Despite declarations that busing to desegregate schools failed in the 1970s and 1980s, that era actually saw significant improvement in educational equity. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in the early 1970s, there was a 53-point gap in reading scores between black and white 17-year-olds. That chasm narrowed to 20 points by 1988. During that time, every region of the country except the Northeast saw steady gains in school integration. In the South in 1968, 78 percent of black children attended schools with almost exclusively minority students; by 1988, only 24 percent did. In the West during that period, the figure declined from 51 percent to 29 percent. But since 1988, when education policy shifted away from desegregation efforts, the reading test score gap has grown — to 26 points in 2012 — with segregated schooling increasing in every region of the country.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The case is interesting, through I would compare it to a similar but failed experiment in Sweden where students of got free points in their grade if they applied to a program where there would be a minority. Why did one have some success and the other had none? I would go back to the things I wrote above about what to do and what not to do.

Providing free buses to people who live far away from desired schools do not rub the act in the face of people who live near those schools and do not need buses. It might cause a negative side effect that school buses becomes a symbolic proxy for being poor, making those intended to use them less likely to agree to use them, but it extends the option available for those who only have few options to begin with. In contrast, free grade points is much more displayed directly in the face of other fellow students, both to those who get into the program and those who were rejected with similar grades.

Free buses does not provide any ambiguous borders or rules once the student is at school. The requirements and expectations of the student is same as any other student. There are few situation where uncertainty and doubt can occur between buss and non-buss student, except maybe for times of heavy snow or road congestion. To my knowledge, when students who depend on buses can't reach the school and thus given a pass to skip school, the other students are given the same pass. If we go back to the Swedish example, requirements and expectations get ambiguous when people get in through other means than merit, causing tensions between those who got in through grades and those who got in through the free points system.

Both systems has generalizations, so I would say that a way to improve the desegregation efforts would have been to skip the qualification of race and simply provide the busing to any individual that is below a set amount of wealth and live a distance far away from the desired school in order to need a bus. Such change might have saved it from being abandoned in 1988.

For a majority individual to 'feel ok' with a minority jumping the line they must fundamentally believe their merits don't matter as much as the minority's group identity. Likewise, the minority must believe their merits don't matter either, only their group identity matters. Therein lies the problem, 'color blindness' and 'affirmative action' are diametrically opposed. The harder you push for the one is a push away from the other. Which is 'harder' for a society to learn - their merits don't matter or their group identity doesn't matter (in the context of say getting a job)?

It's such a shame, because we want as a society the hiring manager to go to the reservation job fair looking for applicants. But the manager knows that there are precious few 'qualified' applicants and we recognize they will tend to maximize the efficiency of their time.

Of course, it isn't an accident there are few qualified applicants in those places. Poverty has a holistic effect on a group. My hope is that groups can somehow separate financial poverty from poverty of ambition to try to break these cycles and make progress. Every 'group culture' has a unique ethos, many poor groups had rich ambition and rose out of their poverty over time. To me this is the only way I can see real progress being made without giving up on meritocracy (and by extension technological/scientific progression).

So the question becomes - what does it look like to cultivate group ambition?

1. Generational support: believe your situation is not guaranteed for your children. Fight for them. Sacrifice for them.

2. Education/medical: we pour resources into certain underprivileged places (not groups, physical locations). This isn't going against meritocracy, it's a long-term investment.

3. Recognize that human civilization is at its finest when people believe they can rise above their circumstances, despite all the external and internal factors pulling them down.

> Add social and economical support based on lack of those resources on an individual level, from the bottom up

How do you apply this to a system that has favoured certain groups for so long that the whole structure has close to none of those it supposedly wants to help?

You need representation from groups that need help in order to help. You need representative individuals in the organisation to guide it. You may have to positively discriminate at first, or else you won’t have any representative to draw from.

There are abundant examples of butchered attempts at ‘helping’ when those with good intent have no idea (this thread gives plenty of cringe inducing examples).

The key, I think, it making it clear what the role is and what is wanted to those that are there in that role.