Busing (School Desegregation)

Busing is the act of transporting children to a school outside their residential area, as a means of achieving racial balance in the school system. It arose out of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. This entry focuses particularly on the case of Boston, Massachusetts, where court‐ordered measures designed to achieve greater school integration resulted in high levels of community conflict and in numerous techniques employed by white parents to avoid the consequences of the policy. After four decades, American schools remain highly segregated and what little progress was achieved has been reversed by the gradual erosion of the reforms.