Rucker Johnson, economist and professor of public policy at Berkeley, has written an important new book called Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works.
It arrives at an opportune moment, as the Disruption Movement (AKA Reformers, Deformers) has decided that school segregation is a very good thing indeed, because charters are more segregated than public schools. A charter operator in Minnesota recently argued in comments here that segregation was just fine so long as it was voluntary. That was to rationalize the fact that Minneapolis has purposely segregated charters for children who are black, white (“German immersion”), Hmong, Hispanic, and Somali. Most recently, a charter supporter said that it was time to abandon the promise of the Brown decision, because it had not been realized.
In short, embrace the status quo, don’t fight it.
It is thus refreshing to read Rucker Johnson, who briefly summarizes his findings in an article at Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet.”
Do not be content with reading the summary. The book is rich with history and anecdote, as well as Johnson’s meticulous research about the long-term and significant benefits of school integration.
He writes:
How did we get here? How has de facto Jim Crow been nurtured back to health?
Policy amnesia. We have forgotten the efficacy of the boldest suite of education policies this country has ever tried: school desegregation, school funding reform and Head Start.
School desegregation and related policies are commonly misperceived as failed social engineering that shuffled children around for many years, with no real benefit. The truth is that significant efforts to integrate schools occurred only for about 15 years, and peaked in 1988. In this period, we witnessed the greatest racial convergence of achievement gaps, educational attainment, earnings and health status.
Using nationally representative longitudinal data spanning more than four decades, I analyze the life outcomes of cohorts tracked from birth to adulthood across several generations, from the children of Brown to Brown’s grandchildren. The slow and uneven pace of desegregation, school funding reforms, and Head Start programs across the country created a natural “policy lab,” that allowed for rigorous, empirical evaluation of integration, school funding and Head Start.
The research findings are clear: African Americans experienced dramatic improvements in educational attainment, earnings and health status — and this improvement that did not come at the expense of whites.
Sixty-five years after the Brown decision, our nation is at an inflection point. Do we intend to pursue the goal of equal educational opportunity for all or do we want to cling to the discredited policies of our apartheid past?
Do we listen to those with a vision for progress or to those who embrace a failed and corrosive status quo?
Rucker Johnson explains the way forward. Read his book. Send a copy to your members of Congress.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
On your recommendation I read Cutting School by Noliwe Rooks. Yes integration works. I hope you saw the series we at Governing did on how cities continue to foster segregation, not only in schools.
Mark
Sent from my iPhone
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Mark, please send the link to the series in Governing.
“The research findings are clear: African Americans experienced dramatic improvements in educational attainment, earnings and health status — and this improvement that did not come at the expense of whites.”
Unfortunately, a cost/benefit analysis misses one of the most important aspects of integration: learning about people different from yourself.
Perhaps the author talks about non economic benefits, but imany arguments for and against social programs and many other things (eg, clean water and air, a stable climate, biodiversity, etc) hinge on economic “analysis”. If it has a quantifiable economic benefit that is obvious to economists, it’s good and if not, it’s not and is usually discontinued or not pursued to begin with.
The same thing happens in education.
“Bird Counts”
Murmur of earth
Concerto of birds
Value and worth
Uncounted by nerds
SDP, he writes about non-economic benefits
That’s good to hear.
Too many people ignore the non economic benefits of policies like integration.
Economic arguments can be good (sometimes) but they too often take the focus off of more important unquantifiable things.
Americans have short attention spans and a lack of seeing things to fruition. I was born in 1964 and had much older siblings. We had Hippies, Black Panthers, race riots, Viet Nam war protests….lots of protests and lots of social change. The young protesters grew up, got jobs, got married, bought homes, had children and there wasn’t enough time for the attention to the social causes. Integration stagnated, the MLK movement stagnated, the Viet Nam vets came home. Next up in the mid-late 80’s we got HIV and the Gay Rights Movement which led to much social change for a large group of people. Again, people grew up and the movement stagnated. Our attention gets diverted by life and as time goes on, the stagnation actually becomes a back tracking to the original societal ill. It’s a vicious cycle that plays out with every great progressive movement.
