Walzer / Dewey / Education Michael Walzer\'s

Walzer / Dewey / Education

Michael Walzer's position on school busing in Spheres of Justice is rather ingenious. Before we look more closely at it, though, I'd like to recall the context for his argument in favor of what used to be called "forced busing" (a derogatory term which Walzer distances himself from). The issue of using school busing to help to remedy the effects of racial segregation was the subject of two controversial Supreme Court rulings issued during the Nixon presidency: these were Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) and Milliken v. Bradley (1974). In Swann the Supreme Court found that it was constitutional to use busing for the purposes of overcoming the effects of poverty and housing inequality which led to racially homogenous populations within certain school disticts. The revisitation of the same topic in Milliken only three years later reflects the Supreme Court's establishment of a standard as to whether Swann would apply, i.e., busing of students across school district lines was only permissible if there was solid evidence of legally actionable racial segregation within all the contiguous school districts. Walzer begins his argument from a lofty-sounding perch but it is only because he is trying to face up to the complications involved when large-scale segregation persists as the function of numerous social and economic factors. For example, he notes that

I assume a pluralist society: so long as adults associate freely, they will shape diverse communities and cultures within the larger political community. They will certainly do this in a country of immigrants, but they will do it elsewhere too. So the schools, while they respect pluralism, must also work to bring children together in ways that hold open possibilities for cooperation.(Walzer 223).

In other words, Walzer recognizes that it could be increased freedom of association (rather than institutional racism) which results in the segregated communities: he is careful to invoke America's traditional role as a refuge for immigrants in order to make the point that, even among white Americans who immigrated from elsewhere, there might have been linguistic barriers which led to the effective construction of a segregated social group. Yet Walzer emphasizes that the "cooperation" fostered by schools as part of a socially reformist agenda is his way of getting beyond voluntary segregation caused by freedom of association and pluralism. But Walzer quickly comes to defend the busing policies specifically:

This is all the more important when the pluralist pattern is involuntary and distorted. It is not necessary that all schools be identical in social composition; it is necessary that different sorts of children encounter one another within them. This necessity sometimes requires what is called (by those who oppose it) "forced busing" -- as if public education must for some reason dispense with public transportation. The phrase is in any case unfair, since all school assignments are compulsory in character. So, for that matter, is schooling itself: forced reading and forced arithmetic. (Walzer 223-4).

Here the derogatory rhetoric which terms the subject of the Supreme Court's 1971 and 1974 rulings "forced busing" is addressed directly, and exposed as nonsense when the essence of schooling is in compulsory activities and codes of behavior. Although this threatens to make Walzer sound briefly like a quasi-authoritarian, he immediately clarifies his position, to distinguish between those cases in which the government intervention by means of busing is wholly justified:

It may still be true that busing programs designed to meet the requirements of strict proportionality represent a more overt kind of coercion, a more direct disruption of everyday living patterns, than is desirable. The American experience suggests, moreover, that schools integrated by bringing together children who live entirely apart are unlikely to become integrated schools. Even strong schools may fail when they are forced to cope with social conflicts generated on the outside (and continually reinforced from the outside). On the other hand, it is clear that state officials have imposed racial separatism even when actual living arrangements called for, or at least allowed for, different associational patterns. This kind of imposition requires repair, and repair may now require busing. It would be foolish to rule it out. One would also hope for a more direct assault upon tyrannical distributions in the spheres of housing and employment -- which no educational arrangement can possibly repair (Walzer 224).