SCHOOLS: The Busing Dilemma

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feel a great deal of academic pressure. They are trying to fulfill goals set by their parents, while black kids are concerned about meeting goals set for themselves." That statement obviously does not apply to middle-class black students, who are as highly motivated as their white counterparts. But poor black students often have low self-esteem and lack pressure from their parents to do well in school. In integrated schools, there can also be a debilitating double standard for dealing with students. Complains Omar Blair, a black member of the Denver board of education: "Teachers don't discipline black students because they say that they are afraid of the consequences. Black students roam the halls and are ignored. Teachers allow black kids to talk back to them and won't do anything about it. In contrast, white kids would be sent to the principal."

Even worse, white teachers frequently push black students through the system without caring much whether they have learned anything. Says St. Louis University Instructor Ernest Calloway: "The expectation of the teacher is very low. One of the problems is raising the expectation so the child will be told, 'You can learn. You will learn.' " Good teaching indeed can motivate black students. For example, in Oakland, some 1,400 black underachievers have received remedial instruction since 1968 in math, English and science; 1,120 have gone on to college.

One approach to motivating black students would be to give new emphasis to programs that lead to technical careers, either directly from high school or after college. Kenneth Tollett notes that "Power in this society is increasingly in the hands of the technocrats. Blacks will be frozen in a subclass if they do not increase their numbers among the technocrats."

The alternative to what Tollett and others are worrying about is the familiar vicious cycle, which may begin with segregation in housing but leads inevitably to segregation in schools and ultimately to segregation on the job and a permanent black underclass. Most experts still agree that better schooling for blacks offers the soundest hope of breaking that pattern. There are no quick or painless ways to achieve equal educational opportunity, but that is no reason to abandon it as a goal.

Court-ordered busing obviously will remain part of the effort to achieve that goal for quite a while. But given the feeling of most Americans, and its own built-in shortcomings, busing is plainly neither a long-range solution nor the best instrument to bring one about.