Between 1974 and 1988, court authorities sanctioned and controlled the desegregation of public schools across Boston, Massachusetts. In this case, busing refers to the practice of distributing or assigning and moving students to specific schools as a way of redressing previous segregation based on racial differences. The practice involved the sending of white and black students into each other’s schools within Boston as a way of desegregating the public school system (Delmont, 2016). Nonetheless, in the long term, the practice of busing hurt Boston as a community because of the violent racial strife, white flight, and damage to the quality of education in the public school system that it influenced.
While the objective of the court authorities in Boston to desegregate schools was a noble idea, the model of implementation through busing was unsuitable because it involved the use of force. The appropriate model would have been to involve the community in finding a suitable, widely accepted solution in the effort to redress the historical wrong of segregation. Busing was only a mathematical solution to the problem of segregation in the public school system that ignored the potential effect of forced assignment of students to schools on both the quality of education and life in the broader Boston community. The busing policy was inappropriate and counterproductive in the effort to desegregate schools since it ignored the fundamental rights of children and parents to choose schools, thereby influencing chaos in the lives of Boston’s residents. The policy influenced the traumatic experiences of children and families by subjecting them to violence and racial hostility (Doran, 2015). At the same time, the policy contributed to deterioration in the quality of education and life, generally, as children did not have safe and effective school environments to learn and Whites migrated on a large scale to the suburbs. In the long term, the policy victimized students by disrupting their promising futures. As Gellerman (2014) notes, it is still possible to meet people who the busing policy in Boston denied an education that they needed and a future that they deserved.
References
Delmont, M. (2016). Rethinking Busing in Boston. Smithsonian Museum article. Retrieved from: http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/rethinking-busing-boston
Doran, M. (2015). Narratives of the Past in Contemporary Urban Politics: The Case of the Boston Desegregation Crisis. Northeastern University dissertation. Retrieved from: https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:rx915x909/fulltext.pdf
Gellerman, B. (2014, September 2014). “Busing left Deep Scars on Boston, its Students”. WBUR article. Retrieved from: http://www.wbur.org/news/2014/09/05/boston-busing-effects