This year, BPS hopes, the buses will run on time

And why would the schools not be of the same quality? This isn't 1965. Please name names. Who would you hold responsible for schools not being the same quality?

Is it newness or adequacy of facilities?
Training of staff?
Diversity of educational options?

Or is it just, in your mind, test results?

Test results track socioeconomic status no matter what you do at a school. When you argue that a brand new, well-supported school i(say, Orchard Gardens in Roxbury or Renaissance Charter in Hyde Park) s a bad school just because the test scores are worse than they are at kids that serve white, middle-class kids, what you're really saying is that it's a bad school because poor and dark kids go there.

The successful result of a 'turnaround' at Orchard Gardens is test scores still lower than they are at the Kilmer. Continuing to disparage schools like this in our city's less wealthy and more minority neighborhoods isn't helping anybody; it's just punishing kids for being poor.

Poor kids are much better off with the city investing resources in their local schools to meet their needs than they are being pawns in a busing-supported shell game of 'hide the dummy,' where schools seek to "improve" (increase their test scores) by attracting a different (higher SES) demographic, resulting in a spreading out of low-SES kids to whichever schools are less sought-out across the city, where they can be ignored equally.

Instead, look to Orchard Gardens and Renaissance Charter to see the way it should be done. If the schools in minority neighborhoods had been this good in the sixties, busing never would have happened in Boston.