Education: Forced Busing and White Flight

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Nonetheless, there is now considerable academic consensus that in large cities a significant linkage exists between white flight and forced busing. The fact that sociologists show signs of catching up with everybody else's common-sense observation should be reassuring. But in the spectrum of hope for improving the education of minorities and for guaranteeing constitutional rights that have been violated for a century, Armor's report is depressing. Finding forced busing counterproductive, at least in inner cities, he offers evaluations of alternative measures.

The first is the "metropolitan plan," which tries to block white flight by incorporating suburbs under city control, then busing whites back into town to achieve balance. The courts have struck down such plans in Detroit and Richmond. Armor adds another glum note. After studying inconclusive results of the one metropolitan-integration plan tried so far, in Louisville, he says it does not seem to work. Whites, denied escape to near suburbs, move farther away, or flee into private schools. Even in sprawling Los Angeles, where, Armor thinks, some sort of metropolitan plan should be instituted and might work, the chances of getting approval seem small.

Armor has often testified in court hearings about mandatory busing plans. His personal hope for further progress boils down to a mixture of mandated school improvements—for instance, a court-ordered increase in the number of "magnet" schools to draw qualified whites and blacks from all corners of a city—and vigorously promoted voluntary school integration. The only hopeful example he gives, however, is San Diego. Using a voluntary system, the city has kept the level of white flight down (below 6% per year). But the increase in the actual number of whites and nonwhites going to school together—the real aim of integration—has been small. A similar failure to achieve much actual integration occurs in many forced-busing cities, as Armor keeps pointing out, but at a much greater cost in pain, dislocation and plain cash.

Perhaps significantly, Armor does not confront a fact that most parents, blacks especially, need no sociologist to remind them of. Without the constant threat of busing and the steady prodding of the courts, the amount of "voluntary" school integration in San Diego and elsewhere would probably have never occurred. ∎