Sitting in the City Council’s education committee, like a chained pit bull ready to bite, is a plan to put school busing on the November ballot. A proposed referendum question would ask whether voters believe that, beginning with the next school year, school assignments should be race neutral and made instead on the basis on parental choice.

The proposed referendum is a bad idea. It is non-binding, so it functions less like public policy-making and more like a poll. Like many referenda questions, it poses a question that can only be answered yes or no; it allows for no shades of gray and for no recognition of the legitimate competing concerns (parental choice and a fear of resegregation) that Boston’s schools face. Moreover, it risks becoming a referendum not on assignment factors, but on integration and Boston’s long struggle to heal racial antagonisms. And because of this, it risks being counterproductive, undoing considerable progress that has been made over the last several years and, perversely, hurting current efforts to reform the school assignment process.

Twenty-five years ago, in the wake of incontrovertible evidence that the Boston School Committee has intentionally segregated the city’s schools, federal courts ordered a massive, mandatory desegregation plan. Key to this plan was the assignment of students to schools outside of their neighborhoods.

For good reason, the mandatory desegregation plan was called “busing.” Buses were nothing new in Boston. They had been used for years to bring children to schools where it was too far to walk. But under the new scheme, buses were the primary means used to transport students to their new schools. It was buses that took children to schools far across town where they, and their parents, knew no one. It was buses that tore apart the local schools that had served as the focus of the civic and social life of many of Boston’s residential neighborhoods.

Busing had a noble purpose: the elimination of racial segregation. The theory was flawed, however, and its effects were perverse. Rather than lose their children to strange schools, parents took them out of the Boston school system. Often they sent them to private or parochial schools. Perhaps more frequently, families simply left the city and moved to towns where neighborhood schools were still a reality.

The numbers bear this out. In 1970, 641,071 people lived in Boston; 96,696 children attended Boston public schools. Today, only 574,282 live in Boston and the number in our schools has dropped about a third to 63,131. Those who left the public schools were those who could afford to leave. Those left behind were predominately poor, predominately black and Hispanic.

Instead of integrating the system, busing made it more segregated. In 1974, 52% of the kids in Boston’s schools were white; today that number has dropped to 19%. Indeed, although Boston is today still 55% white, our schools are 81% minority. This is what we call integration?

Busing not only destroyed once vital neighborhood schools, it undermined support for public education in the city. It drove people out of Boston and, for all that, still failed to create an integrated learning environment. None of that helped our children. None of that helped the city.

Boston does not have to keep busing its kids. So few people seem to be aware of this that it almost seems a secret. But it’s true. In 1989, the same federal courts that first ordered busing in 1974 declared Boston’s schools “unitary,” or desegregated. Mandatory desegregation, or its successor plan, so-called “controlled choice,” is not required any more in Boston. The city now has complete latitude to adopt whatever school assignment plan it wants.

What should that new plan be? A model used in many urban areas across America is a combination of neighborhood schools and magnet schools. Provide parents, particularly those of elementary school children, with the option to send their child to local schools. Provide them also with the right to choose to send their children to magnet schools, centers of excellence, designed to attract students from around the city. Draw boundary lines around neighborhood schools that, to the extent possible, allow for a racially, ethnically and economically diverse school population. Build new schools — and Boston already plans to spend $400 million over the next five years to build new schools — in places that would enhance the diversity of the student population.

Blacks and whites in Boston know this history, and all are ready for change to a system that rebuilds communities, gives parents more choice and keeps are schools as ethnically diverse as possible. The referendum merely asks whether we should change. We already know that answer to that question. The task before us now is how and when.