Is busing for school desegregation really going to be a central issue for the Democrats?

That's how it looked in last night's debate, when Kamala Harris lit into Joe Biden for his long-ago rejection of forced busing imposed by the federal government.

I was wondering how much this issue could resonate with younger voters and also how many older voters — old enough to remember what Biden lived through — had any great enthusiasm for moving children about on buses in order to change the racial proportions in various schools.

Researching my questions, I saw that there's one Democratic presidential candidate who must be horrified at this issue rising to the top: NYC mayor Bill de Blasio. I'm reading "Parents Do What the Mayor Hasn’t — Integrate Schools" (NYT):

Mr. de Blasio said his administration would move faster toward a comprehensive citywide plan now that local efforts seemed to be working, but he said it would still be voluntary. “Is everyone going to buy in? No,” he said. “We do not require everyone to buy in.”

The mayor also said the city’s hands were largely tied with segregation in public elementary schools, which are largely zoned by neighborhood and more affected by residential segregation patterns. Busing, he said, “absolutely poisoned the well” in Boston in the 1970s, near where he grew up. “I’m telling you, and I think history is on my side here, you do not want to create a series of conflicts here,” he said.

See also "Segregation Has Been the Story of New York City’s Schools for 50 Years/Low black and Hispanic enrollment at Stuyvesant High School has reignited a debate about how to finally integrate the city’s schools" (NYT)("Last summer, Mr. de Blasio ruled out using busing to achieve integration").

ADDED: Is there room for local experimentation in how to provide equal schooling? I'm reading "'I Love My Skin!' Why Black Parents Are Turning to Afrocentric Schools/While New York City schools are deeply segregated, some black families are choosing an alternative to integration" (from last January in the NYT):

Though New York City has tried to desegregate its schools in fits and starts since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the school system is now one of the most segregated in the nation. But rather than pushing for integration, some black parents in Bedford-Stuyvesant are choosing an alternative: schools explicitly designed for black children.

Afrocentric schools have been championed by black educators who had traumatic experiences with integration as far back as the 1960s and by young black families who say they recently experienced coded racism and marginalization in integrated schools. Both groups have been disappointed by decades of efforts to address inequities in America’s largest school system.

“Some of us are pro-integration, some of us are anti- and others are ambivalent,” said Lurie Daniel Favors, a member of Parenting While Black, a newly formed group of Brooklyn parents. “Even if integrated education worked perfectly — and our society spent the past 60-plus years trying — it’s still not giving black children the kind of education necessary to create the solutions our communities need.”...

With the city’s approval, any principal can adopt a black-centric curriculum — with black teachers, and a focus on black culture in literature, history and art classes — as long as the school complies with state educational standards....

Richard A. Carranza, the city’s schools chancellor, said he is eager to expand a debate he helped start about stark inequalities in schools — even if some black parents don’t agree that integration is the answer. “Often when you talk about integration, it’s about taking black kids out of their schools and sending them into white schools,” he said in an interview. “Rarely is it about, ‘How do you have other kids come into traditionally black schools and find value?’ If there’s a school that says that’s what we want to focus on... I think we should be very supportive of that.”...

The [Little Sun People] school’s founder, Fela Barclift, said she’s spent years telling parents that they can demand more Afrocentric public schools when their children graduate to kindergarten....

In the 1960s, her two younger siblings were bused from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bay Ridge, then a largely white Brooklyn neighborhood, where they were spat on and called names. “School was a tragic experience for them,” said Ms. Barclift.

At Little Sun People, she said, “You see you.”...

Rashad Meade, the principal of Eagle Academy for Young Men II in Brownsville, a public school created to educate boys of color, has spent his career experimenting with ways to do just that. After running the school for a few years, Mr. Meade discovered that his students needed a strong sense of black pride in order to thrive in mostly white spaces after graduation.

“Some of our young men didn’t really know who they were,” he said, sitting in his office under a sign that a showed a red slash through the phrase “N Word.”

So three years ago, Mr. Meade created an identity course, revised the black studies curriculum and added books by black and Hispanic authors to English courses.