“I was born in 1964”
Young pup! 😉
This will make you feel young, Duane. I got a call from the daughter of an old friend I knew from North Carolina. She reported the death of her mother last weekend, who passed at the astonishing age of 103.
I am adding this title to my hs library’s badass book collection. It grows every year.
awesome
There is no question that segregation undermines the life chances of nob-white children. However, that is not all. Segregation was/is the trusted enabler that keeps privileged in power and the rest of us fighting amongst one another for left overs.
Well said! I don’t know whether “nob-white” was a typo or a coinage, but if it was the former, it was felicitous error!
segration is not good for all kids bc the schools are so diverse now they cannot get any stable curriculum in the schools….too many diverse cultures all wanting a part of the american dream but the chaos will cause the system to explode and fail
I wonder if I need to get my sarcasmometer recalibrated?
Integration works! Poor students that attend school with middle class students benefit in a multitude of ways. They attend clean, safe, well resourced schools where the norms of positive behavior and work habits are modeled. I worked with minority ELLs from some of the poorest countries in an integrated school district. These students arrived in elementary school with little to no schooling and sometimes few social skills. By the time these students graduated, most of these students were headed to college or some other post-secondary training. I know first hand that integration in a good school district can change students’ lives for the better. I witnessed the whole process because I worked in the same school district for many years. Some of our students have become teachers, social workers, business people, even a lawyer, an engineer and at least two doctors that I know of.
an important point: we often talk of integration/segregation by race, but it is often the rich/poor divide which controls the masses
There are certain realities – poor black and brown children predominate schools in our urban cities – middle class white kids predominate in suburbs. Because of Supreme Court decisions you can’t force inter-district integration. And while research show “benefits” to poor black and brown kids from integration, and certainly all kids would benefit from being in a diverse environment, the benefits are mostly from the social and economic capital that middle and upper middle class families bring to a school and school district. I have no doubt the Black and Hispanic families only want the best for their children. But I find it condescending that Black and Brown families need the agency of white folk to succeed and excel. How about we just accept that we fairly fund all our schools, that we take into account the higher needs of our urban kids, that we give incentives for our best teachers to teach in our urban schools. That we have smaller class sizes for higher needs kids. That we lengthen the school day/year – for more time for academics/enrichment activities and accepting the reality that our working poor need someplace safe for their kids to be while they work. We can’t keep having these huge disparities in funding where in CT our wealthy suburban districts spend $25,000 per kid (which is a bogus number because pensions are funded by the state and not reflected in the district budget and teachers don’t get social security) and some of our urban districts spend $14,000 per kid. We can’t phase in a constitutionally mandated “equitable” funding formula over 10 years. I want to do what we can do now and not wait for the messiah to come!
It’s abundantly clear that integration benefits poor and minority students. The trick, though, is to convince affluent white people that it benefits their kids because they’re the ones who have the power to make it happen. Most affluent white people I know are not convinced, at least not along economic lines. Most people will say they want their kids to be around black and brown kids, but they have to be the “right kind” of black and brown kids.
It benefits the white kids just as much. I’ve seen it–their growth into tolerant adults. See my note below.
The middle class white students did not suffer any personal or academic loss from being in classes with poor, minority students. If anything, they benefited as well. They learned about people that were different from them. They learned acceptance and tolerance that should serve them well in such a diverse country as ours. I always enjoyed seeing the sports photos from our high school. Many of my former students were outstanding athletes on the soccer, football and track teams. If fact, that is how a number of my poor students got to college from an athletic scholarship.
I agree, but, again, the trick is convincing most affluent white parents. Many such parents don’t want their kids in with kids that they perceive to be disruptive or violent – i.e., poor minority kids.
Not all poor and not all poor minority students are the same. Most of my foreign black and brown students were aspirational, and most of the parents were caring. The school district also had middle class black students that did well in school too. The group that had the most difficult time with conduct were the poor, black American boys as many of them were angry from dysfunction in the home. Luckily, in an integrated school with a variety of economic levels, this group was small, and we gave them support.
