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: By Matt Barnum Jul 1, 2019, 6:15pm EDT
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LOUISVILLE, KY: Students board a bus heading to Atherton High School in 2017 in Louisville, Kentucky. The Kentucky GOP-led state House had just passed a bill that requiring Jefferson County to return to neighborhood schooling, undoing the county's longstanding desegregation efforts. Michael Noble, Jr. for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have catapulted a long-running debate about “busing” and school integration back into the news. Harris’ criticism of fellow Democratic presidential candidate Biden for his vigorous opposition to court-ordered desegregation in the 1970s has also sparked fresh debate about whether those efforts were successful. 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.” “