LynNell Hancock Re-Visits J. Anthony Lukas’s Powerful Book about Boston’s Busing

I have read hundreds of books on education, many of them about racial injustice and segregation.  But I confess that I have never read J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, the story of Boston’s violent and acrimonious fight from 1968 to 1978 about school desegregration and busing.

LynNell Hancock’s new review of Lukas’s book in the Columbia Journalism Review convinces me that I need to pull that 650 page book off my shelf as a reading project for this winter.  “Court-ordered busing that was meant to reverse stubborn de facto school segregation nearly ripped apart the social fabric of that historic city.  It exposed the raw residue of Yankee guilt, black anger, and Irish immigrant antipathy—the churning clash of cultures that defines America.  The country’s racial enmity showed its ugliest face not on the steps of an Arkansas high school this time, but in genteel Boston, the intellectual capital of the abolitionist movement, the ‘cradle of liberty.'”

Hancock is director of the Columbia School of Journalism’s Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism.  She describes Lukas’s respect for nuance and complexity as he tracked three Boston families in the years after Boston’s buses began to roll and the book’s original publication in 1985.

Hancock describes her own experience re-reading the book all these years later: “Reading it today is still as daunting as it is inspiring.  It feels in the end, close to an act of despair.  There is considerable evidence that creating district-wide diversity can be a powerful reform tool but few reformers now consider it seriously.” ” No federal incentives encourage districts to create equity across their populations. Today, about one-third of black and Latino children are attending racially isolated schools.  Child poverty inches up every year.  It’s not exactly the outcome the U.S. Supreme Court justices envisioned when they ruled in 1954 that separate schools were inherently unequal.”

“Yet the education reforms favored by the last two White House administrations have aggressively avoided any policies designed to remedy the disparities. Instead the most popular charter school networks champion a ‘no excuses’ curriculum, which is based on the belief that educators use poverty as an excuse to avoid offering rigorous teaching to minority children. President Obama’s signature Race to the Top policy places a premium on creating charters and ranking teachers based on student test scores.  No incentives are built in for districts that are raising achievement scores through large-scale integration.”

Hancock believes Lukas explores the deeper issues that will continue to defeat today’s technocratic fixes: “He wasn’t so much looking for truth in its purest sense, or the quaint satisfaction of solutions, as for something much bigger, much messier.  He was looking to understand the fundamental roots of America’s fears and tensions, where they originated, why they are so often about race…  It is also an ambitions tableau reaching back in time to the beginnings of Puritan America, through the civil rights era to the present, circling back to the origins of slavery, of Ireland’s turmoil, and of church history, legal history, the press, and urban politics.”

Hancock’s article is very much worth reading.