The Other Boston Busing Story

What's Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line

Susan E. Eaton

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781684580309
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

METCO, America's longest-running voluntary school desegregation program, buses black children from Boston's city neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban schools. In contrast to the infamous violence and rage that greeted forced school busing within the city in the 1970s, the work of METCO has quietly and calmly promoted school integration. But how has this program affected the lives of its graduates? Would they choose to participate if they had it to do over again? Would they place their own children on the bus to suburbia? In The Other Boston Busing Story, sixty-five METCO graduates who are now adults answer those questions and more, vividly recalling their own stories and assessing the benefits and hardships of crossing racial and class lines on their way to school. As courts and policymakers today are forcing the abandonment of desegregation, this book offers an accessible and moving account of a rare program that, despite serious challenges, provides a practical remedy for the persistent inequalities in American education. This new edition puts the original findings in a contemporary context.

1

The Other Boston Busing Story

No horde of newspaper photographers showed up in the suburban town north of Boston to record Barbara Michaels’s small moment in history one summer day. (“Barbara Michaels,” like all the identifiers of past METCO participants, is a pseudonym.)

In June 1975, Barbara was the town’s first student to graduate through a voluntary program called METCO, which bused Black students from Boston to public schools in white suburban communities. Barbara was asked to give a speech, and she had good things to say. Looking back that day on her years as one of a handful of Black METCO students in her school, Barbara was glad she had left her neighborhood school in Boston and come to this small, suburban town. She had grown accustomed to the hour-long highway commutes from and to her city neighborhood. Barbara had a nice suburban “host” family, who had helped her become more familiar with this town.

Barbara still chuckles when remembering the day that she and her mother visited the town before school started. They had never even heard of the place until after Barbara won a coveted METCO spot at the start of her eighth-grade year.

“I remember driving out there with my mother one day in the summer before school,” Barbara recalls. “Just to see it, to check the town out, and at first looking at all the big houses and thinking, ‘What’s with all these big houses?’ But it was so quiet. You see all these big houses [and] you think, ‘Well, people must be living there, right?’ But where were all the kids? You know, in the city, it’s more active, kids are out, playing together. It feels more alive. So, that was strange to me. Just that small thing. It all seemed so strange.”

Barbara remembers, though, that she eventually made good friends. And she overcame the academic struggles of junior high through hard work. By the time she was in high school Barbara earned good grades, and by her senior year she was looking forward to attending college the next fall. Barbara felt fortunate.

Barbara recalls deep disappointments, too. She was a track star whose record runs had helped get her suburban track team to the state finals. But Barbara suspected she had failed to win votes for team captain because of her race. She had tried out for cheerleading, but the white parents doing the judging had said Barbara didn’t “jump high enough” to make the squad. Even the white teachers looking on during tryouts had sided with Barbara when she complained to the vice-principal of “blatant racism.” Barbara had said, “C’mon, if I’d have jumped any higher I’d have been in the rafters,” and the teachers had nodded in agreement. Then there were the classroom discussions about slavery and Jim Crow. All the white kids had turned and stared at Barbara, seeming to search her face for reactions, for answers. That had made her angry. “Turn around,” Barbara remembers having told her white classmates. “Turn around. I’m trying to learn this, too. I wasn’t there. I’m just trying to learn, here.”

Today, Barbara thinks she never did learn enough Black history. And her response was to “take every Black history course I could in college. Because I was lost. I was totally lost. I did not know my history.”

What Barbara did learn, though, was how to “survive intact” in a white-dominated society. She says, “It taught me how to work with all different types of people, how to find my way and just survive intact as a Black person” in a white power structure. “So, I was collecting information out there, collecting my information for the world. And you learn it. You have to learn it. And you do need it. This is something you find out later.”

Crossing the Lines for Three Decades

Decades after Barbara’s journey, thousands of students of color from Boston still travel to suburbia for their educations. Fifty-four-year-old METCO is one of the longest-running interdistrict voluntary school desegregation programs in the nation and one of several of its kind. Similar programs operate in metropolitan areas of Rochester, New York; Hartford, Connecticut; Saint Louis, Missouri; and East Palo Alto, California. A similar program in Minneapolis was officially ended in the mid-2000s. Past efforts also have existed in Indianapolis and Milwaukee.

The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) was founded in 1966 by Black parents and activists who originally saw the program as a partial and temporary remedy for the poor conditions in Boston’s then-segregated, predominantly Black schools. METCO grew from efforts of earlier activism that drew attention to the segregation and unequal facilities for Black children in the city of Boston. In 1963 and 1964, Black parents boycotted Boston Public Schools for their failure to desegregate.

In 1965, Operation Exodus began under the leadership of Black parents Ellen Swepson Jackson and Elizabeth Johnson with the goal of enabling the transportation of Black students to better-funded, higher-quality schools in other parts of the city. By 1965, Exodus had formed into METCO Inc.

