Teen Vogue, November 5, 2019 by Thea Sebastian
During the first Democratic debate of the 2020 presidential campaign, school busing re-emerged in the public consciousness. When Senator Kamala Harris challenged former vice president Joe Biden over federal legislation involving busing programs, a crucial conversation about school integration was rekindled.
This is a discussion that we should be having. Decades after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling determined that “separate but equal” public schools were unconstitutional, many of our schools are more segregated than they were 60 years ago. But busing isn’t the only way to integrate schools. Today, the federal government has the tools to combat the issue that's driving three quarters of all school segregation: the underlying segregation of our neighborhoods. There’s only one problem: The Trump administration recently took a major step toward completely dismantling these tools.
The issue dates back to the 1954 Brown decision. Although the Supreme Court case ignited substantial backlash in some communities, causing a number of infamous standoffs at the schoolhouse door, Brown had a loophole: Schools couldn’t discriminate based on race, but they could discriminate based on geography.
Government policies helped catalyze segregation. President Dwight Eisenhower passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, prompting a massive exodus from cities. White families, armed with government-backed mortgages (which were essentially off-limits to Blacks) and suddenly able to make long commutes, relocated to surrounding suburbs. When white families left the urban core, state laws allowed these breakaway communities to form their own municipalities, with their own schools.