Title: Did busing for school integration succeed? Here’s what research says. - Chalkbeat
Headings: Did busing for school desegregation succeed? Here’s what research says.
Did busing for school desegregation succeed? Here’s what research says.
Research shows that school desegregation — often including “busing” — helped black students in the long run.
More recent research continues to find benefits of integrated schools, though they tend to be somewhat smaller.
There’s little evidence that integration hurts white students — and it may also reduce racial bias.
School desegregation has had some negative side effects.

Content: What do we know? In the most basic sense, they did succeed. School segregation dropped substantially as courts and the federal government put pressure on local districts to integrate. But those efforts also sparked bitter, sometimes racist, resistance that shaped political discourse for decades. “Busing as a political term … was a failure, because the narrative that came out of it from the media and politicians was almost only negative,” said Matt Delmont, a Dartmouth historian who wrote a book titled “Why Busing Failed.” “ It only emphasized the inconvenience to white families and white students.” A political failure does not necessarily mean an educational failure, though, as Delmont and others have pointed out. Indeed, research has consistently shown that integrated schools offered, and still offer, tangible benefits to students of color. Since public schools in many places today remain intensely segregated by race and socioeconomic status, this issue is not just a historical one. “School integration didn’t fail,” Berkeley economist Rucker Johnson, who has conducted some of the most far-reaching research on school integration, recently argued. “