to argument as if they had borrowed earplugs from the Columbus cops.

Most discussion centers on the great cities with large black populations where, experience so far suggests, busing's chances of success are slight. According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the average black pupil in the North and West now attends schools more segregated than those in the South. After the U.S. Supreme Court gave yet another go-ahead to desegregation in Columbus last July, the U.S. Justice Department announced, without disclosing the targets, that it intends to investigate similar school districts elsewhere. As school opens this year, TIME examines four representative communities that, over the past eight years, have tried busing with varying success, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not.

PONTIAC: Calm after storm

A smallish (pop. 83,000) blue-collar town 25 miles northwest of Detroit, Pontiac, Mich., houses an assembly plant of the General Motors truck and coach division, one of the nation's largest school bus manufacturers. One of the first Northern cities to carry out court-ordered desegregation, in 1971, Pontiac also became one of the first flash points of busing violence. White mothers chained themselves to block school buses. Six Ku Klux Klan members threw fire bombs. One woman even expressed her outrage by walking 620 miles to complain to Congressmen in Washington, D.C.

A working-class town with high unemployment (more than 60% of its schoolchildren qualify for free school lunches), Pontiac is not the sort of place sociologists consider best equipped to absorb the shocks of racial integration. Yet a majority of both black and white citizens have told pollsters that they favor the integration of the city's schools, although they remain unenthusiastic about the bus as the vehicle for integration.

In 1970, 63% of Pontiac's student population of 23,807 were white. Today just 19,875 students are enrolled, and only 48% of them are white. During the first year of busing, nearly 3,000 students, mostly white, left for private schools or schools in nearby communities. For-sale signs sprang up on lawns throughout Pontiac. Then things began to stabilize. School-enrollment declines of 1% a year after 1972 have mainly reflected the drop in the size of the whole school-age population. Home buyers have "lit a fire under the housing market," as Downtown Development Authority Director Phil Mastin puts it. One reason more whites have not left, according to City Commissioner H. Tom Padilla, a Hispanic: "Whites discovered that schools in the so-called paradise outside Pontiac didn't have bands or gymnasiums or athletic departments."

School Superintendent Odell Nails is convinced that busing was necessary to produce equal educational opportunity, because it focused the clout of concerned white parents on the condition and equipment of schools that had been all black and largely neglected. "In the old days," he says, "black schools had to borrow microscopes for two weeks a year." Adds Principal Darryl Lee of Jefferson Junior High: "Now, everyone shares in the wealth and the poverty." White Parent Kay Hackett has seen her four children bused to school. She insists, "Socially, it has been good for them. Their black friends come about the same way as their white friends. As a result of integration they will be far better prepared."

Superintendent Nails points with some pride to system-wide achievement testing, which shows a slow but steady increase in the level of reading and math skills. Whites continue to outscore blacks, but the achievement gap between the races has not increased since busing began in Pontiac, as it has in some other cities. Even so, Pontiac students' overall test performance is nothing to brag about. "We're below the national average," concedes Research Associate Helen Efthim. Lest the busing program be unfairly blamed, Efthim quickly points out: "We always have been."

SAN FRANCISCO: Failure so far

In 1971, after years of wrangling and legal delay, San Francisco became the first large Northern city to try court-ordered busing. For eight years it spent up to $2.5 million annually to shuttle as many as 18,200 youngsters back and forth to school. What it has to show for the effort now is a good deal of bitterness and a school system almost fabled for its fecklessness. A number of schools continue to be mostly black or mostly white, which has prompted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to seek a brand-new court-ordered desegregation plan. With a weary eye fixed on the possibility of such an order, former School Board Member Dr. Z.L. Goosby, 56, says: "This city is going to have to go through the whole damn thing again."

