U.S. public schools provide substantially different educational opportunities to students--even within school districts, where attendance zone boundaries (AZBs) shape most children's access to schools. The (re)drawing of AZBs is therefore a highly consequential policy decision. In this paper, I study how AZB changes in the Washington, D.C.…

This autoethnography shares our personal experiences and counter-narratives in the St. Louis busing program. Through our mission we expound on experiences and real-life situations as seen through our lens as a student and a mother in the St. Louis busing program. Critical race theory (CRT) was used as an essential framework allowing us to focus on…

Most U.S. school districts draw "attendance boundaries" to define catchment areas that assign students to schools near their homes, often recapitulating neighborhood demographic segregation in schools. Focusing on elementary schools, we ask: How much might we reduce school segregation by redrawing attendance boundaries? Combining parent…

Though many families of color move to U.S. suburbs for better educational opportunity, they often find that their children's access to capital-building resources is dependent on transportation which may be unavailable, insufficient, or provided in a marginalizing and stigmatizing manner. This study shares the perspectives of eight suburban…

The Chinese of Chinatown, San Francisco largely opposed the city-wide racial integration plan that would bus their children across the city beginning in 1971. Claiming that it was a violation of their language rights, a need for cultural preservation and continued autonomy from the San Francisco that had long excluded them, Chinatown instituted…

The history of forced dispersal of immigrant children in England, which affected mostly non-Anglophone Asian pupils in areas such as Southall (West London) and Bradford (West Yorkshire) in the 1960s and 1970s has only very recently elicited the interest of historians. Mobilising archival material as well as interviews with formerly bussed pupils,…

New Brunswick High School, which had been racially integrated for decades, became majority-minority (and soon, all minority) in the 1970s, after years of legal wrangling led hundreds of its students to depart for a new, nearly all-white high school in the adjacent suburb of North Brunswick. White suburbanites invoked "local control" to…

Although Americans tend to deal emotionally with the issue of school desegregation, it is largely an issue comprised of certain facts. Historically, government has played an active role in creating segregation, but segregation has a capacity to damage Black students. Busing is a safe, cheap, and necessary solution to this problem. (KH)

Reviews cases currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Issues identified that are of importance to American educators include censorship, discrimination, busing, unions, and educational malpractice. (GC)

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In discussing the Defunis v. Odegaard case and the busing issue in reference to reverse race discrimination, the author concludes that measures that favor racial minorities pose a difficult moral question that should be left to the states. (Author/PG)

In these remarks, William Bradford Reynolds, Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice, discusses American civil rights in the light of past and present Federal policy. A review of constitutional provisions, legislation, and court litigation reveals how policy has variously provided for equality and perpetuated…

The Assistant Attorney General asserts that it is wrong and naive to equate discrimination with economic disparity and to say that because there is an economic disparity between Whites and Blacks, it is due to discrimination against the latter group. (Author/GC)

Surveyed middle to upper middle class African Americans at three times following a 2000 court decision to desegregate schools in Louisiana's Lafayette Parish. Results indicated that although reactions were initially largely positive, these reactions turned negative after the reality of implementation (e.g., closing of black schools, busing of…

Reprints Marion Wright Edelman's 1975 article in which she argues that resistance to school desegregation means denying African-American children equal protection. Forty years after Brown v Board of Education, suggests that the current debate on educational quality be broadened to include issues of social inequality. (SK)