Balancing Boston's Schools

De facto segregation in Boston's public schools is being seriously challenged for the first time and the challenger is Massachusetts' Board of Education. Its weapon is a new state law permitting it to hold funds back from racially imbalanced school systems.

Any school with an enrollment more than 50 per cent Negro is, according to the law, racially imbalanced. Boston has 46 of them. Last week the Board gave the Boston School Committee one month to agree to a plan that would make it possible to reduce imbalance in all 46.

Now the School Committee has two alternatives: to comply or to begin a court fight against the law. To comply, the Committee will have to disown part of the imbalance plan it submitted last fall. That plan, resting on the premise that "some schools located in the center of the non-white population of Boston will remain largely racially imbalanced," was rightly rejected by the state Board last week. What was best about the plan--its programs for "compensatory education" and research--clearly had little to do with meeting the Racial Imbalance Law's requirements.

"We intend to make the schools a magnet for the white suburban families who will be attracted to the city by the quality of education offered," Boston Superintendent of Schools William H. Ohrenberger wrote. "If the housing in these areas of the city concomitantly improves, the influx of white families will dramatically reduce racial imbalance."

The state Board could hardly have been expected to wait for this dramatic influx. It tore into the School Committee's plan and especially into its "massive" construction program. Of the 46 imbalanced schools, it pointed out, 34 were unaccounted for. No indication was given of when the projects listed might be completed; nor was any clear data provided on present or future school racial composition.

To further its policy of "open enrollment," the School Committee also offered to provide free subway tokens for elementary school pupils who want to attend a school more than a mile and a half from their homes. Such unsupervised transportation of young children is not likely to attract many Negro parents.

The only direct attack on imbalanced elementary schools was the Committee's proposal for a "middle school" system, which would bring pupils into larger, more integrated Junior high schools a grade earlier than at present.

The state Board's demands last week were modest and reasonable. It asked the Committee to make clear how and when future school construction will correct present imbalance. It called for direct financial support to private groups like Operation Exodus, which is now busing a few hundred children out of Roxbury. It sought consideration of proposals to bus a few hundred more Negroes to suburban schools.

This is far from asking for the cross bussing of white and Negro students that the Committee has sworn it will prevent, and far from touching the majority of the estimated 24,000 Negro students in Boston's classrooms.

The School Committee would be well advised to comply with the state demands. Perhaps the Racial Imbalance Law, in the long run, will be too hard on a city that is losing more and more of its white population; maybe a broader approach bringing in the suburbs, is required.

But compliance seems the best hope for the generation of Negroes Boston is now miseducating. Clearly, compensatory programs and subway tokens won't be enough.