Giving Compass' Take:

• Matt Barnum unpacks research around busing for school desegregation that shows that bussing improved outcomes for students but was a political failure. 

• How can funders use this information to guide efforts to improve education and equity? 

• Learn how some local governments reinforce racial segregation in America. 

Harris’ criticism of fellow Democratic presidential candidate Biden for his vigorous opposition to court-ordered desegregation in the 1970s has also sparked fresh debate about whether those efforts were successful.

What do we know? In the most basic sense, they did succeed. School segregation dropped substantially as courts and the federal government put pressure on local districts to integrate. But those efforts also sparked bitter, sometimes racist, resistance that shaped political discourse for decades.

“Busing as a political term … was a failure, because the narrative that came out of it from the media and politicians was almost only negative,” said Matt Delmont, a Dartmouth historian who wrote a book titled “Why Busing Failed.” “It only emphasized the inconvenience to white families and white students.”

A political failure does not necessarily mean an educational failure, though, as Delmont and others have pointed out. Indeed, research has consistently shown that integrated schools offered, and still offer, tangible benefits to students of color.

Since public schools in many places today remain intensely segregated by race and socioeconomic status, this issue is not just a historical one.

“School integration didn’t fail,” Berkeley economist Rucker Johnson, who has conducted some of the most far-reaching research on school integration, recently argued. “The only failure is that we stopped pursuing it and allowed the reign of segregation to return.”

At the same time, there is evidence that desegregation efforts have had some unintended consequences, like the loss of black teachers.

Here’s what research tells us about how these desegregation policies worked.

  1. Research shows that school desegregation — often including “busing” — helped black students in the long run.
  2. More recent research continues to find benefits of integrated schools, though they tend to be somewhat smaller.
  3. There’s little evidence that integration hurts white students — and it may also reduce racial bias.
  4. School desegregation has had some negative side effects.

Read the full article about bussing by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat.