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October 21, 2004

Panel examines legacy of busing

Jeremy Schwab

With the school committee considering a plan to divide Boston into smaller student-assignment zones for the first time in 30 years, a panel of experts took the opportunity to revisit the school department’s track record in educating students of color since the 1973 court order that mandated integration by busing.

Black parents, whose neighborhood schools were under-funded and decaying, pushed for equal educations for their children, a protest movement which led to the 1973 order.

Students of color now enjoy more educational opportunities in Boston than they did before busing, agreed the four panelists at the Old South Meeting House recently.

However, systemic problems persist, they said, including a wide racial achievement gap.

“White and Asian students still do better than blacks and Latinos,” said Ted Landsmark, who headed the mayor’s Task Force on School Assignment, which recommended the smaller zones. “We need to improve that. But I think we have come very far since the 1970s. The back of overt, legally sanctioned white-on-black racism has been broken.”

During the 10 years following busing, the school department struggled to deal with busing protests and adjust as white parents pulled their children out of the public schools in droves.

“Twenty, thirty years ago it was just me and my classroom,” recalled Casel Walker, a former teacher and now principal of the Manning School, during the forum organized by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the Ford Hall Forum. “Nobody cared what I did. Now, as an administrator, I can’t do anything without my teachers and parents having a voice.”

With parents and administrators pre-occupied with the busing debate, educational quality suffered, indicated Landsmark.

“I think at the time of busing, there was so much emphasis on achieving equity across the system that virtually no parent could talk about quality,” he said. “Equity focuses on the establishment of minimum standards. Today, the focus is on excellence.”

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Achievement System test has given the state a new tool to measure the achievement and improvement of students in different schools, different racial and ethnic groups and different educational groupings such as special education.

Teachers are improving students’ capabilities by pushing students to pass the math and English test, which they must do in order to graduate high school, according to Harvard Professor Ronald Ferguson, who has done consulting work on education policy.

“As they teach to [the test], kids are getting better skills,” he said.

Ferguson noted that the achievement gap has been around for decades.

“We made huge progress, mostly in the time between 1970 and 1990, in closing the racial achievement gap,” he said. “However, at the end of the 1980s the progress stopped quite dramatically. Black 17-year-olds started doing much less leisure reading, and class attendance went down. But that is by no means irreversible.”

One cause of the achievement gap may be the ways in which teachers teach blacks and Latinos and Asians and whites. Some parents and activists say many teachers have lower expectations for black and Latino children, an attitude which the activists say hampers children’s development.

The fourth panelist, Ellen Guiney, the executive director of the Boston Plan for Excellence, said differing expectations were already a problem in the years immediately following busing, underlining the slowness of change.

“I became aware that [my children] were getting not quite what other children got,” said Guiney, whose children are white. “They were certainly held to higher standards than some of their classmates.”

 

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