A word about the federal government and bussing

Sorry, I know this is late; I'm at the national school boards' trainers conference in Omaha, and I haven't had much of a chance to post!
If you watched the Democratic debate last night (or if you saw much since then), you saw this exchange between Senator Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joseph Biden:



I do want to observe here that this illustrates something which is crucial: policy is never hypothetical. It's always about the second grader on the bus; it's about people.

Senator Harris attended the Berkeley, CA public schools which did voluntarily desegregate in 1968 (you can read a lot about Berkeley in 1968 here). Berkeley used two-way bussing, meaning that children went in both directions (not only sending Black children into white schools). It was done due to local community decision through massive community organizing, 'though one can't, of course isolate Berkeley from what else happened in the rest of the country.

Vice President Biden's position has been well covered by the education press in the past few weeks; this piece in EdWeek captures much of the history, and his letter to Senator James Eastland, a noted segregationist, has been well-circulated. He went so far in 1975 as to float the idea of a Constitutional amendment forbidding it. Above, he speaks of opposing the (federal) Department of Education forcing schools to desegregate through bussing, something of which I can find no record, which may have been discussed by the Ford administration, though Ford cited busing orders as federal overreach (see also his statement here); desegregation, when it was ordered, came through the federal courts (the judiciary, thus, not the executive branch). Note the points in this interview, in particular:

It seemed like the crux of his response was, he was trying to draw this distinction between when busing or desegregation efforts were mandated by outsiders versus when communities came up with them or OK’d them themselves. I wonder what you made of that. 

It struck me as a distinction without much meaning to it. By which I mean, the local and the federal roles have always been intertwined with schooling in America, particularly on the school desegregation issue. This sense that communities should only desegregate when they locally decide to do so is farcical. It demonstrates a complete either lack of knowledge or willful misunderstanding of how race and school desegregation played out in the country.

The main power the federal legislative branch has, of course, is that of funding. Since at least 1974, sections 301 and 302 of appropriations has included a ban on the use of federal funding for bussing used for desegregation efforts. It has been noted, however, that this would seem to run afoul of one of the main points of the Every Student Succeeds Act:

Momentum to remove these provisions began last year, when it became evident that the decades-old riders conflicted with the Every Students Succeeds Act, the federal education overhaul passed in 2015. That law gives states and local districts greater flexibility to implement evidenced-based school improvement strategies. Decades of research have shown that racial and socioeconomic integration can lead to a wide-range of academic and social benefits — which many state and local policymakers hope to provide for students.

Since this has now come up--and it doesn't seem to me as if today's "clarification" clarified at all--one can hope that this discussion continues. I, too, would be interested:

all of the politics and optics and theater criticism of the Biden/Harris thing aside, I'd love to read a big long piece about where the Dem candidates stand on school segregation that has them talk through their own sense of how we got here and what we should do moving forward

— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 28, 2019

A significant number of the current president's judicial nominees have declined to say if they think Brown v. Board was correctly decided, so the issue is necessary in more ways than one.