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Mention
"Boston" and
"busing" in the same title, and most readers conjure up images of
the city’s intense racial violence in 1975 over mandatory school
desegregation (Formisano, 1991). But author Susan
Eaton tells the "other" Boston busing story, a lesser-known and
more hopeful tale about African American city students who voluntarily
desegregated predominantly white suburban schools throughout the greater
Boston area.
Beginning
in 1966, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (commonly
known as METCO) formed when black parents and activists sought what they
envisioned as a "temporary remedy" for
educational inequality in Boston's
predominantly black schools (p. 3). Drawing political momentum
from the Massachusetts 1965
Racial Imbalance Law, as well as the state's financial incentives for
suburban schools to participate, the first cohort of 220 black city
students volunteered to be bused into seven outlying white communities.
Thirty-five years later, METCO had expanded to over 3,000 city students
enrolled in over 30 suburban school districts, becoming the longest-running
program of its kind in the nation (p. 5). Compared to the widely perceived
failure of Boston's mandatory desegregation, METCO offered a longer-term,
quieter, more peaceful resolution to racial segregation between city and
suburbs, though not without personal costs to many of its voluntary
participants.
In her book, Eaton's greatest strength is her keen ability to
listen to METCO alumni and transport the reader vicariously into their
worlds, to hear them express their joys, disappointments, and daily
experiences with suburban integration in their own words. The alumni’s
stories at the heart of this book, combined with the author's
chapter-by-chapter analyses, expand our understanding of the long-term
outcomes of school desegregation as well as African-American racial
identity development in predominantly white settings. But when it comes to
drawing policy recommendations, these nuances are lost. Eaton’s research is
shaped by her need to make the strongest political arguments in support of
the embattled METCO program. When summarizing individuals’ stories to
construct the book’s broader claims, she overstates the evidence behind her
argument that “nearly all” METCO alumni would repeat the program and
downplays the level of ambivalence in the majority of their responses.
After reviewing Eaton's study, we introduce our own findings from a
parallel study of Project Concern, METCO's sister
program in Hartford, Connecticut, which many alumni perceived as representing
a "forced choice," due to lack of quality schools in the city and
obstacles to securing housing in the suburbs. Participants' historical
reflections on both of these voluntary city-to-suburb desegregation
programs have profound implications for contemporary debates over race and
educational policy.
Retelling the "other" Boston busing story
Eaton's
study rests on the in-depth interviews she conducted with sixty-five former
METCO students and the conclusions she draws from analyzing their thematic
content and narrative structure. Her interview questions probe three areas:
how alumni expressed memories of their experiences after so many years,
their perceptions of the long-term costs and benefits, and their
willingness to repeat the experience (p. 18). Eaton acknowledges that, due
to the lack of an official roster of participants over the past three
decades, her study is not a random sample of METCO alumni. Instead, Eaton
made an appropriate decision to construct systematically a "chain-referral"
sample, obtaining names through various sources, then
asking these individuals to refer her to others. From a total pool of 189
prospective interview candidates, she selected those who helped her balance
the final sample of 65, so that their gender, age-cohort, and the
socioeconomic status of their suburban schools would resemble past surveys
of METCO students (pp. 22, 264-8).
Previous
social science surveys of METCO-style programs have found that black
participants were more likely to report having racially-mixed social
networks, career opportunities, and higher college graduation rates than
their segregated counterparts (Crain, Miller, Hawes, and Peichert, 1992). While Eaton's research clearly draws
from this body of literature, she distinguishes her work from it, carefully
noting that she does not attempt to compare METCO alumni's long-term
outcomes to those of their black peers in city schools. Instead, the author
argues that her open-ended qualitative interview methods extend our depth
of understanding of the "human processes" of black participation
in city-suburban desegregation programs and the "meanings people
attach to their own experiences" (pp. 17-18). In doing so, the book
picks up on several themes raised in previous city-suburb desegregation studies
(Wells and Crain, 1997) and fleshes them out in the rich detail that they
deserve.
