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> Further, don't underestimate the power of white flight. It's happened many a time before.

I think it would be pretty surprising if this hyper-integration plan didn't result in a sudden and substantial drop in the quality of education in the nicer schools (more classroom disruption which is, anecdotally from the several teachers I know, a huge problem in lower-income schools, more teacher time spent catching the new students up, et c.) and I 100% guarantee that any parents, of any color, who could afford to leave those districts to unaffected ones or switch to private schools would do so ASAP. So yeah, white (and/or not-poor) flight, instantly. And probably some fairly intense protest action by any who couldn't afford to get their kids out.

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I live in a city-adjacent suburb in Chicago, Oak Park, directly butting up against Austin, the largest high-crime overwhelmingly black neighborhood in the city of Chicago.

Oak Park is tiny and known for its school system.

The western side Austin Ave, which divides Chicago from Oak Park, hosts an unbroken row of multi-family dwellings, many of them large apartment buildings. The occupants of those buildings are people who would otherwise live in Austin, but move to Oak Park to get their kids into Oak Park schools.

This has been going on for decades in Oak Park, and we continue to have excellent schools, and continue to be a high-status magnet for professionals who want to live somewhere connected to the CTA trains but not part of CPS schools.

It doesn't happen in Kennilworth or Wilmette, because those suburbs aren't directly adjacent to troubled neighborhoods in Chicago. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that the carrying capacity for lower-income students of those suburbs --- the majority of Chicago suburbs, which like Wilmette and unlike Oak Park, aren't city-adjacent --- is any less than that of Oak Park.

So, no, I don't think your hypothesis about inner-city kids disrupting suburban schools is accurate, nor do I think "instant white flight" is going to happen.

"White flight" was an irrational, racist reaction to housing integration. It's not a law of nature; it was/is a growing pain of the US getting over centuries of segregation.

Multiple Houston suburban neighborhoods have been ruined by "integrative" public housing developments. The situation you're describing sounds rather different (more organic, in particular). We also can't expect uniform results across the board.

> "White flight" was an irrational

What's irrational about it? The suburbs created as a result of "white flight" are objectively vastly safer than the places the now middle-class suburbanites were fleeing from.

The dominant economic power reacted to de jure segregation by creating a regime of de facto financially-enforced segregation. It's awfully nervy of you to blame the victims of that effort for its effects.

Ah, so the fleeing middle class is to blame for protecting their own interests by choosing to peacefully leave the bad situation they were in?

It's not like the people fleeing the inner cities salted the earth when they left. They simply refused to put up with increasing crime and poverty. I'm not sure how one would rationally consider anyone to be a "victim" of that peaceful outmigration.

Yes. Racist white people who fled an influx of black neighbors after the elimination of redlining are to blame for deliberately trying to recreate segregation.

Not even a difficult call.

> Racist

Why do you think they were motivated by racism? Safety and superior economic environments were far and away the most pressing factors that led the middle class to flee declining urban areas.

> deliberately trying to recreate segregation.

They weren't deliberately trying to create segregation; they were trying to protect themselves and their families, both physically and financially. De facto segregation may have been a consequence of that, but we have no reason to suspect that it was an explicit goal.

Yes: white flight is obviously the product of a cascade, seeded by the belief of a core group of virulently anti-black racists that any incursion of black residents in all-white neighborhoods will bring crime with them, and bolstered by the rational belief by other white residents that the reactions of their racist neighbors will decrease property values, spur an exodus from the neighborhood that harms the tax base, and eventuate the crime that the racists were concerned about.

Like I said: I'm willing to concede that not all of the participants in white flight were wearing Klan hoods. What I'm not willing to do is blame their victims for the systemic, perpetual disadvantage this phenomenon created.

Lots of white flight was caused by the massive urban crime wave that lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The main reason we term the situation "white" flight is that the whites could afford to move out of the city, and most blacks could not. If the majority of blacks had as much money as whites, they would have moved away too.

It's telling that when this crime wave ended, whites started to move back to the cities, even though the racial composition of the cities they were moving back to was less white than it was when they left. If they left in the first place because of racial diversity, they would not have moved back -- but they did move back, and are continuing to do so.

I'm not prepared to dignify the argument that white people left neighborhoods that were beginning to integrate, en masse, to form new all-white enclaves --- and then fled again when those enclaves started to integrate --- as a purely rational reaction to crime.

The idea that the arrival of black people in a homogenous white neighborhood is a harbinger of intractable crime problems is itself an example of systemic racism. I don't care if you feel it's justifiable racism.

There are places in the US --- St. Louis is probably the best example --- where you can observe white flight creating strata of suburbs like the rings on a tree. Ferguson was one of those suburbs: 99% white in 1970, majority black now, but (until very recently) with institutions controlled by whites.

