The Nation: A Supreme Court Yes to Busing

NO single word in all the arguments over school integration has inspired as much fear and anger as busing. The idea of taking a child out of his own neighborhood to help integrate a school elsewhere outrages many parents. Yet as a practical matter, the bus is an indispensable corrective tool in cities where large areas are predominantly white or black. Thus when President Nixon last year praised the ideal of the neighborhood school and attacked busing, he was in effect suggesting a slowdown of integration—and Southern holdouts acquired new hope for delay. That hope dissolved last week. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed unanimously that transporting pupils to remedy school board-imposed segregation does not violate anyone's constitutional rights.

While the court's approval of busing will have the most practical impact, its decisions on four overlapping school cases also gave federal judges wide discretion to use almost any means they consider effective in desegregating dual school systems. Judges may demand the redrawing of school-district boundaries, even creating gerrymandered districts in which children from noncontiguous areas may be assigned to the same schools; they may pair or group schools from racially different neighborhoods and require transfers of students among those schools. They may establish racial quotas for schools, at least as a starting point to remedy past segregation. All of those methods may involve the transportation of children. Ruled the court: "Desegregation plans cannot be limited to the walk-in school."

Not Equal. The decision was written by one of President Nixon's own appointees: Chief Justice Warren Burger. His most quotable passages seemed to acknowledge, but to dismiss Nixon's defense of neighborhood schools. "All things being equal, with no history of discrimination," Burger wrote, "it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest their homes. But all things are not equal in a system that has been deliberately constructed and maintained to enforce racial segregation. The remedy may be administratively awkward, inconvenient and even bizarre and may impose burdens on some; but all awkwardness and inconvenience cannot be avoided in the interim period when remedial adjustments are being made to eliminate the dual school systems." Noting that about 39% of U.S. schoolchildren have routinely been riding buses, Burger indicated that only when a busing plan required such long rides as "to risk either the health of the children or significantly impinge on the educational process" would the high court find it objectionable.

Any Way. The court thus took another decisive step in the 17-year process of federal judicial and Administrative pressure that began with the 1954 decision defining officially sanctioned separate school systems as inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional. It was not until 1968 that the court lost patience with the slow pace of desegregation and gave a curt answer to the question of when it must be completed: "Now." Last week's decision addressed the question of how —and the answer, in effect, was "any way that works."