It's time to end busing in Boston

The city's demographics have changed since busing began, says Ted Landsmark, who was the target of this angry demonstrator brandishing an American flag during the school busing riots on April 5, 1976. (©Stanley Forman)

WE MUST end school busing as we have known it.

Parents want high-quality schools in their neighborhoods. The mayor's School Assignment Task Force that I co-chaired several years ago held dozens of meetings where parents in every neighborhood said they would prefer to send their children to quality schools near their homes. Some lamented the lack of appropriate facilities in their communities, understanding that it would take time to reestablish a comprehensive network of facilities and programs. All indicated that sending their children across the city diminished their ability to engage with teachers and learning; they preferred more involvement with their children's education.

We can no longer afford to spend $72 million a year to bus children across Boston to schools that are not demonstrably better than schools near their homes. About $32 million will still be required to transport children with special needs. The other $40 million is a vestige of the 1970s court mandate that Boston redress decades of racial discrimination in its schools.

Busing students from one neighborhood to another does nothing to change the racial, cultural, and caste demographics of classrooms, while devouring financial resources that could be better spent on teaching and learning. That $40 million would better prepare students for success in college and would support arts, music, technology, and physical education instruction.

The city's demographics have changed. In the 1970s, Boston was largely a "bicultural" city with a "white" majority and a significantly smaller "black" minority. Federal court cases indicated that financial and facility allocations clearly favored the white majority.

The current student population is "majority minority." Boston today is a multicultural city as multifaceted Asian, African, Latino, and other immigrant communities contribute to the city's rich diversity.

Two-way adversarial dialogue has been replaced by nuanced conversations about how to improve learning for more diverse families than lived in Boston three decades ago. Busing does not address the complexities of strengthening urban education for all our varied residents.

Little positive learning occurs on a bus, and reducing busing can increase the time students can learn in classrooms. Many buses run on routes and schedules that have not been modified in two decades, sending half-empty buses to schools locked into inflexible starting times. As we transition to less bus dependency, the application of Fed-X or UPS delivery strategies could reduce costs and significantly improve scheduling efficiency.

Choices already exist in Boston's schools. About a quarter of Boston's parents still opt out of traditional public schools by sending their children to charter, pilot, parochial, or METCO schools. Many parents voluntarily transport their children to these alternatives. Bus-dependency to achieve school choice is now perceived as less desirable than in the past.

Emotion has drained out of the busing argument. Eighty percent of Boston's residents did not live here during the 1970s. Boston's new mélange of residents carries little direct memory of the emotionally charged arguments that drove politics then, and like most 21st-century Americans, Boston's residents look forward, rather than back to that time of civic strife and violence.

Busing undercuts efforts to make Boston more energy-sustainable. Hundreds of diesel buses running twice a day through neighborhoods dramatically increase our carbon footprint. Based on what we learned during the violence reduction successes of the early 1990s, public transportation on expanded routes can also provide safe and secure student transport.

Fewer than 20 percent of Boston's ninth-graders today will graduate from college. As president of the largest New England college educating the next generation of architects, interior designers, landscape architects, and urban planners, I support partnerships with Boston's schools to graduate diverse students.

Our colleges are thwarted by the lack of preparedness in Boston's graduates. Colleges need to do more to help public schools, and public schools need more resources to prepare graduates for success. The $40 million a year we now spend on busing, phased in over time as high-quality schools are returned to every neighborhood, would go a long way toward achieving this goal.

It is time for the Boston Public Schools to end busing as we have known it.

Ted Landsmark is president of the Boston Architectural College.