If white people are re-colonizing the inner cities of some of these places, I'm not prepared to see that as a purely hopeful sign (or, worse, a sign that white flight was itself benign or justified). Rather, I'd worry that we're progressing towards an outcome that France has seen in its own cities, with vital city centers ringed by poor, disadvantaged suburbs.

> The idea that the arrival of black people in a homogenous white neighborhood is a harbinger of intractable crime problems is itself an example of systemic racism. I don't care if you feel it's justifiable racism.

Actual crime arrived in those neighborhoods. There is no shortage of statistics to prove this.

Of course it did. Wealthier racist white people turned those neighborhoods into ghettos.

Wealthy people do not turn their own neighborhoods into ghettos.

By leaving them en masse and ravaging their tax base, yes, they did.

They did not leave before the crime came to their neighborhoods. They left after the crime came.

You need to get your cause and effect in order.

No, they did not. This is well studied. Crime rose in neighborhoods that were endogenously majority-black, but suburbanization of white residents did not track crime in previously white, then integrating neighborhoods: it was a reaction to the perception that crime in those integrating neighborhoods would track the rates of crime in endogenously black neighborhoods.

People saw high crime in all-black neighborhoods created by the great migration, lost their shit, and moved to escape the black people. In doing so, they fucked up the tax base for their previous cities, and created new ghettos. Predictably, crime followed their exodus, (falsely) confirming the predictions of the fleeing white people, creating a cascade.

(High crime in endogenously black neighborhoods is also not hard to explain: well-integrated neighborhoods in the Chicagoland MSA have low crime rates, but crime rates in places like Englewood are sky-high; this is a legacy of disadvantage and lack of opportunity and mobility that traces directly from virulent racism. Simply put: you systemically disfavor a population, and the areas inhabited primarily by the disfavored population have poorer outcomes. Who'd have thunk it?)

Are you arguing that crime would not have increased in the newly-integrated neighborhoods if the white residents had not moved away?

Could you respond to my comment? It refutes your argument about causality.

Your explanation of crime in endogenously black neighborhoods is reasonable, but it only explains why crime existed in the first place, not why it increased so much in the 1960s through the early 1990s.

The endogenously black neighborhoods did not experience erosion of the tax base due to white flight, because there were few, if any, whites living there in the first place. So, why did crime increase dramatically in the endogenously black neighborhoods during the time period we are talking about? Whatever the reason is, why wouldn't it be the same reason crime increased in the areas subject to white flight?

I find it very unlikely that the endogenously black neighborhoods experienced an increase in crime for one reason, and the nearby white flight neighborhoods experienced an increase in crime for a totally different reason (such as erosion of the tax base after white people left). Obviously the erosion of the tax base made things worse, but unless that caused all of the increase in crime, something else was going on.

If you are going to argue that crime increases after white flight were a self-fulfilling prophecy and would not have occurred without white flight, that's a pretty extraordinary claim.

I'm sorry, I think I made it sound like I was speculating. No, I was reciting the literature on this question. Your claim, that the causality of crime and white flight were reversed, is false. Can you address that (or just concede it) before moving on to new arguments?

Answer a straight question: was 100% of the increase in crime a self-fulfilling prophecy caused by white flight that would not have happened otherwise?

If you answer in the affirmative, you'll need to bring some proof.

This is how I'm addressing your argument about causality. If any of the crime increases happened before white flight, or if the increases would have happened anyway, then you are wrong about causality. The best you can do is to claim that white flight made a pre-existing increase in crime worse. That is not what you have argued up to now.

You made a straightforward claim earlier in the thread: that white flight was caused by crime, and not a causative agent for crime. That claim turns out to be straightforward to refute, because it's a basic question that social science researchers have been evaluating since the late 1970s.

Your claim was wrong.

Since you appear to be unwilling to even address the rebuttal of your argument, let alone concede the point, I'm not interested in the rest of your arguments.

This thread is deep enough already.

It's pretty telling that you won't give a yes-or-no answer to a simple question that gets to the very heart of your argument.

How is "white flight" irrational?

Have a listen to The Problem We All Live With[1] a podcast episode from This American Life. It speaks to this specifically and comes to very different conclusions. Ie. integration works.

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...

So shame them for being classist and racist. Public education is a public investment.

You're welcome to shame people moving their kids to better schools as classist and racist. It might work!

With that said, I have some doubts that such a policy would accomplish what you might hope for. Most people, even those who wish people wouldn't, understand and sympathize with parents trying to get the best possible education for their kids.

"Better schools?" They'd be the same schools, just with some additional lower income kids.

