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: 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. “ The only failure is that we stopped pursuing it and allowed the reign of segregation to return.” At the same time, there is evidence that desegregation efforts have had some unintended consequences, like the loss of black teachers. Here’s what research tells us about how these desegregation policies worked. Research shows that school desegregation — often including “busing” — helped black students in the long run. To isolate the impact of court-ordered school integration in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, Johnson used two strategies.