Eaton
successfully captures compelling, deeply humanizing elements of her METCO
alumni’s stories, leading to some finely nuanced discussions of African
American participation in predominantly white school desegregation
programs. For example, we learn in "Why They Went" (chapter 2)
that many working-class METCO families were motivated by an intense, though
largely unconfirmed, vision of "a better education" in the wealthier
and whiter suburban schools, where most students went on to college (pp.
27-31). Their watchword was opportunity, not necessarily racial diversity,
the goal more commonly articulated by white advocates of racial
integration. Despite the very long bus rides and the distance between their
home and school communities, most METCO alumni continued to see their Boston
neighborhoods as their true homes. As adults, two-thirds of the sample
resided in the city rather than its suburbs. Accordingly, most framed their
family's decision to participate in METCO as an effort to embrace the
American dream, rather than a separation from Boston. "METCO is not a
rejection of anything, really," asserted one alumna. "It is the
choice of participation in something that maybe wasn't all set up right
just for you, maybe they've been trying to keep it from us . . .people in
positions of power forgot about certain communities" (p. 42).
METCO alumni’s most powerful memories typically involved straddling
“two worlds” and becoming aware of “crossing the line” by shifting their
language or outward appearances. By themselves, these cultural differences
did not bother most alumni; the deeper problems were “white reactions to
difference” (pp. 47, 80). Several alumni recalled troubling incidents where
whites misinterpreted black student groups as “street gangs” and
aggressively punished everyday black student social behaviors. "We had
issues where the METCO students were being perceived as loud, rowdy, just
out of control,” explained one male graduate. “But if you look at where we
come from, we come from a culture that emphasizes music, laughter. If you
go to our churches, there is music, there is dance. We shout. . . So here
we are, we're leaving our community that doesn't
exactly emphasize these kinds of things. You are then taken out of context.
It's misreading" (p. 78).
Despite these cultural clashes, Eaton reports that former METCO
students did “not recall resisting academic success” nor associating it
with “acting white,” as anthropologists John Ogbu
and Signithia Fordham have interpreted lower
black academic achievement in other settings (pp. 94, 242-4). Ogbu’s theory holds that while all minorities face
discriminatory barriers in a majority society, “voluntary minorities” who
migrated of their own accord are more likely to generate pro-schooling
cultural frameworks than “involuntary minorities” whose ancestors had been
enslaved or relocated under duress. But how does Ogbu
deal with blacks who chose to participate in METCO-style city-to-suburb
busing programs, or those who permanently migrated
to the suburbs, either through governmental housing programs or private
real estate markets? Have they become culturally transformed into
“voluntary minorities”–or not? Ogbu’s latest ethnography,
Black American Students in an
Affluent Suburb (2003), about black families who moved
into the formerly all-white suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, does not answer
these questions, and future researchers would be wise to contemplate how
they played out in Eaton’s study.
Eaton’s
other chapters weigh “The Gains” against “The Resolutions,” (which,
interestingly, Eaton did not name "The Losses"). After years of
learning to straddle fences between two communities, METCO alumni generally
reported that they felt more “comfortable” in predominantly white settings
than they otherwise suspect they would have been. Growing familiar with
white suburban school culture gave them the confidence to step into white
colleges and workplaces. Furthermore, the METCO experience also channeled
many of them onto the “inside tracks” where they acquired personal
information and social prestige for educational and professional
advancement (p. 118). Yet these benefits came with significant costs. Many
METCO alumni described varying degrees of alienation from their local
neighborhoods and the broader black community. More than two-thirds of the
author’s sample reported an absence of black history in their suburban
schools, and they frequently expressed “a strong desire to be totally
all-black in an all-black place,” with many dreaming about attending an
historically black college (pp. 169, 174). Eaton expertly weaves together
both the positives and the negatives of her narrators’ stories, connecting
them to the broader academic literature on the long-term outcomes of school
desegregation (Wells and Crain, 1994) and psychological theories of racial
identity development (Tatum, 1997).
