Desegregating schools without busing

The failures of busing were widely recognized even on the left not too long ago. In 2014 Slate ran a multi-part series about how liberals’ “embrace of busing hurt the cause of integration.” (“Many black Americans did believe in the school bus and the access it provided, and busing might have been a viable tool for those families had it been smartly and surgically applied. It wasn’t. It was presented in a sweeping fashion that denied many blacks the agency they sought.”) The next year, responding to an earlier iteration of the Great Biden Busing Debate, Politico ran a piece from a former Johnson White House official called “School Busing Didn’t Work. And to Say So Isn’t Racist.” (“No black parents took a bus or drove from Southwest [D.C.] to attend evening PTA meetings [in the city’s Northwest] or to otherwise participate in school-related activity. The quality of classroom instruction fell off markedly. Fourth- and fifth-grade neighborhood students, for instance, were repeating material learned in earlier grades because teachers found their bused classmates had not yet received it.”)