SPECIAL REPORT
Americans Favor Diverse Schools But Still Oppose ‘Busing’
Written By Amanda Pampuro T
he Democratic Party presidential debates have reignited national discussions on the merits of forced integration of schools based on race and the use of school buses to accomplish it,
which the U.S. Supreme Court ended in 2002. It isn’t the description of a yellow school bus that raises voices, it’s the term busing—a politically charged verb that never fails to liven up the conversation. The results of a September 2019 Gallup Poll provide
some insight into the complexities of Americans who on one hand say they support desegregating schools. On the other hand, they oppose redesigning the education system or once again requiring school buses to achieve it. Gallup polled 3,038 adults by phone at the end of July, which built on research that Gallup has been gathering for decades. It found that more than half of Americans remain
critical of using busing to make schools more racially diverse, which the Supreme Court first required in 1971 with Swann v. Charlotte Mecklenburg Board of Educa- tion. That was 15 years after the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitu- tional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling on May 17, 1954. On the flip side, nearly eight in 10 Americans said they
28 School Transportation News • NOVEMBER 2019
support creating regional magnet schools. That opinion included three-quarters of Republican voters, a group which largely opposes other options, like redrawing district boundaries and building low-income housing in high-income suburbs. Researchers described the act of “busing” as “requiring school districts to bus a certain percentage of students to a neighboring school district to make schools more racially diverse.” Therein may lie the problem. Americans want diverse schools, but they don’t want to be required to go to them. “If you ask people whether they’re in favor of school
integration, overwhelmingly people say yes. If you ask people how they feel typically about school transpor- tation, again they’re pretty supportive,” said Dr. Erica Frankenberg, a professor of education at Penn State Uni- versity. “It’s only when we talk about busing for school integration that suddenly there’s much less support.” Dr. Frankenberg has studied school diversity for
more than a decade, and in her youth she attended the integrated magnet school Phillips Preparatory in Mo- bile County, Alabama. Her most recent work, published in the journal of the American Education Research Association in September, focused on school district secessions that began in the south a decade ago but
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