How the left’s embrace of busing hurt the cause of integration. - Slate

How the left’s embrace of busing hurt the cause of integration.: Part 1

by Tanner Colby

Today, America’s schools are more racially homogenous than they were 25 years ago. But to say that those schools are “resegregating” is to misstate the facts. They can’t resegregate. They never integrated. We moved a lot of kids around for the sake of making things look good on a spreadsheet, but our communities and social networks remained largely unchanged. The racial balance created by busing was a fiction, and in the absence of those programs we’re just seeing the country for what it has been all along, what it never stopped being: separate and unequal.

So what do we do about it now? Not much—not in terms of education policy, anyway. Some cities still have token integration efforts here and there, but nothing on the scale we had back in the 1970s. Thanks to the legal precedents set in Detroit and Kansas City—and other recent cases in Oklahoma City, Louisville, and Seattle—court-mandated programs aimed at creating racial balance are increasingly a dead letter. Just last week in Little Rock, Ark., the historic flashpoint where National Guardsmen had to escort black students into the segregated Central High School in 1957, the courts decided tothrow in the towel after a nearly 60-year, billion-dollar effort to bring proportional racial balance on the city’s schools. (They’re still 66 percent black—better than many districts but hardly proportional.) 
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