The Other Boston Busing Story.(Review)

The Other Boston Busing Story By Susan E. Eaton Yale University Press, 286 pages, $26.95

A quarter-century has passed since Judge Arthur Garrity, Jr. decided to desegregate Boston's public schools, but the wreckage left in the wake of his busing policy may take decades more to repair. Court-mandated busing not only exacerbated "white flight" and deepened racial divisions; it drastically diminished the quality of urban public schools. So it is with some ambivalence that one opens a book called The Other Boston Busing Story.

This other story began ten years before Judge Garrity's 1976 decision, when a group of black parents founded the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (Metco). Motivated by distress over neighborhoods of "drunk and idle men who seemed to do nothing all day ... lottery ticket littered sidewalks ... friends who began to use drugs, skip school, or drop out"--these urban parents called for something better for their children.

Metco's goal was to transport 220 inner-city black children to highperforming suburban schools using public funds. Unlike Boston's forced busing program, Metco has met with few objections over the years. Because the transport is in only one direction--white suburban children are not sent into Roxbury and Dorchester--Metco much more resembles a school-choice program than a forced desegregation plan.

The Other Boston Busing Story is the first comprehensive study of the program, and it is useful for what it tells us about the lengths parents and students will go to in order to leave failing schools, and about the results of attempts to racially integrate schools. The book is based on interviews with 65 former Metco participants ranging in age from about 23 to 43, who describe their experiences as children in the program, and how those experiences have influenced their adult lives.

Most participants reported that their years in the program were difficult ones, characterized by long commutes, low expectations from teachers, and racially prejudiced attitudes--not only from classmates but also from peers in their own neighborhoods who taunted them for "acting white."

But many credited their parents with encouraging them to stick it out. As one interviewee said of her mother, "She knew [Metco would] give you that edge. My mother, she never left Roxbury really, but she had it figured out ...