(Second of two columns)
ON THE Tuesday before Christmas, Billy Niedzwiecki was jumped by three schoolmates in a bathroom at South Boston High School. They stomped on him, broke his glasses, ripped a gold chain from his neck, and stabbed him five times. So severe was the attack that Billy had to undergo surgery twice at Boston Medical Center.
Police were quick to deny that race played a role in the stabbing — even though Billy, a South Boston native, is white and his attackers, who come from other neighborhoods, are black. Maybe the police are right, but no one would be surprised to learn otherwise. South Boston High has simmered with violence and racial uneasiness ever since 1974, when Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the School Department to forcibly intermingle black kids from Roxbury and white kids from South Boston. Busing put public schools like Southie High under a sort of martial law, with hundreds of state troopers patrolling the corridors, snipers posted on the roof, and metal detectors at the doors.
 Forced busing didn't relieve segregation in Boston's schools. It worsened it. |
In the quarter-century since busing began, South Boston High School has erupted several times in racial brawls. In 1993, hundreds of students, black and white, hurled rocks, punches, and racist slurs at one another. Five people ended up in the hospital, including two police officers and the mayor. To this day, police still patrol the grounds of South Boston High. There are still metal detectors at the entrance. Judge Garrity's legacy endures.
The idea behind forced busing, in Boston and elsewhere, was that black schoolchildren suffered psychological harm from the stigma of segregation. Separating black students "from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race," Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in Brown v. Board of Education, "generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status . . . that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Therefore it was essential — so federal judges would reason in case after case — for schools to be racially "balanced." By force, if necessary.
But racial balance was the one thing busing could never accomplish. Across the country, in cities as different as Boston, Denver, and Detroit, parents refused to stand by while their children were yanked to unfamiliar parts of town and experimented on in the name of "equality." Those who could afford to pay tuition moved their kids to private or parochial schools. Others left the cities altogether.
When Garrity's order first set the buses rolling in Boston, 85,000 students of all races attended the city's public schools. A decade later, enrollment had shrunk to 60,000. "White flight" had begun even before the judge usurped control of the schools, but busing accelerated it sharply. In 1970, there were 62,000 white children in Boston's schools — 64 percent of the total. By 1980, the number had dropped to 24,000, a little more than 35 percent of the total. By 1990, the white headcount was down to 13,500, or 22 percent. Today whites account for just 17 percent of Boston's public school students, and most of them attend one of the three exam schools, where admission is based partly on merit.
In short, busing didn't end segregation — it worsened it. The whole purpose of uprooting kids from schools close to home and sending them on long bus rides to neighborhoods they didn't know was to increase interracial exposure. That was precisely the outcome Garrity's orders sabotaged. Before busing began, the average black child in Boston attended a school that was 24 percent white. Now the proportion is 17 percent. All that anguish, all that upheaval — and the schools are more racially isolated than ever.
And all that money. Busing has cost Boston hundreds of millions of dollars — a scandalous waste of funds that could have done so much good had Garrity and his supporters been less obsessed with skin color and more concerned with the quality of the schools. What black schoolchildren urgently needed in the 1970s was not classrooms with more white faces. It was classrooms with more and better teaching.
They still need it. Boston's public schools are among the worst in Massachusetts, far below the national average. Statewide test scores released last month show that half the city's fourth-graders can't read and two-thirds of its eighth- and 10th-graders can't do math. In 1998, the average Boston student scored 843 on his SATs —168 points below the national average of 1,011. "It is a cruel irony," writes Steven F. Wilson in Reinventing the Schools, his deeply researched 1992 book on public education in Boston, "that some of the finest universities in the world surround one of the nation's least distinguished school systems." This, too, is Garrity's legacy.
Busing shredded the emotional bonds that once linked the schools to the neighborhoods that surrounded them. Far from improving the schools, busing eroded the community support that had nurtured them. As pride and affection evaporated, they were replaced with resentment and alienation. Learning and school spirit dwindled in tandem. Middle-class parents left. What remains, Wilson observes, "is a system of educational apartheid, in which primarily low-income children of color are consigned to a second-rate education, one that offers grim prospects for their future."
Just the sort of system, in other words, that busing was supposed to cure.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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