It seems that lots of white boys are angry as well, and some of them have access to AR-15s. They seem to be the students that are attacking their schools.
I think isolation feeds a lot of people’s false perceptions about different groups of people.
I’m reading Professor Rucker’s book as we speak, so I haven’t formed an opinion about it. But I need to register a complaint here.
It’s simply wrong and dishonest to frame his work and mine as some Mandingo fight, and to mischaracterize my position.
I have never said that I think segregation is just fine. I’ve made an important distinction between the government assigning people on the basis of race to inferior schools, and minorities choosing schools that they think are culturally-affirming, or culturally safe for their students.
It’s unnerving that a historian (especially a white historian) would ignore the long line of black thought that sees Brown v. Board as an advancement in some ways, and a step back in others. You can’t ignore that post-Brown black schools were closed, black teachers were fired, and black principals were demoted. Black educational capital was lost and never recovered.
We can’t pretend that life was without problems for black students who entered many schools that didn’t want them or didn’t know how to teach them. Black educators of the time, and historians, complained vigorously about the misfiring of desegregation.
If you disagree with me, fine. But can you disagree with W.E.B. Du Bois, Dr. Kenneth Clark, Derrick Bell, Tommy Curry, Vannessa Siddle Walker, and other black scholars – dead and alive – who have added a considerable scholarship that should make us resist a simple story about integration is good and black schools are bad?
The reason we need integrated schools is not just about achievement. We need integrated schools so that student learn to live together with dignity and respect. We need integrated schools so that parents have a reason to join together to fight for a common goal: more equitable, better funded schools.
Derrick Bell was a close friend. We had many long discussions about the resistance to integration and the persistence of white racism. I am fully apprised of his work and of the other scholars you mention. The obstacles have been enormous, but the vision must not be renounced. As Professor ably demonstrates, integration works. Our society is backsliding in many ways these days, including not only civil rights but environmental protection, women’s right to control their bodies, immigration fairness, and many other areas. We can’t embrace backsliding. Another article posted yesterday on The 74 explicitly endorsed racial segregation. I say no. I oppose racial segregation.
You make an important point. And we’ve seen a lot of this is recent years–the closing of traditionally black schools with black leadership in Chicago and New Orleans, for example, to make way for charters. So, here’s a question: what can we do BOTH a) to retain black school leadership while b) getting the positive results that come from integration–from people getting to know one another? What are your policy suggestions? A very interesting and important topic!
“School choice” has not solved the problem of racism. In fact, charters are more segregated. Private schools are selective, and it is often the schools, not the parents, that get to do the choosing. In some cases there is no choice in a so-called choice system Students get assigned to a school, and, unfortunately, white students are selected for a better school than many black students. At least, public schools aspire to provide equity, and many schools do more than that. Where I worked, the school district encouraged minority students and helped prepare them for advanced classes. We actively sought to eliminate the famous academic “gap.” Our goal was always to challenge all students and move them in a positive direction.
The charter industry has now embraced apologetics for segregation since so many charters are segregated. They are asserting that segregation is a goal, not a problem.
Thank you for this important insight for laymen like myself: “post-Brown, black schools were closed, black teachers were fired, and black principals were demoted. Black educational capital was lost and never recovered.”
One’s mind jumps immediately to post-Katrina NOLA schools, where 7k mostly-black teachers were fired, an entire school system was replaced by a patchwork of charters mostly-run by imported white newbies—generations of black local tradition & capital lost not just in property, but reflected in the decimation of those community hubs that were the local schools.
We know intellectually that this was a phenomenon of vulture capitalism preying on the disruption of natural disaster, no doubt aided & abetted by pols on the take. But what smarts bitterly to this day is the blatantly racist/ classist justification one often reads on comment threads: that NOLA’s schsys was the dregs of the dregs anyway, better to start from scratch. A position based on nothing other than test scores that reflect SES (like anywhere else in the country). Zero assessment of the social value of nbhd-based schools, now lost forever—let alone parish-by-parish comparison of old vs new. Heck I’ve read NOLA can’t even count up its school-age children anymore, to see how many have fallen through the cracks of the new decentralized privatized system.
