Education: Forced Busing and White Flight

New school study seems to link them closer than ever

Back in 1975, Chicago Sociologist James Coleman, having looked at the early figures, felt called upon to report what most Americans thought they knew already: court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance in large U.S. cities and to ensure that more blacks and whites go to school together was causing a great deal of David Armor white flight from city schools.

If the finding came as no great surprise, its source was a considerable shock. Coleman was the man whose 1966 report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, had served as the main academic proof of the values of desegregation. Yet here he was, questioning the usefulness of busing. Coleman, of course, was merely asking whether, in the long run, "forced busing might not defeat the purpose of increasing overall contact among races hi schools."

To many people, though, the question seemed virtually unAmerican. For months sociologists kept busy stomping all over Coleman's findings. His conclusions were premature, they said. There was no hard proof that white flight from city schools, already a phenomenon before the threat of busing, was significantly increased by busing. And even if such a connection might one day be proved, the condition was likely to be short-lived. In any case it would take years to measure the matter adequately. Three years have passed. Now comes a new study that has the advantage of being able to see the effects of busing in a slightly longer perspective. Produced by Harvard-trained David Armor, 39, a senior sociologist at the Rand Corp., the report seems to bear out many of Coleman's early fears.

Armor measured white flight over a six-year period in 23 Northern and Southern cities that had court-ordered mandatory busing. They also had accessible suburbs, school districts with an enrollment of at least 20,000 students and a large minority population (more than 20%). Then he compared his figures with a projected loss of white students that would have taken place without forced busing, based on established demographic patterns of white exodus and predictable birth rates. The results were remarkably consistent.

Against a projected white-student loss without busing that varies roughly between 2% and 4% over the six-year period, the average rate of real white loss quickly rose toward 15% for the first year of busing, then dropped some, to about 7% to 9%, during the next three years. Predictably, the highest rates of white loss occurred in districts where large numbers of whites were forced to bus into predominantly nonwhite schools. "The size of the flight is both large and long-term," Armor concludes, and he estimates that 30% to 60% of it is due to forced busing.

Critics have already begun finding fault with Armor. He has been taken to task for not running more comparative studies in districts where results proved favorable to busing. He has been accused of exaggerating the influence of busing on white flight. His most significant contribution, the projection of white-flight levels likely to occur without busing, has been challenged. Above all, he has been reminded that the problem is complex, that nobody can tell how long white-flight loss percentages will stay high.