WHO EVER LIKED riding the bus to school? In endless teen flicks and in our own psyches, the yellow school bus holds a unique place in the story of how American kids come of age - the flying objects and hard cruelties; the bully, the bus driver, and the outcast you hoped wouldn't sit next to you.
Starting in the late 1960s, the school bus also became a powerful social symbol. With the advent of school desegregation, voluntary and court-ordered busing programs began to ferry children not just down the road, but from one social world to another, even across imaginary battle lines. In Boston, the faces of grade-schoolers peering out from moving window panes are permanently etched into our collective memory.
What is it really like today for children who travel these distances in the name of social equality? For all the worry about busing, surprisingly little is known about the students' own experience, not just on the bus but throughout the school day. In his new book, "The Bus Kids: Children's Experiences with Voluntary Desegregation," Stanford scholar Ira Lit follows a group of 5-year-old kindergartners as they first enter into a voluntary desegregation program in California. The child's lens he trains on the experience of school and busing - of unattended birthday parties and unspoken recess rules that break harshly along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines - brings into sharp view the problems that busing can cause for kids, and the unmet responsibilities of adults who create the school life in which these children are asked to survive, and thrive.
Lit, director of Stanford's elementary teacher education program, still puzzles over the question that has become more and more glaring with each day of hindsight on the history of school desegregation: If busing isn't the answer, what is? Lit isn't sure, but says the dangers of abandoning busing without investing in better models are as serious as they were a generation ago. Ideas interviewed Lit by phone from his home in California.
IDEAS: Your book focuses tightly on how things look and feel for these young kids being bused. Is that something new in the conversation about busing?
LIT: I think that there's not really enough attention paid to the lived experiences of children in schools, particularly the youngest in the schools, whether that's the lowest grades in elementary or even preschool. . . . They're spending an awful lot of time in these educational settings that are mandatory for them. So I think it's worthwhile thinking about, well, how does that shape their lives?
IDEAS: You taught kids this age for a while before putting on your researcher's hat. Did anything about the bus kids' experience surprise you?
LIT: I guess the most intriguing thing to me was just the level of complexity that the kids were dealing with on a daily basis . . . because it encompasses such a wide range of things. It's not just transferring over distances and over a long period of time. It's not just adapting to a new culture, and possibly a new language. It's that at each juncture of the school day, there was a different set of demands placed on them. So the expectations for them, for example, on the school bus were very different than what the expectations were for them immediately after they got off the school bus. And nobody was teaching them how to be successful on the school bus, or even how to be successful after they got off the school bus. They had to figure that out for themselves.
IDEAS: And from what you could see, how did that affect the kids' performance?
LIT: Schools can be very subtle places. They have lots of unwritten rules or hidden curricula, however you want to describe it. And some kids have better access as to what that's about. Some have a better instinct for what that's about, and others don't. I think for the most part, those kids were left without that road map or those guideposts, and they had to sink or swim. And there were some swimmers, but there were a lot of sinkers in this experience.
IDEAS: But presumably, even if they get more guidance from teachers, there are always going to be kids who don't get invited to parties, kids experiencing rejection at a young age. Isn't access to better schools what ultimately matters?
LIT: Well, I think what tends to happen is, folks like you and I who've managed to succeed in the system, regardless of what circumstances we started in, tend to overgeneralize from that and say that therefore everyone can succeed under these complicated circumstances. What I want to do is to bring back to the attention of the educators and policy makers who are organizing these settings to think about, are we organizing them in such a way that we can get the most success for the most students, and the broadest range of students? And I think there are things we can do that can make the system better. I'm certainly not suggesting that, you know, busing makes life difficult for kids so therefore we shouldn't do busing. . . . I think schools make life difficult for a wide array of kids for a wide range of reasons.
IDEAS: Some of the most passionate advocates to end busing in Boston are parents, including parents from the most underserved areas. Should there be a return to neighborhood schools?
LIT: What I'll say is, busing has been an imperfect means to an important end, in Boston and other places across the country. I do firmly believe that separate schools for children from different backgrounds are inherently and inevitably unequal, and in our society we have kind of moved backwards in the degree to which we offer integrated schools for our kids. And I don't think that's to the good. . . . My view is that our public schools are designed and intended to foster children's successful participation as citizens in a pluralistic and global society. The degree to which we're organizing school experiences for them that segregate them is problematic for that long-term goal. Now, whether busing is the right solution to that problem, I'm not sure. Is there a better solution that's five years in the making? I doubt it.
IDEAS: But wouldn't neighborhood schools foster more parental involvement? Not to mention kids getting to school well-rested and well-fed, since they wouldn't be commuting at the crack of dawn.
LIT: I do have a deep understanding of the commitment of parents to want to have the most successful flourishing schools in their own neighborhoods, where they can do all the things you describe. . . . My worry in any place would be that the most likely alternative to eliminating busing, or some other kind of desegregation program, is just to return back to whatever we used to do prior.
IDEAS: What did you make of the obsession over whether President Obama's girls would attend public or private school?
LIT: Not much. If anything, it's just another reminder that our systems are imperfect. But I don't think we needed a reminder of that.
Francie Latour, a former Globe reporter, is an associate editor at Wellesley magazine.