Thanks for that important comment about the damage that white Reformers did to the black community in NOLA. In Chicago and other cities, charters have been the leading edge of gentrification, creating schools that are “good enough” for white newcomers and that screen out local black kids. From 2000-2016, 200,000 black people left Chicago.
The best book to date in the tragedy of the Chicago school closings is Eve Ewing’s eloquent “Ghosts in the Schoolyard.”
Permit me to tell a story. I had an uncle from a small town in Southern Kentucky. The uncle was a racist, and he ended up sergeant of an infantry platoon in Korea. The Army had been recently integrated. Well, as my uncle told this story, he made that one black man’s life a holy hell. Whenever there was a nasty or dangerous job to be done, he assigned it to that guy. Then, one day, the platoon was under heavy enemy fire, and my uncle stepped on a land mine, which blew one leg to kingdom come. The other guys in the platoon weren’t about to try to extract him given the heavy fire they were under. One said, “Leave him; he’s dead.” The black man field-dressed my uncle’s injury and picked him up and carried him, under fire, to where he could be helicoptered to safety and treatment.
My uncle was fitted with a prosthetic leg, which he wore for the rest of his life. After the war, he looked up the man who had saved him. He knocked on the fellow’s door, and the man’s wife answered. My uncle explained who he was and why he was there. The woman turned and talked to her husband. My uncle heard him tell her, “Tell the racist SOB I don’t want to see him.”
My uncle became mayor of his little town, and throughout the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, he was that rare thing, one of its local white, Southern champions. He had learned his lesson.
I tell this story for one reason: racism comes from fear which comes from ignorance. You can only hate like this people whom you don’t actually know. I saw this first-hand in the school where I taught recently in Southern Florida. Local white kids off the farm would come into the school with all kinds of prejudice (“They have to be taught, before it’s too late, before they are six or seven or eight”), and then, in school, they would actually get to know black people, to become friends, and by the time they were Seniors, the racism had vanished–the kids just didn’t see color with regard to their friendships, their romantic interests, and so on.
Comic book supervillain, former reality TV star, and part-time President Donald Trump has been working overtime to make racism acceptable again in the US, and, at the same time, our schools are becoming dramatically resegregated. We need to fix both of these issues, first by voting the racist out of office. It ought to be a clue to people that our current President is a hero to pimply skin-head Aryans.
The history of the civil rights movement is about studies and what they show, but it is also about stories, narrative as you so properly put it in one of your essays. This multiplicity of stories makes it hard to use history as a bludgeon. So history is a massive collection of stories. Thanks for yours.
“history is a massive collection of stories.” yes, yes, yes. https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2018/11/30/what-makes-humans-human/
Roy, I’m a fairly bright fellow, but it wasn’t until I was out of high school that I figured out that history was everything recoverable that ever happened to anyone, and not just a list of battles and their dates, and that a LOT of that stuff was pretty darned interesting!
Part of the fear stems from isolation that people experience in their schools and communities. I grew up in Philly and attended integrated schools. I am white, but I spent most of my career working with black and brown students. Many times I was the only white person in the room. So what. Here’s what I know. Despite cultural differences, people are pretty much the same, and race is an artificial construct that creates barriers. People have much more in common than they may believe.
“…race is an artificial construct that creates barriers,” says Retired Teacher.
Indeed. So let’s repeat and let it sink in.
Race is an artificial construct that creates barriers.
Ret T: while race is correctly put biologically as a false construct, it is none the less powerful. All characteristics that render humans in a mood to generalize are fodder for trouble. Pandora opened the box, and I. It was only one thing: logical fallacy.
Bob: I have been studying history nearly 50 years, sometimes seriously. I grew up in a family oriented toward history, and it came to define who I was, even during my 29 years teaching math. That said, it was a long time before I really understood the passing of the generations, how a brilliant thinker like Newton could dabble seriously in alchemy or how my extraordinary grandfather could be totally mystified as to why having to use the back door would offend Those with African ancestry. You are not alone. The world grows into history. Well, some of us do, others get elected president.