Overall,
METCO alumni’s personal memories of the program varied widely. Eaton
reports that about 20 percent expressed positive memories of METCO, 70
percent mixed, and 10 percent negative (p. 197). But this is not the
author’s final conclusion. Instead, Eaton’s boldest argument addresses how
alumni responded to her two specific interview questions regarding their
willingness to participate in the program again: If you could go back in
time, would you repeat the METCO experience? Would you want your child or
one close to you to have the [METCO] experience? (p. 278)
"Remarkably,"
Eaton claims in her introduction, "nearly all the adults represented
here said they would indeed repeat their METCO experience could they go
back in time. (Just four of the sixty-five said otherwise.)" (p. 21).
While readers might logically assume that METCO alumni having positive memories
would desire to repeat the program, and those having negative memories
would not (and so on), her results defied this expected pattern. "The
quality of one's experience in METCO is rarely the most important
consideration" when alumni decided whether or not they would repeat
the program, Eaton claims. Instead, she traces their predominantly
favorable response to their "real-world experiences.
. . in either college or the workforce, [when] they began to see clearly
the reasons they were placed in suburban schools to begin with" (p.
198). According to this interpretation, the value of educational and
economic opportunities that METCO provided to African Americans far
outweighed their personal recollections of discrimination and racial
disconnection in the program. The passage of time helped alumni to put
their pioneering experiences with school desegregation into a long-term
perspective. According to the author, "It was fairly common for men
and women to say that if they had been asked in junior or senior high
school: 'Would you go through METCO again?' they likely would have
answered, 'no.' But if you ask the same question of the same people, five,
ten, fifteen, even twenty years after they're out, they most often say
'yes' " (p. 198).
But
as Eaton unfolds the evidence behind her argument, the interview responses
do not fit so neatly into these simplistic "yes" or
"no" categories. Instead, she groups them into four thematic
categories and offers approximate numbers for each. The first category,
"METCO's cheerleaders," numbered “less
than a dozen” who replied “yes,” without hesitation, that they would
personally repeat the city-suburb busing experience (p. 205). (No data are
presented about their responses to sending their children.) Despite any “personal
problems” that these individuals may have encountered in suburban schools,
such problems were outweighed by better job, college, and housing
opportunities. Eaton’s second category is the “Yes, but. . .” group,
consisting of "just over thirty" alumni who "would place a
child in METCO only on certain conditions.” Some would consent only if the
child maintained strong ties to other black institutions, or if white
suburban schools began to view METCO children as positive contributors
(rather than “charity cases”), or if they could be assured that the child
would not be tracked into lower-level courses (pp. 206-11). (No data are
provided about whether or not the adults in this group would personally
repeat the program.) Eaton labels her third category, “I guess I have to,”
grouping fourteen individuals who stated that “they would repeat their
experiences and place their children in white suburban schools, [but]
nevertheless see METCO as the best choice among inadequate options"
(p. 212). These alumni were most critical of the quality of mainstream
Boston public schools, the lack of space in the elite public college
preparatory schools, and the high cost of private schools. Furthermore,
they leaned towards choosing METCO “with far more hesitation and
uncertainty” than did others (p. 212). The fourth and final category, “No
going back,” describes alumni who “are sure that they would neither repeat
the program nor send their own child–actual or hypothetical–to a METCO
school” (p. 198). At first, Eaton states that “just four” individuals were
in this group, counting those who replied “no” to both questions about
repeating the program and sending their children. But when focusing on
those who responded negatively to the first question, the total number in
this group rose to eight (pp. 198, 214).
How
do Eaton’s numbers add up? Given the author’s imprecise reporting of
interview data, we reconstructed numbers from her text and repackaged them
into a tabular format:
Table 1 –
METCO Alumni Responses
(Numbers
Reconstructed from Eaton’s Text)
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Would you repeat the program or
send a child?
