I welcome the opportunity to respond to Mr. Cooper's comments [Cooper, W. W. 1976. The cluster plan for desegregating public schools or a little less Weltanschauung, please, for some more adequate description. Management Sci. 22 (11, July).] about the paper that Mr. Thompson and I wrote on...

Busing of children to achieve racial balance in schools is an important and controversial social issue. In studying the school busing problem, various groups (e.g., operations researchers, educators, sociologists, psychologists) proceed quite differently because of their different...