6-1 Discussion: Supporting a Thesis
Statement
I came to the conclusion that busing was bad for Boston in the long run
because it caused racial violence, white flight, and a decline in public
education. There were, in my opinion, more efficient strategies for
desegregating Boston public schools.
The majority of students attending Boston's public schools lived in the
immediate area prior to the busing. When the busing plan went into
effect and students started showing up at school, there were a lot of
protesters who "began throwing bricks and rocks at the buses and at the
state police escorting them." For the next two years, white and black
parents, students, police, and protesters engaged in enraged and
frequently violent altercations (Wolff, 2015). Teens aren't very good at
adjusting to new situations and people, and these fights took place at
South Boston High School. The busing should have started with younger
students from different schools, not angry and emotional teenagers.
There were 93,000 students in the Boston public schools prior to the
introduction of busing in 1971–1972, with 61% being white and 32%
being African American (MindEdge, 2022). In 1990, three years after
schools were desegregated, there were 60,000 students enrolled, of
which 48% were African Americans and 22% were white (MindEdge,
2022). The hypothesis that busing causes white flight is supported by
these figures. White parents did not want their children to interact with
and learn alongside African American children, so they sent them to
private schools instead of the public system.
Busing also hurt the quality of the public school system. When Stanford
9 testing began in 1996, the majority of students still advanced to the
next grade despite receiving "poor" or "failing" scores in math and
reading (Richer, 1998). According to Richer (1998), students in Boston
scored poorly on the state Iowa Reading test, placing them 275th out of
279 Massachusetts cities and towns. According to Richer (1998), Boston
students took the SAT in 1996 and received an average score of 845 out
of 1600. These facts do not indicate that the public schools in Boston
provide an education of high quality. Even though the majority of
students scored poorly on standardized tests, their teachers still moved
them up to the next grade. Even though I think desegregation and
busing were done in Boston with good intentions, I don't think it was a
good idea for the education of the students.
