For decades “desegregation busing” has been one of the more divisive phrases used in American cultural politics. But according to Ira W. Lit, society is still not paying enough attention to what the words really mean.

In his new book, “The Bus Kids: Children’s Experience with Voluntary Desegregation,” Lit examines the impact the 22-year-old voluntary desegregation program has had on some of the youngest students in a California school district.

Lit, a former elementary school teacher and current director of the Elementary Teacher Education Program at Stanford University’s School of Education, argues that schools need to look at not just how they get children from one side of town to the other but how they help them and their families successfully integrate into their adopted schools and neighborhoods.

Lit writes that this transitional event is so important “perhaps precisely because the experience for [the bus kids] is one of transitions; the transitions to primary schools; the transition from one city and one neighborhood to another; for many, the transition from a native to a second language; and the transition from one set of cultural, community and institutional norms to another.”

To understand this experience, Lit talks to the teachers, listens to the experiences of the children and rides an actual bus, where he discovers that he and the driver are the only two caucasians on board. He finds the students jangled from early morning, boisterous bus rides, sometimes without eating breakfast. When they arrive at school, these 4- and 5-year-old students can find neither physical nor psychological rest. They have battled each other, mostly neighborhood kids, for limited space on the bus. They must often deal with not only multiple languages but different cultural expectations, one for home and one for school.

According to the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, there are fewer than a dozen districts with voluntary desegregation programs. Fewer than two dozen more have implemented voluntary plans that work across multiple districts. Meanwhile, an unverified number of schools estimated to be in the hundreds are still under federal orders.

According to Lit, if this notion is expanded to include “choice” programs that allow students to attend magnet and charter schools or schools outside of their district due to No Child Left Behind and provide transportation to and from class, the number of students that find themselves in foreign lands grows exponentially.

While some educators have said they feel that this federal-required program was a long and fruitless experiment, Lit notes that widespread “forced” desegregation busing was relatively short-lived. Within 10 years of court orders, schools were dismantling their systems. Recently, politicians have turned away from this element of educational reform. They’d rather focus on achievement gaps, as exemplified though the No Child Left Behind, Lit notes.

The parents who voluntarily sign up their children for the 60 spots open on the bus each year, rarely see the issue on these racial terms. For them, it’s largely about educational opportunity. The teachers, too, express a sort of color blindness. But, for Lit, integration remains critical to creating a pluralistic society.

With housing patterns, choice and larger social forces segregating racial communities, busing remains “an imperfect means to an important end,” Lit says. Only serious reflection can help make policies for children and schools work, and parents, teachers and children cannot discuss the challenges of racial integration and potential solutions without recognizing that there are racial issues.

In his book and in subsequent interviews, Lit offers only a handful of suggested improvements. Among them, older student liaisons could help ease the newest riders into the world of the bus. School staff greeters could also help guide students from the world of the bus to the world of schools, hosting programs that bridge families from these neighboring communities, and generally looking at the school bus as a continuation of the classroom by placing learning material on the bus.

“We’re spending billions of dollars as a nation moving children from one place to another,” Lit adds. “Why not try to do something while they’re en route to further their education?”

Reprinted from the July 2009 issue of School Transportation News magazine. All rights reserved.