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Yes ("cheerleaders")
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11 17%
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Yes, but. . .
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32 49%
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I Guess I Have To
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14 22%
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No Going Back
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8 12%
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Total
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65
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Reanalyzing
Eaton's data in this format raises questions about her initial claim that
“nearly all” METCO alumni would repeat the program (p. 21). Technically,
that claim is true, since the majority of alumni did lean toward “yes” when
pressed by the interviewer. But Eaton's introductory remarks do not
accurately characterize the full range of their comments. On closer
examination of the body of her book's evidence, only 17 percent of alumni
gave an enthusiastic “yes” to going through the program a second time. The
vast majority gave a more qualified affirmation (over 70 percent when
combining the author’s “Yes, but. . .” and “I guess I have to” categories).
Overall, when sorting alumni reactions to repeating METCO into three
categories, the results are 17 percent positive, 71 percent mixed, and 12
percent negative. That breakdown looks remarkably similar to Eaton’s
description of the alumni’s overall memories of the program—20 percent
positive, 70 percent mixed, and 10 percent negative—thereby raising doubt
about her other claim that these two sets of responses were substantially
different (p. 197).
Several
pages later, after Eaton concludes that the METCO interviews demonstrate
that the positives outweighed the negative aspects of the experience, she
briefly inserts one line: “But there is much ambivalence within these
answers” (p. 226). Here lies the book's hidden thesis, another side of the
“other” Boston busing story that remains largely untold. Despite the
author's rosy introduction, over 70 percent of the alumni gave conflicted
responses about repeating METCO or sending their children, by asserting
that they would participate only if key reforms were made in the program,
or stating that their decisions were profoundly shaped by the lack of
quality educational alternatives. To better understand this predominant
theme of ambivalence, which Eaton chose not to emphasize in her book's
introduction, we decided to conduct a parallel study of a similar program
and to analyze our own set of alumni interviews.
Investigating ambivalence and constraint in Hartford’s Project Concern
One hundred miles away from Boston sits the
city of Hartford, Connecticut, the home
of a closely related voluntary desegregation program named Project Concern,
which bused children to suburban schools from 1966 to 1998. Working
together with our colleagues in the Cities,
Suburbs, and Schools undergraduate seminar at Trinity
College, we read Eaton’s book on METCO and constructed a parallel study of
Project Concern alumni. Our project would not have been possible without
the author’s openness and cooperation. Eaton greatly assisted us by
publishing a detailed methodology and her complete interview guide in the
book’s appendix, and kindly offered advice to our seminar through a
telephone conference call. We also benefited from a partnership we formed
with the former long-term director of Project Concern and the manager of
the present-day program. They provided us with an initial list of alumni
who still lived in the Hartford region, who led us to others through the
same chain-referral sampling methods that Eaton used. Our final sample of
24 individuals was comprised of 15 females and 9 males, who enrolled in ten
different suburban school districts through Project Concern, representing
graduation-year cohorts from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. While our class
project conducted only one-third of Eaton's total number of interviews, it
still allowed us to make some general comparisons with her findings (Project
Concern Oral History Interviews, 2003).
But
we analyzed our interview transcripts with a different approach than
Eaton. First, to investigate the
degree of ambivalence among Project Concern alumni, we sorted responses
about their willingness to repeat the program into three (not four)
categories: those who answered “yes,” they would definitely repeat Project
Concern; those who gave an ambivalent response with some expression of
doubt or reservation; and those who replied with a definitive “no.” Our middle
category merged two of Eaton's labels (“Yes, but. . . ” and
“I guess I have to ”) to combine responses that we believed to be more
similar than different at this level. Second, we analyzed the transcripts
again to determine whether alumni suggested that the voluntary Project
Concern program was a “forced choice,” due to the lack of quality
educational options in the city or racial and economic barriers to securing
housing in the suburbs. Although neither Eaton nor we asked a specific
question about this topic during the interviews, we could not ignore its
frequent appearance in the transcripts. Some alumni spoke explicitly about
"forced choices" surrounding Project Concern, such as one female
who explained that "If you are stuck, as a parent. . . and you can’t
put yourself in the neighborhood that you want your kids to go to school
in, then you have no choice” but to be in the city-to-suburb desegregation
program. Others spoke about these same constraints in less explicit terms,
by pointing out the many failures in Hartford public schools or the
excessive housing costs in suburban communities. Since the prevalence of
"forced choice" themes were not necessarily linked to individual
alumni's responses to the question about repeating the busing program, we decided
not to follow Eaton's approach (the "I guess I have to" label)
and recorded its presence in a separate analysis.
