Busing Minneapolis students from low-income neighborhoods to the more affluent suburbs doesn’t raise test scores. In fact, students who stayed in city schools outscored the suburban transfers for the second year in a row.
At D-Ed Reckoning, Ken DeRosa mocks the claim that city schools are doing a good job with low-income students.
The choice is between attending a city school where low-SES students fare poorly or a suburban school district where they also perform poorly.
I can think of a number of reasons why students who chose to transfer didn’t benefit: their schooling was disrupted, they may have been lower performers looking for a fresh start, they may have felt unwelcome in their new schools, they may not have attended the new schools long enough to benefit. However, it’s fair to say that busing seems to be a perennial disappointment.
Working at a high-performing magnet school in Los Angeles which busses in students from throughout the LAUSD boundaries (which is huge) and a former student at the same school, I would say that there are some places where bussing has contributed to students understanding of different cultures, promoted diversity, and academic achievement.
I seriously doubt busing has ever helped education. In the old army, they would say “Don’t just stand there, do something.” Any idiot who claims that hours in a bus can substitute for hours in a classroom has a lower opinion the education establishment than have I.
Working at a high-performing magnet school in Los Angeles which busses in students from throughout the LAUSD boundaries (which is huge) and a former student at the same school, I would say that there are some places where bussing has contributed to students understanding of different cultures, promoted diversity, and academic achievement.
The operative term is magnet school.
It’s much easier to educate higher IQ children regardless of SES. The effective magnet schools work by segregating out the high IQ children from the rest of the low-SES herd. The results of the high IQ children will not generalize to the lower IQ children.
If we randomly selected a group of low-SES children and bussed them to a random magnet shool, you would not expect that this group will perform any better than they would in their neighborhood public school.
Reading, not riding!
A schoolbus more likely to shrink and give an educational tour of the body than work its magic on the grades of low-income students.