I am a beneficiary of the much-maligned social experiment of school desegregation through busing.
I say beneficiary, because being bused to Garfield High School in Seattle’s Central District was one of the most transformational experiences of my life, and forever changed my trajectory and worldview.
Without my experience at Garfield I doubt I would live in Rainier Beach, have the multiracial chosen family I have or do the equity work that I do. Attending integrated Garfield was unequivocally one of the best things that could have happened to me.
The class of 1993 is celebrating our 30th reunion this year, a bittersweet moment as the ramifications of abandoning integration are becoming more clear.
Seattle Times reporter Dahlia Bazzaz’s groundbreaking two-part series on the city’s integration efforts, concluding today, shows a marked racial retrenchment of the city’s schools, with Black students as segregated as they were during the early ’70s.
While Seattle-specific data on the impact of integration is hard to measure, national research like the work of economist Rucker Johnson in his book, “Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works,” found that “the medicine of integration works.”
Johnson likened integration to a surgery. It hurts, but it cures. Segregation and white flight, on the other hand, he described as like a painkiller, “providing instant relief for families looking to avoid diversity, but also plaguing them with long-term side effects.”
Using a methodology akin to randomized control trials, he found that desegregation efforts substantially reduced segregation overall, but for Black students, in particular, it increased spending per student and reduced class sizes. Johnson wrote that the effect of desegregation exposure through 12 years of school “proved large enough to eliminate the black-white educational attainment gap.”
And for white students, desegregation made little difference on educational attainment, but I would argue likely made a huge difference in how students approached the world.
As Johnson described it, “True integration has the redemptive power to heal divisions. It can serve as an incubator of ideas, provide catalytic effects, and exert a gravitational pull to bring people together across racial lines.”
I reached out to some of my Garfield classmates who were bused during the height of the desegregation era mostly from the north end of Seattle to Garfield — like I was — to see if my experience was an anomaly. It wasn’t.
As Bazzaz noted in her stories, most of Seattle’s busing efforts took the shape of Black students from central and south end schools being taken from their neighborhoods and sent to schools where they were racially isolated and, in the case of one of the students she profiled who attended Roosevelt, discouraged from even applying to college.
I agree with the people she interviewed who said it should not be the responsibility of those who face the greatest harm from racism and marginalization to remedy the social ills of redlining, income inequality and residential segregation. But what if we looked at it from the other direction?
Amy King, for example, was bused from the Meadowbrook neighborhood in North Seattle to the Central District from first grade through high school.
She now lives in Wedgwood and said she felt grateful even as an elementary student to be able to go to school in a different part of the city.
“When I was a kid, I remember hearing about these people saying that busing and going out of neighborhood schools was the end of the world. And I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I didn’t understand it then, and honestly, I don’t really understand it now,” she said.
She said as a white person, she liked that “normal” was not going to a school where everyone was like you and from your own neighborhood. King said that while segregation within integrated schools like Garfield was — then and now — a serious problem, she said she learned that “my world and my neighborhood is not just my neighborhood, my world is so far beyond that — it’s the city.”
King worried as she got older that the powerful experience she had at integrated Central District schools might have only gone one way.
Another classmate who rode the bus with me from the north end of Seattle, Shanti Rao, felt so strongly about the importance of busing, he wrote a letter to the editor at The Seattle Times in 1989 (that he reminded me I signed along with 50 other ninth grade students) to oppose the so-called “Save Our Schools” antibusing initiative and advocate for continuing the “controlled choice” program. The controlled choice program gave students an option between staying at their neighborhood school or being bused across town to advance district integration.
Rao’s bulleted letter read, in part, “we should give controlled choice a chance … Some of you out there also think that to be bused 30-45 minutes is immoral; listen to this: We think being bused is actually great.”
Rao, who is Indian American and an aerospace engineer who now lives in Los Angeles, said a lot of the opposition to school integration stems from a misguided belief in scarcity. He cited the saying, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”
He said a lot of people preserve the status quo because they benefit from it and are unsure how they will compete in a new paradigm. But he said that is misguided.
“Getting to know the full spectrum of America, as a student, opened my eyes to new kinds of problems that people face that are worth solving.”
Sharyl Rabinovici wasn’t bused as far — her family lived in Montlake — but as someone who studied public policy, she has thought a lot about her experience at Garfield and how desegregation and busing affected her life and the city’s racial and socio-economic climate.
She now lives in El Cerrito, Calif., but as a white person, Rabinovici’s experience at Garfield opened her eyes to the lives and experiences of other students in the city. She felt pride that Seattle made this commitment.
“I thought it was something really significant about my city, and where I grew up, and the ethics and values and willingness to put a lot of effort and take political heat in order to try to do better,” she said. Integration “didn’t solve all the problems, but it was a heck of a lot better than not trying.”
I agree.
And after the Supreme Court gutted race-based school assignments in 2007, we will have to be more creative about trying new things. That could look like white parents opting out of segregated neighborhoods and schools. It could be advocating for more just school funding mechanisms so that resources are distributed more fairly.
As Bazzaz reported, the district’s gap in white and Black outcomes grew to one of the largest in the country in the past decade. This is unacceptable and should be cause for urgent action and alarm.
But in a city that seems to default to paralysis and inaction — especially when faced with messy contradictions and complicated, generational solutions — it would take a large public effort to see any change, and no effort seems to be coming.
Yet author Johnson said we can’t give up.
“ … imperfection does not invalidate the noble experiment that is school integration,” he wrote. “Too often, we balk at doing difficult work by finding excuses, seeking refuge in statistics and counterarguments. These may sometimes be valid. And yet the work remains. A sense of justice calls us. A yearning for equality demands we see past the imperfect present to an improved future.”