Few issues are as controversial as school busing. Initiated more than 40 years ago as a means to resolve social injustice against African-Americans, busing remains a hotly debated topic. The state of New Jersey is currently embroiled in an emotional school desegregation battle. New Jersey's experience is being watched closely because of its implications for similar communities throughout the country.
In the 1954 decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools across the South were perpetuating a system of separate but unequal treatment of African-Americans. Thurgood Marshall, the African-American Supreme Court Justice most closely identified with the Brown case, was a former civil rights activist and chief counsel to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The Brown case involved four class action suits filed on behalf of African-American students in Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, and Kansas. The Court moved to dismantle the systems of racial segregation allowed under state constitutions and statutes and to replace them with systems that promoted racial balance. The decision of the Supreme Court in the Brown case was unanimous. Although the basic goals and assumptions of the Brown decision have been upheld by courts over the past 40 years, evasive techniques, "years of trickery, open resistance, and white flight from desegregated school districts," have tainted the ideal of racial integration (Pillets, 1995, p. A-1). The failure of school busing to achieve its lofty goals has even swayed the resolve of the high courts. The 1990s has been termed the dawning of a new age in the Supreme Court's involvement in school desegregation (Russo, Harris III, and Sandidge, 1994, p. 306). In Missouri v. Jenkins (1990), the Court handed down a divided decision focusing not so much on the existence of segregated schools in Kansas City, Mis...