I am operating in the context of a *parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12694649

I'm open to the possibility that the measured quality of a school does not change if you make significant changes to its constituent populations, but it seems like a large enough question to not be assumed in passing.

Sure going from 1% low income to 10% low income will have the short term effect of changing the overall average test scores. But how will it change the quality of education for the existing students? It'll be the same teachers, same curriculum, same facilities, etc.

The educational experience of students is not dictated wholly by teachers, curriculum, and facilities.

You are coming dangerously close to implying that children in poorly performing school districts are intrinsically unschoolable.

That can't be what you mean to imply, so I think maybe step back and examine how you've ended up in an incoherent position.

I don't think anyone is unschoolable. I do think that changing populations can mean changing how resources are allocated, and this can affect more than just the part of the population that has changed. For example, I've seen schools cut special needs education programs because populations have shifted and resources haven't.

"intrinsically unschoolable" might be going to far, but I think it's generally agreed upon that children in poorly performing school districts are (on average) more difficult to teach. It's also generally agreed upon that students have an impact on their peers. This is the whole rationalization for better integrated schools in the first place.

We can certainly debate how many (as a % or raw number) challenging students a "good school" can import before overall quality begins to degrade. But I don't think that it's especially controversial to say that degradation will happen at some point.

Yes, but it's not agreed upon why that's the case, and that's Rayiner's point. If the problem is that students are forced to compete academically while being raised in broken neighborhoods, moving them out of those neighborhoods might be a better solution than pouring more money into the schools.

I don't know that I agree with the intervention he's recommending, but the underlying point he's making makes sense.

There is considerable evidence showing this is more or less true. "Intrinsically unschoolable" is a strong and incorrect statement, but "less schoolable" yields similar conclusions and is well supported by research.

Consider Raj Chetty's work; he shows that the primary determinant of student performance is intrinsic student qualities, but that teachers also matter a fair bit.

http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf

http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/w19423.pdf

Why would you consider this factual claim to be an "incoherent position"?

The papers you've cited make essentially the opposite case as your comment does. Chetty's work suggests that a single year of teaching under a high quality teacher raises the lifetime earnings expectation of a student by $50,000.

The papers show large and significant effects from student quality as well, a position you described as "incoherent". The fact that teachers also have an effect doesn't change this.

If you were actually correct, and teacher quality was the primary determinant, then we could skip VAM and just use raw test scores to measure teacher quality.

I.e., if teacher A had a class of underprivileged black students while teacher B had a class of rich Asian students, and teacher B got higher test scores, that would be evidence teacher B was a better teacher. Is this actually your belief?

Can you point out the section of the major Chetty VA study that distinguishes student circumstances from student intrinsic quality?

The context of the thread you've jumped into is what the best intervention to circumstance might be to improve outcomes for students. You appear to be begging the question.

I don't know what you mean by "intrinsic". Kalium said:

The educational experience of students is not dictated wholly by teachers, curriculum, and facilities.

You seemed to disagree with his claim. Due to this apparent disagreement, I interpreted "intrinsic" to mean something other than teachers, curriculum and facilities. The Chetty paper, and the entire need for VAM (as opposed to just measuring raw test scores), shows this to be true. Do you believe this to be false?

Maybe somebody else can restate the point I'm trying to make in a form that will make more sense to you.

Ironically, yummyfajitas definition of "intinsic" to mean "not teachers, curriculum, nor facilities" would thus include life circumstance.

For example, the kid's quality of life outside of school. Which is demonstrably improved by helping poor kids with rent. Which I believe he is trying to argue against.

Is it clear to anyone else that 'yummyfajitas is implying that the kinds of students who attend poorly-performing schools are genetically incapable of academic performance?

I may be misreading. I'd like a second opinion. I'd rather not assume people I'm arguing with hold revolting core beliefs. This would not be, like, the first time I'd jumped the gun on something like this: I myself hold a (probably faulty) core belief that the median HN participant is likely to host retrograde beliefs about race, which is unfair of me too.

I'm genuinely curious why you are asking third parties to put words into my mouth. Why not just ask me?

If you want a summary, I don't share your religious faith that God ensured an identical statistical distribution of genes across all subpopulations when he created man. But Kalium's argument is not dependent on this - there are more things in the world than simply teachers, curriculum, facilities and genetics. For example, poor people might be disproportionately bad parents (perhaps they exhibit many bad behaviors which also make them poor) and this might cause their children to be disruptive in school.

That's a concrete theory that's directly compatible with your secular faith in statistically identical genetic distributions, but still supports Kalium's claim.

My question still stands.

If you do _not_ believe humans possess "identical statistical distribution of [academic performance] genes across all subpopulations" why hide such insight? It'd be interesting to hear where in the gnome the "academic performance gene" sits.

