A method used extensively during the 1960s and 1970s for remedying segregation by transporting students to schools that had been racially or ethnically unbalanced in the past.
In education, transporting of schoolchildren who live beyond a certain distance; but in recent decades, longer-distance transporting of children to schools beyond their neighborhood school to achieve racial balance, as part of efforts to achieve desegregation. Busing has often been mandated by federal courts, and proponents of the approach applaud the judiciary’s attempt to provide equality of opportunity to students of all races when schools and other branches of government have failed to do so. Critics, however, charge that court action amounts to government by judiciary, usurping the prerogatives of the legislative and executive branches. On a personal level, some parents openly prefer a segregated school system, while many parents (regardless of their feelings about desegregation) have been concerned about the effect of the disruptive busing on young children, some of whom are transported long distances when they might otherwise have walked to their neighborhood school. As a result, many parents opted out of the public school system altogether, choosing instead to place their children in private schools or to try home schooling. In recent years, many school districts have tried alternative approaches to voluntary desegregation instead of involuntary busing; schools of choice, especially magnet schools, are often key features of such programs.