SCHOOLS: The Busing Dilemma

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we are in a mess, because two-thirds of the world is nonwhite, and we would not have enough whites to go around. If the schools are effective and children learn, that is the easiest way to achieve the ultimate goal of integration." Retorts Kenneth Clark: "There is no such thing as improvement in the schools while they are still segregated. As long as we have segregated schools, I see no alternative to busing. Integration is a painful job. It is social therapy, and like personal therapy it is not easy." Kenneth Tollett, director of Washington's Institute for the Study of Education Policy, calls for busing to undergo "almost a cost-benefit analysis" to determine its worth. He notes further: "The difference is not blacks v. whites but underclass v. middle class."

William Raspberry, a Washington Post columnist, writes: "A lot of us are wondering whether the busing game is worth the prize. Some of us aren't even sure just what the prize is supposed to be. Most whites have long since accepted the notion that segregation is wrong. But on the other hand, precious few whites, North or South, feel any guilt in resisting the disruption of their children's education by busing them to distant schools because those schools are 'too black.' Nor is there much more enthusiasm among black parents for large-scale busing for the primary purpose of racial integration."

Even Linda Brown Smith, 32, whose father brought the suit against Topeka, Kans., schools that resulted in the Supreme Court's historic 1954 decision, has reservations about busing but sees no alternative to it. Says she: "To get racial balance in the school system I would have my children bused [her son and daughter walk to integrated schools]. This is what my father was fighting for more than 20 years ago."

The bitter and seemingly endless debate over busing had led many politicians and educators to predict that it will be abandoned as a tool for desegregating schools. Declares a university president in Massachusetts: "Busing is a cause whose time has passed." There is a danger that opposition to busing will be used as a pretext to fight the principle of desegregation itself. The dilemma for the nation is that busing cannot be abandoned in many cities without pushing back desegregation, because of the large distances separating black and white neighborhoods. That in turn could well lead to what educators term "urban apartheid."

To achieve integration through evolution (better incomes for blacks, better housing, in time leading to peaceful mixed neighborhoods) would obviously be excruciatingly slow. Thus busing will remain inevitable and perhaps necessary in some situations. But it is clearly not a good solution. To replace it eventually, it is necessary to 1) make far greater use of other methods of school integration, admittedly slower and less dramatic, but perhaps more efficient in the long run; 2) upgrade the education of black youngsters in the inner city to speed the otherwise slow process of bringing them into the middle class; 3) fight for racial harmony beyond the schools and thus ease the tensions that have made school desegregation a volatile issue.

One limited approach would be to build new schools on the borders between black and white neighborhoods to make integration possible without