Although court-ordered busing ended more than two decades ago, and only 13 percent of students in the public schools today are white, the school district buses 64 percent of its students in kindergarten through eighth grade to schools outside their immediate neighborhoods.
In a gentrifying era when well-educated white people are heading downtown, you hear surprisingly little about America’s oldest and most academic big city, Boston.
You would think that Boston would be the Portland of the East, but it’s not quite. The ultimate success of gentrification is when the gentrifiers’ children can walk to their high scoring neighborhood public schools, but that isn’t close to happening in Boston because its public school system was systematically demolished in one of the hardest fought triumphs of the War on Racism.
One weakness with Boston gentrifying is that, legally, it’s a geographically tiny 17th Century city surrounded by conveniently close-in suburbs that don’t have to bus. So, it’s easy for young parents to say, forget it, I’m not bothering to try to fight for a good student body in my kid’s Boston school, we’ll just move a few miles to, say, Brookline. For example, Judge Arthur Garrity, who ordered the school busing in 1974, lived in nearby Wellesley, which is just as Seven Sistersy as it sounds and was, amazingly enough, immune from Garrity’s own busing order.
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