Table 2 - Project Concern Alumni Responses
|
Would you repeat the program or
send a child?
|
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Stated or implied
a “forced choice”
|
|
|
|
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Yes
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No
|
|
Yes
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12 50%
|
|
5
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7
|
|
Ambivalent
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9 38%
|
|
6
|
3
|
|
No
|
3 12%
|
|
3
|
0
|
|
Total
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24
|
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14 58%
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10 42%
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Despite
our relatively small sample size, we can draw some general comparisons
between the METCO and Project Concern interviews, and probe more deeply
into selected aspects of the latter group. First, while the alumni in our
sample were much more likely to answer definitively "yes" to
repeating the program than Eaton's METCO sample (50 percent versus 17
percent), the significant number of clearly ambivalent responses (38
percent) and negative responses (12 percent) among Project Concern alumni
cannot be ignored. The fact that half would repeat the Connecticut program,
while the other half were not sure or said no, confirms our skepticism of
Eaton's initial claim that "nearly all " would repeat METCO if
given the opportunity. Second, moving to the right side of the table, a
majority of the Project Concern sample (58 percent) suggested that the
program represented a “forced choice." While the three alumni who
responded "no" to repeating the program all expressed this theme,
this same response also made a significant showing among the
"ambivalent" and "yes" groups. To be clear, not a single alumni called for eliminating the Project
Concern program. In fact, some graduates who would refuse to repeat the
program or who criticized "forced choices" advocated for the
program's continuation as strongly as its "cheerleaders," on the grounds
that parents of color in Hartford need more
choices for their children, not fewer choices.
Translating research into policy talk
Across the nation, school integration programs are facing intense
legal and political challenges, a fact very much on the minds of Eaton and
co-author Gary Orfield from their previous book, Dismantling Desegregation (1996).
Eaton points our attention to the heated policy debates looming over the
embattled METCO program, which in recent years some white Boston suburban
districts have threatened to abandon (p. 7). In nearby Hartford, the
Project Concern program faced severe budget cuts as the dwindling number of
suburban school openings dropped the level of city student enrollments from
a peak of nearly 1,300 down to 500. In 1998, Project Concern was eliminated
and absorbed into the state legislature's strategic plan for addressing
racially desegregated schools, which maintained its voluntary nature and
renamed it the Capitol Region Choice Program. Advocates of the change point
out that this new program supports two-way desegregation–from city to
suburban schools, and vice versa–and that enrollments are scheduled to
increase as part of the 2003 Sheff
v O'Neill school desegregation settlement. But long-time Project Concern
supporters argue that merely busing students between segregated districts,
without providing race relations educators to support these transitions,
does not by itself constitute an effective desegregation program (Green,
1997, 1998; Frahm, 1998, 2003). As these disputes
continue, the overall status and quality of voluntary city-suburban school
desegregation programs hang in the balance.
Given this context, it should not surprise anyone that Eaton
concludes The Other
Boston Busing Story by translating her research findings
into a strong policy stance in favor of continuing the program. But we are
troubled that nearly all signs of ambivalence from the METCO alumni
interviews seem to evaporate from the text as the author plunges into her
policy conclusions (p. 226 ff). Eaton raises and then eloquently refutes
the three most common objections raised against METCO-style programs.