Pandora opened the box, and in it was only one thing: logical fallacy. Wow, Roy. That’s is beautifully said and an important insight. I’m going to be using that one!!! (with attribution, ofc!)
retired teacher I can relate to your 12:27 post—as a young woman I worked in a man’s profession (thanks to affirmative action) & was almost always the only female in the room. In recent decades teaching PreK often most of my students are non-white– but 3-5y.o.’s almost don’t count here because thankfully few so young have built up ideas that they might be treated differently—that I am “other.” Men back in mid-‘70’s-mid-80’s most definitely had prejudices: re women, incl colleagues, vendors & clients. I never had difficulty, because I didn’t see them as “other,” just enjoyed them as people. I respected their experience; I behaved professionally & they responded in kind.
That uncle, Edvert, was a good ole boy. No question about it. But I remember, near the end of his life, when I was was visiting and we were talking and the subject of the outsourcing of US jobs to India and China came up. Ed said, “Well, I reckon those people have families and have to work, too.” He had quite the change of perspective from 18 to 78!
The real question about integration is not whether it worked to our satisfaction or not. We just had to do it. It would have been much better if a courageous group of legislators had crafted legislation to get it done rather than depending on a Supreme Court that is still today the object of derision by those who object to its “activism” when they would rather it sat on its hands. (Modern Supreme Court critics seem not to mind judicial activism if the activities go their way). But Brown vs Board and a few other decisions that attempted to level the playing field saved us from ourselves.
It has been argued that the Cold War ended segregation. I subscribe to this interpretation of events that led an embarrassed JFK to lecture the country from the bully pulpit about the danger of continuing to look like a racist bully in a world that was churning out new African nations we preferred to align with the US rather than the Soviets. Kennedy clearly saw Jim Crow as the Achilles heel of American foreign policy.
The end of Apartheid in South Africa removed one of the more vicious and blatant attempts to enshrine racism in a body politic, but racism is not dead. The Chinese treatment of the Weigers, the Myanmar treatment of the Rohingia, and the rising anti-semitism in Hungary gives us pause as the return of hostility seems everywhere around us.
We had to desegregate. In Richard Wright’s Native Son, the lawyer for Bigger Thomas argues that the society that condemned Thomas rather than confronting itself was doomed. Wright got it perfectly. Any society that does not try to cure its disease dies from it. Even if the cure is not perfect, we must try the cure. The only cure to apartness is togetherness. We better all hang together or we will hang ourselves.
Roy, as usual, you are on the mark.
Beautifully said, Roy.
I have always thought it a shame that more people have not listened to the two part This American Life/Pro Publica podcast The Problem That We All Live With (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-one/act-one-0 )
I am never sure what to make of this subject. I guess because schools were “de facto” integrated where I grew up (despite residential segregation), & not much different in med-sized Northeast towns today – if there are only a handful of elemschs, 2 midschs & 1 hisch, you’re going to get to know the black kids—and the poor kids—in your town. (Obviously if charters/ vouchers make it into such a town, that can change quickly—one of many reasons I’m in favor of one public school system.) So forcing integration has always seemed an issue for big cities & the once-officially-segregated schools of the South.
We already know that the South has ingenious ways of maintaining or exacerbating segregation; their segregation academies have given way to “school choice” [same difference]. How do you roll that back? And how on earth—practically speaking—do you integrate schools in our many residentially-segregated cities of 1-several million? Picture trying to bus kids in & out in gridlocked, far-flung LA… Small cities maybe: Montclair/ Upper Montclair NJ successfully integrated by making the entire school system 100% magnet [sadly now being chipped away by charters].
I guess the point is: Dept of Ed needs to decide once again that integration is a plus, ed-achievement-wise. They could replace their current incentives for accountability systems– & grants for charters—w/incentives for locally-developed integration plans… But I tend to see the whole issue as one more example of the nation expecting schools alone to solve major social/ economic issues of inequity w/its inevitable fallout of segregation by race & SES.