To date, San Francisco must be rated a failure. It also seems to demonstrate that busing does not work for inner cities surrounded by green and inviting suburbs. There are other problems. Its population is a kind of mini-U.N. Whites make up 49% of the city's inhabitants. San Francisco's blacks constitute 15% of the population. But there are nearly as many Chinese and Hispanic San Franciscans as blacks, along with a scattering of Filipinos, Japanese and American Indians. Two years ago the school board abandoned more exacting integration standards and proposed, simply, that no school should have more than 45% of any one racial group. By that standard there has been some progress. In 1971, 87 schools were "unbalanced." That number has been reduced to 17.

Like most large central cities, San Francisco is losing population to the suburbs. It has experienced black flight and Hispanic flight. But the white exodus is the largest, and it threatens to make real desegregation within the city a numerical impossibility. In 1970, when the population reached 720,000, whites made up 35% of the city's total school enrollment, compared with 20% now. Today 31% of San Francisco's children are enrolled in private and parochial schools.

Horror stories about life in the city's public schools have increased since 1974, when a local commission announced that deteriorating schools were "the most serious problem facing the city." While attempting to measure the abilities of students, Stanford University Sociologist Sanford Dornbusch reported that he found 62% of the black male students four years behind whites in reading ability by the tenth grade. Many students were unable to read Dornbusch's questionnaire. Fearing that busing their children will only bring them more poor education, some blacks and many Chinese have joined whites in bitter resistance to busing. To facilitate what is known locally as "yellow flight," Chinese doctors routinely write medical excuses for students who claim they get motion sickness and so cannot travel by bus outside their neighborhood. For busing to succeed, observes Jane Mercer, a sociologist at the University of California at Riverside, "there has to be a good program at the end of the bus line."

TAMPA-ST. PETE: Success

As with Pontiac and San Francisco, court-ordered busing came to these neighboring cities on Florida's Gulf Coast in 1971. But despite a good deal of hot opposition at first, the Florida programs gamed acceptance and produced results. There were two main reasons for success. The busing plan in both cases was countywide -- stretching beyond Tampa to include all the schools of Hillsborough County, and beyond St. Petersburg to all Pinellas County. That made white flight to schools beyond the district limits more difficult. Even more important, the population of both counties was not overly large, about 500,000 each, and included relatively few blacks: only 14% of Hillsborough County's population, 8% of Pinellas'.

As a result, less busing was required of white students. In Tampa, desegregation recast schools in black neighborhoods as integrated centers for the sixth and seventh grades; extensive busing of white students was done only for these two grades. Black students had to put up with most of the busing for grades 1 through 5 and 8 through 12.

After Tampa's busing began, a drop in white enrollment was expected but failed to take place; a handful of white-flight academies soon closed for lack of business. Today, reports School Superintendent Raymond Shelton, the only impact of busing on enrollment is a dip of 4% for grades 6 and 7, the grades in which white children do most of the busing. Apparently their objection is not to black classmates but to the bus.

In Pinellas County, whites were reassured by a rule that no school could become more than 30% black. In fact, busing has served as an incentive for neighborhood integration in St. Petersburg; white children who live near blacks can avoid busing, since they are needed to desegregate nearby schools. Busing also helped block the predicted pattern of swift racial turnover once a few blacks had moved into a neighborhood, since the plan guarantees that no school will become all black. Says a local real estate agent: "When busing was new, people were afraid of something they just didn't know. But I think desegregation is an accepted fact now."

The academic benefits of desegregation are harder to measure. In 1974 a bi-racial school-system committee decided that it did not want to keep track of black vs. white academic progress in St. Petersburg for fear that unfair comparisons would be made. "There is no way to say whether students have benefited from desegregation," says Thomas Tocco, assistant superintendent of the Pinellas school district. "Frankly, I would not even venture a guess."

In Tampa, as a whole, students are at national norms or above them, according to Superintendent Shelton. He also points out that scores have steadily improved since 1971: "I can't attribute it to busing. But it does show that you can operate a sound education program in a desegregated setting."

But academics isn't everything. St. Petersburg black Community Leader Harry Harvey, whose six-year-old daughter is bused daily, is pleased. "Now it's just like it was in the Army," says Harvey. "You go to the PTA and sit beside each other at football games and you say, 'Hey, you're just like anybody else.' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.