First, to the argument that scarce resources would be better spent on
improving black urban schools, she responds that racism is a metropolitan
problem that requires metropolitan solutions. Second, to the criticism that
suburban busing disconnects urban youth from their neighborhoods and
thereby internalizes racism, Eaton replies that her interviews show how
alumni deliberately remained connected with black communities. Third, to
the charge that confrontations with racism at such an early age hurt black
youth, she argues that the alternative of segregated schooling is
unthinkable, and that alumni perceived these painful experiences as preparation
for the real world to come. Overall, Eaton defends METCO by reiterating her
interpretation that "many" of its graduates would repeat the
program, a claim that masks the underlying ambivalence and constraints in
the interviews (pp. 247-50). As a policy defense of city-suburban
desegregation for the twenty-first century, Eaton's book succeeds. But as a
research study that promises to reveal how African-American graduates
perceive the complex METCO experience, some findings are given much more
emphasis than others.
Buried in Eaton's conclusion is a deeper and more troubling truth
about city-suburban desegregation policy: these programs operate "on
terms that suburbanites can accept" (p. 221). Just as the politics of
implementing one-way desegregation largely protected white interests in the
South during the 1960s, so too did Northeastern regions design programs
like METCO and Project Concern to retain existing privileges over public
schooling. Wealthy whites continue to choose where they wish to purchase homes,
and therefore educate their children, in suburban communities. Also, their
suburban boards of education can choose whether or not to participate in
one-way busing programs from city schools, how many city children to
accept, and whether to isolate them in one particular school or disperse
them across an entire suburban district. Simply transporting between one to
three thousand self-selected city students to an array of suburban schools
each year leaves the existing framework of public schooling in the broader
metropolitan area largely intact. To be sure, once a suburban district
chooses to accept METCO or Project Concern children, it must tolerate them
to some extent.
But as a desegregation policy, this arrangement saves suburbanites from
making what most would perceive to be an unacceptable sacrifice: being
required to enroll their children in a city (or even a regional) public
school system. By contrast, the forced choices fall largely to urban
families of color, who must decide whether the risks and benefits of busing
their children long distances into sometimes hostile white suburban schools
outweigh the limited educational opportunities found in overburdened and underfunded urban schools. When viewed from this
perspective, the "voluntary" label commonly used to describe
METCO-style programs seems to fit suburban interests more so than urban
ones.
School desegregation advocates need to recognize the "forced
choices" that lay imbedded within many existing programs and consider ways of raising this issue to reframe
discussions on school reform. As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of
the Brown decision,
we must remember that neither desegregation policies–nor the underlying
forms of racism they were designed to challenge–stand still over time.
School reform movements continue to evolve, as new coalitions emerge and
adapt to changing historical contexts over time. Desegregation advocates
like Eaton would be wise to study closely the political dynamics that drive
the free-market vouchers movement, rather than dismissing it out of hand
(p. 255). Although polling data varies widely on this issue, some
well-respected national surveys indicate that African-American support for
private school vouchers has risen from a minority to a majority-held
opinion over the past decade (Bositis, 2003).
Even polls that dispute this finding concede the existence of an
African-American generational split on vouchers, with stronger support
coming from younger respondents with school-age children (National School
Boards Association, 2001). We suspect that African-American support for the
"choice" movement has grown in response to the "forced
choices" that result from continued discrimination and the limitations
posed by white-dominated school desegregation policies in addressing it.
Let us be perfectly clear: "choice," by itself, is not a magic
pill that produces quality education, but neither can the same be said
about "desegregation." In order to move forward on educational
and social reform that addresses racial and economic justice, we must
listen more closely to the themes of ambivalence and constraint as
expressed by METCO and Project Concern alumni, and reflect on their deeper
meaning for our future efforts.
References
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Center for Political and Economic Studies. Available at http://www.jointcenter.org/publications/details/opinion-poll/n-NOP-education-2002.html
Crain, R., Miller, R.L, Hawes,
J.A., and Peichert, J.R. (1992). Finding Niches: Desegregated students sixteen
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