And have you also "discovered" a correlation between this academic performance gene and melanin content? Or gender too? Surely you don't want to deprive us of such important "discoveries".

First let me say that by moving my family with two young kids to Oak Park, I was almost definitionally participating in the phenomenon that turn suburban public schools into de facto private schools. People move to Oak Park because it's on the Green and Blue CTA lines; it's a suburb that feels like living in a particularly nice residential part of Chicago. You move to Oak Park because you want all the perks of Chicago without exposure to its school system.

So with that having been said, and recognizing my own role:

Why exactly should we sympathize with parents who react to problems in their school systems by using their economic leverage both to exempt their own kids from those problems and also, by altering the tax base for their original school system, making those problems worse? Why is that praiseworthy? It doesn't seem praiseworthy to me. It seems to me like just another of those little pragmatic immoralities we all undertake regularly.

We have few problems seeing the problem when it takes the form of kids going to Choate and Bowdoin. But at the smaller scale we all deal with, we seem unable to recognize the same thing happening. We seem to believe can't possibly be a part of the problem. But, of course, we are.

I don't mean to crucify anyone for doing it. After all, I did it too. But I think we can reasonably draw the line at rationalizing or valorizing the de facto privatization of good public education in our country.

I don't know if I'd call it praiseworthy. I do think it's the sort of pragmatic immorality that a great many parents are happy to take on for the perceived benefits gained. As a result, it's easy to oppose for the large-scale effects but difficult to oppose as individual choices.

I think we should be careful about the difference between rationalizing and understanding the decisions parents make. The two are readily confused on the best of days, and political discussions about school quality generally don't happen on the best of days.

We all seem to have an enormous moral blind spot when it comes to our children competing with other children.

This is a tricky topic, but I wouldn't call it a moral blind spot per se. I think that we would have a problem with certain forms of unfair competition. You can't hire a smarter kid to take the SAT for your kid and expect others to feel ok about it. On the other hand, you are welcome to hire a tutor to help your kid score better on his own(1).

I think that most people tend to think that parents have a responsibility to help their kids as much as they can within fairly wide constraints. Parent's loyalty to their children above the children of others is one of the fundamental building blocks of our society like it or not.

1. Though some studies seem to indicate this won't really help.

It's hard to see a bright line where competition becomes unfair, but straightforwardly buying your own children into a better life than will be made available to children without means is problematic.

This is a mountain range of slippery slopes, of course, but the fundamental moral point here seems pretty obvious.

I agree that there is no bright line here. Nor are there bright lines in many other areas of life where inequality rears its head.

Is it fair that I can straightforwardly buy myself a better life than is available to others without means?

Is this more or less unfair than than what I can buy for my child? If anything I would say that the personal luxuries I buy for myself are more unfair than the educational opportunities I can buy for my kid. At least the latter is in pursuit of human capital formation and not just luxury spending.

I think there's a moral difference between what you do with the product of your achievements for yourself and what you do to impact the opportunity of the next generation.

Which is essentially just a long way of saying that the moral weights on inequality and mobility/opportunity aren't the same.

I dunno. I hear what you are saying and I agree that lack of opportunity is a problem. I just have a hard time convincing myself that making sure my kid goes to a good school and gets a good education is morally fraught. Tough subject for sure.

Like I said: I made sure my kids went to a decent school too (I drew the line at private school, but, like I said, my kids go to what is essential a de facto private school based on the neighborhood they live in).

I'm not prepared to crucify people for making these kinds of moral compromises, but I think it's important not to go the other direction and valorize them.

Uh, yes? It is entirely reasonable to prioritize one's own children over the children of others. You're not required to be philanthropic all the time, especially not at the expense of your family.

People tend to be very short-sighted about their children versus everyone else's. Tragedy of the commons readily results.

the fundamental problem seems to be tying public school funding to taxes at a very local level. i was surprised when i found out that was the system in america; it seems like a very blatant rich-get-richer measure.

You're assuming that this results in upscale cities and towns having better outcomes by spending more per pupil. In fact, yes, the outcomes tend to be better; the schools are often better by both objective and subjective measures. But the correlation with spending is very murky.

"Bad" urban schools with often poor student outcomes often have significantly higher spending per pupil than the tony suburban schools. There are lots of reasons why this would be the case of course. But it's not exclusively, or even primarily, a matter of relative spending levels.

Not only that but you will find some people in the US go though ridiculous mental gymnastics to claim that money makes no difference to education. While at the same to they put huge effort into moving into a neighbor with high spending on schools.

It is not enough to defend privileged with taxation, institutions and laws but they must use astounding double-think to convince themselves that the result is somehow fair. Part of that self-indoctrination is putting huge effort into convincing everyone around them of these absurd views.

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