Exodus and METCO’s founders acted on both the love for the community’s children and an understanding about structural inequalities in the larger society. It is these types of understandings that gave rise to the early school desegregation movement. Expressed most eloquently in legal cases that laid the groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education, these cases posit that imposed segregation by race physically and psychologically excludes Black people from myriad forms of opportunity for social mobility that, because of racial discrimination in many sectors of our society, are more abundant in white settings. In plain terms, white people, because of a long history of advantage in the United States, perpetuate their privilege through friends, acquaintances, and their association with prestigious institutions. African Americans, because of a history of racism and discrimination, typically lack access to these contexts where opportunity and mobility get perpetuated. The Boston activists found some willing partners in a handful of suburban communities, including Lincoln, Brookline, and Newton. Together, aided by state funds and grant funding from the Carnegie Foundation, they created desegregation peacefully. This happened a full eight years before Boston’s now infamous struggle with a mandatory desegregation instituted as remedy to intentional racial segregation practiced by city officials. METCO enjoyed a relatively warm political welcome in part because it responded to a new state law passed at the height of the civil rights movement. By enabling the busing of Black children from urban schools to predominantly suburban ones, METCO helped meet goals of the state’s 1965 Racial Imbalance Law. Designed to diminish racial segregation, the law provided money to local school districts that drew up desegregation plans whenever more than 50 percent of students in a school were racial minorities. By providing state transportation dollars, this law is often referred to as METCO’s “enabling legislation.”

According to surveys, though, Black parents were motivated not by a desire for racial integration per se, but by hopes for “better education” for their children (Batson and Hayden 1987; Orfield 1997). It is important to draw a distinction here between the goal of “equal educational opportunity” and that of “diversity.” While the two are surely compatible, from the perspective of parents they are different. Giving students equal educational opportunity implies that resources are being distributed to them that previously had not been made available. One might think of it as evening up the score or repairing harms. The goal of diversity speaks to the need for all children — including the most privileged white students — to interact in learning environments with colleagues from varied racial, ethnic, economic, even geographic backgrounds. Diversity, then, is a pedagogical interest, in which varied perspectives, and ways of thinking, informed by family backgrounds and culture, are viewed as necessary elements of a full education. The two concepts — equal educational opportunity and diversity — are typically treated separately by courts but often are muddled in discourse about educational policy. From its founding, METCO has encompassed both goals.

At the time of METCO’s founding in the mid-1960s, the program’s initiators expected its life span would be short — about three years, until Boston “straightened out” (Batson and Hayden 1987). In METCO’s inaugural 1966 year, 220 Black children, from the first through the eleventh grades, traveled to seven suburban communities. More than five decades later, in 2020, about thirty-eight hundred Boston students of color travel to more than thirty participating METCO communities. While the program was initially designed for African American students, the changing demographics of the city have brought a growing share of Latino and Asian students as METCO participants. In 2018, about 70 percent of METCO students were African American, and about 20 percent were Latino, with the remaining students either Asian or multiracial, with a minuscule share identifying as white (METCO 2019).

An estimated thirty thousand people have graduated from METCO over the course of fifty-three years. Marilyn Mosby, the prosecutor in Baltimore who brought charges against the police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, is an alum. So is Audie Cornish, the cohost of All Things Considered on National Public Radio.

Available data demonstrate that METCO students are performing well in what are highly competitive academic environments, and doing so in spite of the additional stresses of the program’s long bus rides and early morning risings. It is important to stress that these trends are likely the result of many factors and cannot be attributed solely to the METCO program. In order to remove the other potential influences on achievement, it would be necessary to compare METCO with a control group made up of students who are similar to METCO students but who did not participate in the program.

METCO students consistently graduate high school at far higher rates than the state average and at higher rates than students in Boston and Springfield. In 2009, 93 percent of METCO students graduated high school on time, compared with 81.5 percent of students statewide and 61 percent in Boston. State standardized test scores from third, sixth, and tenth grades show that on average, from 2006 to 2010, METCO students, who are overwhelmingly African American and Latino, tended to dramatically outperform their African American and Latino counterparts in Boston. With rare exceptions in math in some years, METCO students, on average, also outperformed Boston students overall on state standardized test scores (Eaton and Chirichigno 2011).

While some suburban communities pick up a small share of the costs, METCO is paid for primarily by the state and supplemented with grant dollars. In 2008, METCO’s budget was $20.2 million. Three years later, in 2011, lawmakers slashed METCO’s budget to $16.5 million. In more recent years, METCO has received small funding increases from the state, bringing its annual overall budget to about $24 million.

The program has two levels of administration. Administrators in the central office, located in the predominantly Black Roxbury section of Boston, make policy decisions, oversee placements and transportation, coordinate special programs such as college tours, work directly with state officials, and counsel and advise parents and students considering the program. Out in the suburbs, METCO directors, assistant directors, counselors, and tutors work with METCO students, their parents, and the personnel in the school district. They often act as advocates and coordinators for students and maintain files to keep track of students’ progress. Most often, directors have offices at METCO schools. There are no admission standards for the program, and students are chosen via lottery.

