Education: The Buses Are Running

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It is schooltime again, and across the land last week children gathered up their lunch boxes and book bags and boarded buses for school. For thousands of children in both North and South, the buses took them a good deal farther than they had ever traveled to classes before. New court-ordered busing programs were being tested in hundreds of school districts, and while there was undeniable confusion and more than a smattering of residual resentment, most classes opened in an atmosphere of relative tranquillity.

The calm was perhaps a tribute more to the average American's traditional respect for the law than to firm guidance from his top lawmakers and executors. Last month President Nixon openly disavowed a busing plan for the Austin, Texas, school system that had been mapped out by Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Elliot Richardson, and warned federal officials that busing operations should be pressed only to the "minimum required by law." Last week Richardson returned from a long vacation to announce that he was in "complete agreement" with the President's stance. He also reported that Nixon was pleased by "the remarkable degree of public understanding" displayed in the South despite "court requirements that have carried desegregation much farther than anywhere else in the country."

Trouble Spots. Adding to the confusion of an already muddled issue, Chief Justice Warren Burger chose the moment to declare that the Supreme Court's Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision of last spring did not really mean what some courts seemed to think it meant-that the law required enough busing to achieve an equal racial balance in every school within a school district. Not so, said Burger, in an obiter dictum to a decision that substantiated a Winston-Salem, N.C., busing order. If federal and school officials would only read the opinion carefully, he pointed out, they would find the statement that "the constitutional command to desegregate schools does not mean that every school in every community must always reflect the racial composition of the school system as a whole." By thus accentuating the negative, Burger appeared to make it even more difficult for beleaguered school authorities to implement busing plans. Said one official: "Swann was supposed to be a landmark, but it's beginning to look like more of a barrier."