Beyond busing: George H. W. Bush and school desegregatioin

Educational Foundations, Fall 2001 by McAndrews, Lawrence J

The Bush Challenge to Busing

"For those who think busing is no longer a major issue in American education," wrote David Armor in February 1989, "look again." In the fall of 1988 federal circuit courts had overturned voluntary school desegregation plans in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Topeka, Kansas; and DeKalb County, Georgia. Busing to coerce school desegregation was returning, Armor contended, even though "racial-balance programs have failed to achieve their ultimate educational goal-to improve the academic performance of minority students." The new Administration concurred. In a December 1989 reply to Rebecca Amerson, who protested the DeKalb County decision, Acting Assistant Attorney General James Turner asserted that "the Justice Department has favored whenever possible the use of non-mandatory busing measures to achieve desegregation." When Bush unveiled his America 2000 education reform proposal in April 1991, he called for voluntary desegregation through magnet schools and nonpublic as well as public school choice.10

If the Administration were to move toward voluntary school desegregation, however, it first would have to remove the vestiges of mandatory plans. In September 1990, when the Seattle school board voted to relax coercive desegregation in an attempt to stem "white flight," the Department of Education invoked Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in withholding $3.2 million in matching funds for the city's magnet schools. Faced with "an economic gun to the board's head," in the words of member Michael Preston, the panel deferred its revised plan for a year. Five days later, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Church Council of Greater Seattle joined in a lawsuit to eliminate the delayed program. The Seattle situation is "illustrative of the competing messages behind federal desegregation policy and school choice," wrote Doreen Torgerson ofthe Education Department. "It is unfortunate that federal financial incentives tied to old paradigm desegregation strategies (even those that include magnet schools) are working against Seattle's propensity for greater school choice. What do we do about this?"11

What the Bush Administration could do was to seize an opportunity which its three immediate predecessors had not received. It could argue against mandatory school desegregation before the Supreme Court. The question before the Court in Oklahoma City v. Dowell in October 1990 was whether the city's schools, which five years earlier had abandoned mandatory busing from kindergarten to the fourth grade, should have to reinstate it. Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, siding with the defendant, contended that since a circuit court had declared Oklahoma City a "unitary" school district in 1977, the judiciary should relinquish its jurisdiction over the city's schools. But Julius Chambers of the NAACP, representing the plaintiffs, argued that Oklahoma City remained a "segregated community that the state helped create before Brown v. Board of Education. "12