The program enjoys an enduring popularity among families of color. METCO does not accommodate all the families that apply. In 2019, there were nearly twelve thousand students on the program’s waiting list (METCO 2019). Getting into METCO has traditionally required parents to think far ahead. A quarter of METCO parents surveyed in 1996 had signed up for the program before their sons and daughters were a year old (Orfield 1997). Technically, METCO is open to all Boston schoolchildren, including white students. But in practice, it remains primarily a program for students of color. There are several reasons for this. The waiting list is long, with racial minority families likely ahead of white students who might have applied in recent years. The program’s administrative offices are in a predominantly African American neighborhood, and METCO has a decades-long reputation as an equal education program for Black students. It is thus responsive — through its tutoring programs, college counseling, student support groups, and diversity training workshops — to this particular population.

METCO: Segregation’s Small Counterforce

Though one can’t tell from watching their routine daily disembarkations from the school buses, the Black METCO students’ lasting presence in Boston’s suburban towns is anything but ordinary. The small degree of racial integration that METCO creates in its participating schools is an anomaly among the more standard, long-standing patterns of racial and economic segregation in metropolitan Boston.

For African Americans, the negative effects of racial and socioeconomic segregation in schools and neighborhoods on overall health, life expectancy, educational attainment, child, adolescent, and adult stress, and incarceration and even homicide rates are extremely well documented. This evidence comes from a variety of disciplines, including education, public health, criminal justice, social psychology, and economics (e.g., Acevedo-Garcia et al. 2016; Borman and Dowling 2010; Brief of 553 Social Scientists 2006; Jargowsky 2014; Feldmeyer 2010). Neighborhood economic segregation is linked to low levels of social and economic mobility over the long term (e.g., Sharkey and Graham 2013; Chetty, Hendren, and Katz 2016).

Because of the history of racial discrimination in the United States, race and poverty are still very strongly linked. This means that a school with a high share of African American and Latino students will likely also be a high-poverty school. High-poverty schools are associated with numerous inequalities in curriculum, a lack of stable teaching staff and highly qualified teachers, and lower relative graduation rates and lower educational attainment after high school (US Government and Accountability Office 2018; Kahlenberg 2003; Simon and Johnson 2015; Harris 2007).

By most measures, our public schools are typically segregated by race and class. Arguments about whether or not school segregation is increasing tend to hinge on what measure one employs. Putting that matter aside for a moment, what is clearer is that racial segregation remains extreme. The causes of contemporary segregation differ somewhat by region. Similar to other metro areas in the US, racial and ethnic segregation in schools and housing in Boston was engineered by policies at every level of government, by jurisprudence, and by institutional and private practices rooted in racial discrimination (Boston Foundation 2019; Rothstein 2018).

In 2016, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that from 2000 to 2013, the share of the nation’s schools that are “high-poverty” (75 percent or more of students in poverty) more than doubled, from about seven thousand to about fifteen thousand schools. The GAO also found that the share of public schools where more than 75 percent of students are Black or Latino grew from 9 to 16 percent (US Government Accounting Office 2016). These changes paralleled a growth in poverty overall and in the Latino population, which likely accounted for some of these increases. Regardless of the precise level of increase, though, the fact remains that rates of segregation are extremely high.

Researchers at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project have been tracking school segregation trends for more than two decades. According to their reports, about a third of Black and Latino students attend schools that are more than 90 percent Black or Latino and that have extremely high levels of poverty. A typical Black student attends a school where about two-thirds of students are Black or Latino and a little over a quarter of students are white. The typical Latino student attends a school that is nearly 70 percent Black or Latino and about 25 percent white. On average, Asian American students are the most integrated group. The typical Asian American student goes to a school where about 40 percent of the students are white, about 25 percent are also Asian American, about 11 percent are Black, and 22 percent are Latino. White students are our nation’s most isolated racial group and are far more likely than Black and Latino students to attend predominantly middle-class schools. The typical white student attends a school that is about 75 percent white, 12 percent Latino, and 8 percent Black. About a third of our nation’s white students attend schools that are more than 90 percent white (Orfield and Frankenberg 2014).

High levels of racial isolation among white students might not be surprising to people who live in places like Maine or Vermont, where there is relatively little racial diversity. However, segregation is common even in regions that are diverse or are becoming more diverse. Demographic change, due to a growing Latino population and the movement of African Americans from city centers, often results in more overall diversity in suburban and rural communities. And in pockets of the nation we see whites moving to predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. However, within these areas, residential segregation and school segregation remain the norm (Frey 2014). Thus, unless school officials and others deliberately create integrated schools and classrooms, through policies and affirmative practices, segregation will likely persist for a host of reasons, including established housing patterns, exclusionary zoning, and racial bias (Frey 2014; Rothstein 2018). The Boston metropolitan area is surely no exception to this pattern. In 2015, a study of fifty US metropolitan areas found Greater Boston consistently among the most segregated cities for Black residents (Mas...