In the decade since Swann, student transportation has proved a critical and necessary component of many school desegregation plans. This is particularly true where school districts default in their responsibilities and subject their black students to discrimination long after their right to equal educational opportunity has been declared. The legal basis for student transportation is plain: it is a permissible remedy for unconstitutional school segregation. Some would isolate busing from its moorings as a remedy for a constitutional violation. However, this overlooks that busing is designed to correct an illegality, and that it arises as an issue only in the wake of a court adjudication of a wrong committed. Courts order busing and other remedial devices only when it is necessary. Nor is busing a penalty: it is as the Swann opinion holds, "a normal and accepted tool of educational policy." Efficacy of Student Transportation The social science literature on school desegregation can be briefly summarized. Black students' achievement scores often improve when they attend desegregated schools. The achievement of black students is highest when desegregation begins at the lowest grades. No study has found that black or white pupils suffer academically from desegBlack students attending desegregated schools regation. are more likely to go to college or enter the labor market than those deprived of the opportunity for an integrated education. However, we do not need social science research to tell us what we all know intuitively. As the Supreme Court stated in Brown v. Board of Education, "[t]o separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Desegregation removes black children from that situation. They are removed from a condition that society considers inherently unequal and stigmatizing. They are thus better able to learn, not only academic subjects but the values of a democratic society. The experience in Charlotte has been precisely this, and it is the desegregation plan approved by the Supreme Court that has made it possible. In Charlotte, as well as other cities, educators have learned that desegregation has helped eliminate the fetters on the minds of black children, and freed them to achieve as much as they can. Recent studies show that school desegregation can improve race relations, not just in the school system but also throughout the community. Indeed, a recent study demonstrates that metropolitan desegregation plans, such as that in effect in Charlotte, which involve both inner city and suburban areas, contribute to significant increases in housing integration.* The Supreme Court in Swann had noted that intentionally racially segregated schools promote racially segregated neighborhoods. "Metropolitan school desegregation not only breaks into the schoolhousing segregation cycle, it sets up a very different dynamic. By opening up housing opportunities for minorities, by making the choice of an integrated neighborhood *Pierce, "Breaking Down Barriers: New Evidence on the one that confers positive benefits, it supports the development of stable integrated communities." Thus, desegregation plans, if fairly and effectively implemented, are selfliquidating. In Riverside, California, the city with the longest experience with busing, after 15 years, only 4 of the 21 elementary schools require busing to racially integrate.* CONCLUSION Busing is not the issue. The issue is whether unconstitutional school desegregation is to be effectively remedied. Most student busing has nothing to do with desegregation. Forty-one percent of America's school children go to school on buses; only 3% are transported for desegregation purposes. Mr. Chairman, if this nation stands behind the guarantee of Brown v. Board of Education, then we should get on with the job of enforcement. *Id. Senator THURMOND. I have a luncheon at 12 o'clock with University of South Carolina officials. Maybe Senator Hatch will be back in a few minutes to carry on. If not, we will let the staff continue the hearing and give all of you a chance to be heard. Mr. Taylor is next. I believe you are director of the Center for National Policy Review here in Washington. You have been staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights as well as a representative for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Is that correct? Mr. TAYLOR. I was an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Senator THURMOND. I believe you teach at Catholic University Law School and you are widely considered to be one of the foremost experts in the country on civil rights law. We will be glad to hear from you now. STATEMENT OF WILLIAM TAYLOR, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR NATIONAL POLICY REVIEW, CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My involvement in school desegregation cases spans a period of some 25 years. You have mentioned some of the areas in which I have been involved. Currently, I serve as counsel for the school board of Wilmington, Del., in a case that Senator Biden referred to this morning. I also serve as counsel for Indianapolis public schools in another metropolitan case. I also serve as counsel for black plaintiffs in the St. Louis case, which is also a metropolitan case. Our center has also done research on a number of the questions and issues discussed here this morning and posed by the chairman. We would be glad to submit material for the record because I think it does bear directly on some of the questions you are considering. I welcome the hearings this committee is having. The last hearings, as you may remember, Mr. Chairman, were those conducted by then Senator Mondale as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Education in 1970 to 1972. Those hearings, I think, were a model for what Congress needs to do in order to legislate. They heard not only from lawyers and from experts but from parents, members of school boards, administrators, and students in the communities around the country where desegregation has actually taken place. They also heard from experts who had done more serious and sustained work in some of the areas that are being discussed today and who hold views that are in contradiction to some of the views expressed today. I would like briefly to address two of the questions the committee has posed about the current status of school desegregation and also what has been learned about the educational and community effects of plans that are in operation. THE LEGAL BASIS OF COURT ORDERED DESEGREGATION First of all, with respect to what the courts have done, contrary to statements that have been made here this morning that the courts have engaged in forced busing for racial balance or sociological experimentation, school desegregation has been judicially re quired only when acts of intentional racial discrimination have been proven in the courts. There has been a consistent thread of decisions from Brown right up through the Columbus and Dayton cases that the Supreme Court decided in 1979. What was at the heart of the Brown decision, in my view, was the right of black people in this country to be exempt, quoting the Supreme Court, "from unfriendly legislation implying inferiority in civil society. I think that point about Brown is now fairly well understood as it applies to the southern and border States where there were racially dual systems, but it seems to be less widely understood about the school desegregation cases that have arisen in the North and the West. Yet from the Supreme Court's first decision in the Keyes case in 1973 through the Columbus and Dayton decisions, it has been perfectly clear, as Mr. Chambers has said, that desegregation is ordered only where the plaintiffs prove a condition of segregation resulting from intentional state action. If the committee were to take the trouble to go through the record of court findings in northern cases, you would find a host of intentionally discriminatory practices: racial gerrymandering, discriminatory site selection in the location of schools, segregative transfer policies, the racial use of optional zones creating a zone to enable white students to move out of schools that are becoming integrated, and discriminatory teacher assignments. Those are just a few of the practices that the courts have found have created segregated systems over time. I think if those who express some puzzlement about how Federal judges, and in many cases conservative Federal judges, could order what appear to be broad remedies, they only need examine the cases and learn that what the judges have been doing is what judges are supposed to do: applying well-established principles of equal protection of the law to the record evidence. The courts have also exercised similar care in devising remedies for the constitutional violations they have found. They have operated under principles that have been repeatedly stated in the Swann and Milliken cases that the scope of the remedy should be tailored to the scope of the violation. Before they order systemwide relief that ordinarily requires busing, they have required a demonstration that the violations were significant and were pervasive. Where that has not been the case, as in Dayton I, the Supreme Court refused to sustain an order for systemwide relief. At the same time, the courts have recognized that purportedly neutral practices or remedies such as neighborhood assignment may be woefully insufficient to cure the violation. In Swann and Keyes, the Supreme Court acknowledged and spelled out that segregative school practices by public officials can have a profound influence on housing patterns. They can create racial segregation in neighborhoods. Senator THURMOND. I have to go now. We will leave it to the staff to carry on until Senator Hatch comes back. I want to thank all of you gentlemen for your presence here today. Please continue. |