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To many outsiders, Boston Public Schools’ court-ordered integration campaign of the 1970s and ‘80s was an unqualified failure that stoked more racial discord than it solved, turning “busing” into a byword for disaster for years to come.
But as commentators commemorate the 50th anniversary of that controversy this year, few have remarked on the legacy of a much more durable, and more successful, effort to bus underserved kids to better educational opportunities: METCO, an initiative that offers Boston students slots in several dozen suburban communities that participate voluntarily. With considerably less fanfare, the program has made a serious dent in segregation across one of the country’s biggest metropolitan areas.
Until recently, researchers struggled to quantify METCO’s effects. But a paper released in August has provided the fullest overview yet of how students’ lives change after being bused to better-performing school districts.
The study, conducted by Tufts University economist Elizabeth Setren, finds that over the last few decades, METCO students enjoyed sizable improvements to their standardized test scores, school attendance, and disciplinary records compared with similar peers who didn’t participate. They were also more likely to both start and graduate from college and later earned substantially higher wages. The effects were especially large for boys and children whose parents didn’t attend college.
Those successes, achieved by a program with little national recognition, could offer lessons to states and districts attempting to engineer more racial and socioeconomic balance in their classrooms. Both legal hurdles and changing demographics have made desegregation a more complex process than it was during the movement’s heyday, but many education leaders are concerned about national data indicating that racial isolation has ticked upward since the 1990s.
It was in an effort to achieve racial balance across Boston’s heavily segregated neighborhood schools that a federal judge ordered local officials to shuttle students to schools in different parts of the city. Researchers are unsure what academic improvements resulted from racially directed school assignment, but the political response was so resoundingly hostile that the project was wound down by the end of the 1990s. By contrast, METCO has grown significantly since its inception and is now one of the longest-running voluntary desegregation programs in the country.
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