Boston School Desegregation: A Connection
to Land Use and Transportation?
The Boston Public School System, like most other large, northern districts, has had forced school integration through busing for over thirty years. School busing has always been a contentious issue, but it is regaining steam in recent years as many school districts are considering eliminating busing for desegregation purposes. School desegregation is obviously a very charged social and political issue, but how do issues of land use and transportation relate to school desegregation? This summary includes an overview of the history of desegregation, discussion on its connection to land use and transportation, and recommendations for long-term solutions to the desegregation issue.
Early segregated housing practices by the Boston Housing Authority played an essential role in the segregation of schools. At the time of the desegregation policy era (1966-1975), students attended schools in their neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were segregated by race, class, and/or ethnicity. So, despite the fact that Boston schools were officially “integrated” in the 1800s, de jure segregation meant that they were little better than most southern schools.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) claimed that practice of segregation, de facto or de jure, created a psychological hindrance for minority children, due to the inferiority of predominately minority schools. The ambiguity of the federal case allowed lower courts and policy makers the leeway to desegregate schools by “any means necessary.” The Massachusetts State Legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act in 1965, prohibiting “racially imbalanced” schools. The Act of 1965 discouraged schools from possessing a student body with more than a 50% minority. The Act was popular among suburban districts, but frowned upon within the city of Boston.
Twenty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, on June 21, 1974, U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr. ordered the school districts within Boston to integrate by means of the “Master Plan.” The Master Plan required students from selected black neighborhoods to bus cross-town to schools in selected white neighborhoods and vice versa in an effort to accomplish “racial balance.”
The Master Plan essentially made assignment of students to schools a transportation problem. Implementation of the Master Plan required the busing of 26,000 students in a 94,000-student body (Lord 1977). Given the location of the schools, the racial make up of the city’s sections, the capacity of each school, travel cost per student, and the required make up of student body at each school, decisions as to how many students to transport from each zone to a particular school can be made by minimizing the total cost function over all schools. The total cost would be less had there been no restrictions on student racial makeup because transportation costs would be a minimum if everyone went to their nearest school. As restrictions on capacity of each school and the required racial make-up at each school is enforced the total cost of busing increases (Lord 1977).
While the
transportation solution required additional cost and required students to be
transported over longer distances, most of the opposition to busing came from
white families who did not want their kids going to what they considered unsafe
neighborhoods. A case in point is the
‘Declaration of Clarification’—authored by a Massachusetts Senator, a Boston
City Council member, and a Congressman—which iterated South Boston’s resistance
to busing because it is “against the children’s interest to send them to crime
infested Roxbury” (Taylor 1986). As
such, people objected to desegregation, not the busing it required.
Similar to a
transportation connection, the extent of a connection between school
desegregation policies and land use is widely debated. Many
studies (including Logan, et al 2003; Armor 1978; Farley and Wurdock
1977) offer that there is evidence to support a serious connection
between forced school integration through busing and White
Flight. Many other studies (including Pettigrew and Green 1976;
Farley 1975; Rossell 1975) claim that there is a lack of statistical
evidence to support the claim that White Flight from northern central
cities from the 1970s to today is due in part to school
desegregation. All of these studies recognize the fact that there
are many reasons why whites have consistency been moving out of large
central cities for the past forty years. However, the studies
that support a connection argue that White Flight would not have been
as pronounced had busing not been enforced. Other studies suggest
that employment location changes, increasing prosperity, and a desire
for better schools is the real reason that middle class whites have
been migrating to the suburbs. This debate shows that the issue
of White Flight is very complex and that school desegregation played
only a minor role.
The school desegregation policies to date have failed. Due to White Flight to the surrounding suburbs, the schools in Boston today are no more integrated than they were in 1970. Additionally, poor and minority students are still generally going to inferior schools compared to their wealthy white suburban counterparts. The difference in school quality is now at the municipal level instead of at the neighborhood level.
The idea of school desegregation is noble. Students do gain cultural awareness that helps eliminate stereotypes and allows for enhanced cultural bridging later in life. However, the benefits have been largely minimal due to the exodus of white students from inner city public schools. Even with perfect integration, how much social benefit are the students getting from the very limited potential integration? Without regional desegregation, there will only be slight integration and, therefore, only slight social benefits. The costs, however, seem to be much higher. School integration costs the Boston School District an estimated $20 million more in busing costs than neighborhood schools would cost (Richer 1998). Additionally, there are significant social costs. Students have significantly longer bus rides and they often go to school with kids who live far away from them. As a result, many friendships made at school will be hard to maintain outside of school and community is often lost.
We suggest a multi-pronged approach to school integration and equality. We propose eliminating busing for desegregation purposes and returning to neighborhood schools. However, this alone is not enough. For true school integration, neighborhood integration is needed. Policies need to be implemented to eliminate class and racial steering in the housing market and increase the amount of affordable housing in the suburbs. Planners need to also continue the trend of the Hope VI program, which instills New Urbanist principles and mandates a combination of market-rate and subsidized housing in all public housing projects. These policies will help balance the jobs-housing ratio and make the suburbs more accessible to the underprivileged. Additionally, the main problem that school desegregation was supposed to address was school inequalities. As mentioned earlier, inner city schools are no better today than they were in the 1970s. State and Federal Governments need to adequately fund all schools, so that, regardless of which public school someone goes to, students will receive a high-quality education.
School desegregation is only indirectly connected to land use and transportation; the topic is mainly social and political. However, our alternatives to school desegregation are directly connected to urban form. Eliminating segregated housing patterns and providing adequate funding for all public schools should be today’s goal instead of continuing the futile hope of school integration. This change in the focus of school policy will bring land use and transportation to the forefront.
Works Cited
Armor, D. 1978. “White flight, demographic transition and the future of school desegregation”. The Rand Paper Series P5931. Santa Monica: Rand Corp.
Farley, R. 1975. School integration and white flight. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan.
Farley, R., and C. Wurdock. 1977. Can government policies integrate schools? Ann Arbor: U of Michigan.
Logan, John R., et al. 2003. Segregation in neighborhoods and schools: Impacts on minority Children in the Boston region. Internet: http://mumford1.dyndns.org/cen2000/colorlines/Logan%20Color%20Lines%20report%20format.pdf.
Lord, J. Dennis. 1977. “Spatial perspectives on
school desegregation and busing”. Resource Papers for College Geography
No. 77.3. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Geographers.
Pettigrew, T.F., and R. Green. 1976. “School desegregation in large cities: A critique of the
Coleman white flight thesis.” Harvard Educational Review 46: 1-53.
Richer, Matthew. 1998. “Boston’s busing massacre”. Policy Review. 92.
D. Garth Taylor, 1986, “Public Opinion & Collective Action: The Boston School Desegregation Conflict”, University of Chicago Press.