Education: A New Idea on Busing

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University of Chicago Sociologist James S. Coleman has become celebrated over the past decade for studies that first supported and then opposed the use of busing to integrate schools. Last week he emerged with a proposal somewhere in between.

In 1966 Coleman issued a pioneering report demonstrating that children from the slums do better work when they attend middle-class schools. But his follow-up report earlier this year argued that compulsory busing has driven so many white urban families to the suburbs or to private schools that it is making city public schools more segregated than ever. In a Manhattan speech last week marking the 75th anniversary of the College Entrance Examination Board, Coleman offered his solution: let any student transfer to any school he chooses within an urban-suburban metropolitan area—provided only that the new school has fewer students of his own race than his old school.

Marvelous Case. Under Coleman's plan, a transferring student's old school system would contribute to the new one for his education. The state would pay for needed transportation. Coleman admits that his proposal would leave inner-city schools largely all-black, but it would help to integrate the suburbs. Says he: "Boston is a marvelous case for this. People in the suburbs are telling people in the central city to integrate while they sit out there protected by school-district lines."

An open-enrollment scheme would need state or federal legislation requiring school districts to accept pupils from the outside. But Coleman thinks the idea would be politically attractive. "Something that would work would be highly supported," he says. "Almost nobody likes busing, but nobody wants to go back to a situation in which there are no means for providing racial integration either."

The next day Coleman was the first witness before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where the foes of busing are pressing for a constitutional amendment to forbid it. Coleman opposes an amendment as unrealistic, and indeed its chances are slim. Said he: "If a democratic Government can't resolve issues of this nature without resorting to the Constitution, then we are in a bad way."

Kentucky Governor Julian Carroll then came before the committee to endorse the amendment. Carroll, who is running for reelection, said that the court-ordered busing between Louisville and its suburbs has "failed miserably, [is] damaging educational quality, contributing to white flight, disrupting community and family life."