If "forced busing" — assignment of kids to schools on the basis of race — ended tomorrow, what would that make Boston's schools?

Lousy.

Which is to say, there would be little change.

School busing no longer arouses the passions it did in 1974, when demonstrators stoned buses, the schools were virtual armed camps, and the Boston School Committee was deemed so iniquitous that the federal courts ran the system. In 1986, much of the controversy was quelled when the courts returned operation of the schools back to the School Committee. At the same time, a new student assignment plan was developed, called "modified choice," that broke up the city into zones and let parents choose which schools within those zones they wanted to send their kids to.

With only a few changes, modified choice is the assignment plan that Boston still uses. The School Department claims that the vast majority of parents receive their first, second or third choice. But many — at least ten percent — don't. Sometimes they don't because the schools are filled up; the Quincy School, for example, is chosen by many more than it can handle because it is perceived (correctly) as one of Boston's better schools. But in other instances, parents don't get the school they wanted because the city still enforces racial guidelines at each school. It's that piece of the school assignment plan that sticks in the craw of many.

"End busing," has been the decade-long mantra of the vast majority of City Council members when it came to education. Indeed, the council's president annually refuses to vote for the education budget because of busing. But that goal has new impetus these days. In part, that's because it seems increasingly clear that federal courts will no longer allow assignment on the basis of race; if challenged, Boston's modified choice plan could very likely be declared unconstitutional. But it's also because there is increasingly a consensus around the notion that all parents — not just white parents — want a say over where their kids go to school. Parents of elementary school children in particular are very uncomfortable sending their child to an unknown and unwanted school far from home.

The consensus stops there, however. There are two, very different solutions that politicians and parents give voice to. One is "neighborhood schools." The other is "parental choice."

Those arguing for neighborhood schools envision an assignment plan that places kids in the school closest to their homes. Thus, children living in South Boston would go to school in South Boston, children living in Mattapan would go to school in Mattapan, and so on. There would be no need for busing (at least, for regular education children; special ed kids would still need transportation) because every child could walk.

But such a plan necessarily means that parents would no longer have a choice — short of moving to another neighborhood — over where their kids went to school. That's intentional. The motive behind neighborhood schools is not to give parents choice or even to improve the schools. It's to build stronger communities.

It's a compelling notion:  schools serve as a focus of community life. Neighborhood schools would build more cohesive communities. In a sense, it returns Boston to where it was more than 30 years ago: a city of discrete and insular neighborhoods that is more parochial than it is cosmopolitan.

The alternative strategy is to give parents more, not less, choice. Under this scenario, parents would choose schools they thought best for their kids. Now one component of that choice would plainly be proximity; all things being equal, parents would prefer a closer school over one that's far away.

But all things are rarely equal. Schools differ in quality and, more precisely, in their cultures, size, teaching methodology, curriculum, administration, physical plant, and staffing. These attributes, and others as well, will affect parents' choices.

What's intriguing about a system that maximizes parental choice is that (unlike neighborhood schools) its goal is quality education. In effect it creates a market of schools, all of which compete against one another. Bad schools won't be chosen; good schools will be.

Boston has tentatively begun to experiment with this model, using its own pilot schools (of which there are only 11). In addition, the state has been pushing this idea through state-chartered public schools.

Real parental choice is, however, a radical idea — much more radical than neighborhood schools. The implication is that today's centralized system gives way to one that is decentralized. Instead of all-the-same, cookie-cutter schools, each school would be unique.

Like many radical notions, a system of choice like this is deeply upsetting to those who are part of the existing establishment. It will be resisted mightily. But as Boston rethinks busing, the time is plainly right to rethink schooling as well.