Joe Biden is getting flak for his stance on busing. But segregated schools aren’t the root cause of educational inequity, and integration alone isn’t enough to address it.
At the Democratic Presidential debate last week, Kamala Harris took on Joe Biden for his opposition to court-ordered busing. At the debate, Biden defended his position with what sounded like a reference to states’ rights, a phrase that has historically served as a cover for racism. In the past, though, he’s offered a different rationale—one that sounds strikingly similar to arguments advanced recently by some African-American commentators.
“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school,” Biden told a Delaware weekly in 1975. “That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with. What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”
Some African-American education activists, writing recently on the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, appear to agree. One disputed the idea “that the brilliance of black children can be ignited only by the torch of white peers.” Another argued that Brown “falsely declared that black kids would be permanently broken if they remained in all-black spaces.” And a third said it’s “absurd” to view integration as “the only solution” to educational inequity. The research that Brown relied on, he added, “leads you to a conclusion that something that is all-black is, by definition, inferior.”
None of this, of course, is to say that segregation is desirable. It’s far better to have schools that are not only racially but also socioeconomically integrated. And data suggests that minority and low-income students do benefit academically from integration, especially if they attend schools serving largely affluent populations.
But in many places, including most urban areas, significant majorities of students are black—or Hispanic—and low-income. Even if white and wealthier students were distributed equally, urban schools would still be overwhelmingly non-white and poor. And schools with high concentrations of poverty generally don’t work well for any of their students.
In some places, busing across district lines could address that problem. But, given the intense resistance sparked by busing in the past, it’s doubtful that even Kamala Harris would run on a platform of bringing it back. And while some of that resistance grew out of racism, some—as Biden has argued—was based more on white parents’ fears that their children would be going to inferior schools and getting an inferior education.
These days, there are undoubtedly many parents who genuinely like the idea of diversity but fear their kids will be held back by classmates who aren’t as academically advanced, especially at higher grade levels. While there’s some evidence that white students’ test scores don’t suffer if they attend a school that’s overwhelmingly black, parents may be understandably wary of taking chances with their children’s education.
One vital question is why schools that are whiter and more affluent appear to be superior—and why at least some poor and minority students, including Kamala Harris and writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, have apparently benefited from attending them. Surely it’s not magical fairy dust they picked up from wealthy white classmates. The usual arguments are that schools serving affluent populations are better funded and attract better teachers. But some high-poverty schools that are well funded nevertheless have low test scores. And one study found little difference in the effectiveness of teachers in high- and low-poverty schools.
A third explanation, though, gets to the heart of a fundamental problem that has been largely overlooked. As one advocate of integration put it, “children of professionals have bigger vocabularies on average than low-income students, and that will rub off.” So maybe that’s the fairy dust?
Having a big vocabulary is indeed a huge asset, not only for taking tests but also for succeeding in high school, college, and in life. And the best way to expand vocabulary is to expand knowledge. But if it’s so important, why leave it to chance encounters with “children of professionals?” Why not build knowledge and vocabulary deliberately and systematically, through the school curriculum?
No doubt many people assume schools are already doing that. Unfortunately, for the most part that’s not the case—at least in elementary school. Instead, teachers spend hours focusing on illusory “reading comprehension skills”—like “finding the main idea” and “making inferences”—rather than building kids' knowledge and vocabulary through social studies and science. The result is that children who start out with more knowledge and vocabulary, because they’ve picked it up at home, continue to acquire more and more of it through their reading. Meanwhile, those who start out with less fall farther and farther behind. With every passing year, the gap gets harder to narrow.
While elementary schools have been trying to teach comprehension skills at least since the 1950s, the approach really took off in the late 1980s and 1990s—along with a move away from systematic instruction in phonics, which has been shown to be vital for many children and especially those who are disadvantaged. Perhaps not coincidentally, that’s also when progress in closing the black-white gap in reading test scores came to a grinding halt. That gap had decreased by half between 1971 and 1988. But a large drop in black scores between 1988 and 1996 caused the gap to reopen. Some have linked that pattern to integration and re-segregation, but it could be the result of a pedagogical approach that ends up penalizing disadvantaged kids.
Since 2001, the focus on comprehension skills has intensified because of high-stakes reading tests, which purport to test those skills. (In fact, they’re basically tests of knowledge.) Subjects other than reading and math have largely disappeared from the curriculum, especially in high-poverty schools where test scores are low.
If elementary schools adopt a knowledge-focused curriculum, as some are now beginning to do, they can raise academic achievement for minority and disadvantaged students even without integration. But doing that could also promote integration. If the school curriculum covers meaty topics like the human digestive system and Greek mythology—instead of just “skills” like “identifying author’s purpose” or “comparing and contrasting”—better educated parents might well be happy to enroll their children, regardless of demographics. And if all students are exposed to the same kind of content-rich curriculum beginning in the early grades, the cavernous gaps in knowledge that become so apparent in high school will shrink. Among other benefits, better educated parents won’t need to worry as much about their children being held back by less advantaged classmates.
Instead of arguing about busing—a policy that no politician is seriously proposing—candidates could be focusing attention on the one remedy for inequality and segregation that we have yet to try: using schools to give all children access to the kind of knowledge that privileged parents provide at home.