Desegregation didn't work?
I don't find this too surprising, actually. It would be pretty strange if white people emitted pheremones (or whatever) that improve the educational performance of people around them.
Seriously, it was never about putting people in "the general vicinity of whites". That statement just makes you look foolish.
As far as I know the gap still exists today, 50 years later, with only small changes over time, quite possibly due to changing measurement techniques.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_the_...
Fixed isn't the right word, but segregation still exists in many ways and integration isn't the entire plan but rather a significant step towards a solution.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8yiYCHMAlM&feature=youtu.be...
[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Files/PDFs/Community%20De...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_segregation_in_the_Unit...
I follow footnote 17 and download the paper, and there is nothing in the paper about academic gains. I think the footnote must be going to the wrong place.
I have heard a similar claims elsewhere, but when I looked at the data it is not at all convincing. Here is Professor David Armor, who researched integration and desegregation for decades analyzing the data (From page 93. of Forced Justice):
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"Figure 2.7 shows black and white reading achievement between 1971 and 1990 for thirteen-year olds (most of whom are eighth-graders). In 1971, when most blacks in this age group had been educated in segregated schools, black thirteen-year-olds trailed whites by 39 points. Over the next two decades, white scores remained virtually constant, starting at 261 and ending the period at 262 points. In contrast, black scores rose steadily for most of the period, starting at 222 and ending at 242 points (following a drop of a point in the latest assessment)..."
"A number of studies and several noted educators have invoked the harm and benefit thesis by suggesting that black achievement gains observed in the NAEP might be attributed in part to school desegregation....Ironically, the desegregation explanation has never been tested by examining the relationship between achievement and racial composition of schools using the most appropriate source of data, the NAEP itself. Since the NAEP established achievement trends for blacks in the first place, it makes sense to test the desegregation theory by comparing achievement trends for blacks in segregated versus desegregated schools. If the desegregation theory is correct, larger achievement gains would be expected for blacks in desegregated schools than for blacks in segregated schools..."
"Achievement trends for blacks in desegregated versus segregated schools has only recently become available for NAEP data. ...Figure 2.9 shows trends in reading achievement for black thirteen-year-olds according to the racial composition of their schools. The desegregation theory is clearly not supported by the NAEP data. While blacks in majority-white schools generally score somewhat higher than blacks in predominantly minority schools (although not in every year), the trend in reading between 1975 and 1988- when the largest black gains occurred-shows that thirteen-year-old blacks in predominantly minority schools have gained virtually the same as blacks in majority-white schools. In the case of math trends, blacks in predominantly minority schools actually gain 10 points mare than blacks in majority-white schools. By 1990 there was only a 2-point difference between the math scores of segregated and desegregated black students....This pattern of gains for segregated versus desegregated black students in the NAEP is replicated for other age groups as well."
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That was from 1995. More recent NAEP scores show the same thing -- https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/studies/pdf/sc... The racial achievement gap is the same size no matter the school composition. Black students do little better in schools that are more white. (And that little difference is probably correlation not causation -- higher achieving black parents both have higher achieving kids and are able to afford schools in more white areas, when you control for socioeconomic status the correlation almost disappears).
One of the few John Oliver segments that I actually liked was his one on how so many academic studies are bogus ( http://fortune.com/2016/05/09/john-oliver-scientific-studies... ). There are all sorts of problems with confounding variables, p-value hacking, cherry-picking data, etc. But what he missed is that all the problems he criticizes about health studies also plague the social science literature. And then he does exactly what he complains about when he cites that Rucker Johnson paper. You need to look at the entire literature not just one paper. And you need to put much more weight on papers with clear and straightforward methodology and where other people have checked the math and replicated the results. Rucker Johnson's paper fails on all accounts. It strikes me that Rucker may have made some obvious mistakes, but I cannot tell for certain because he has not published his data and calculations.
To the extent that I myself have looked over the entire literature, my conclusions are in line with these conclusions that were made when the U. S. Department of Education did a review in the 1980s of all the case studies of integration (From David Armor's Forced Justice, page 91):
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"Desegregation did not cause any decrease in black achievement. On the average, desegregation did not cause an increase in achievement in mathematics. Desegregation increased mean reading levels. The gain reliably differed from zero and was estimated to be between two and six weeks [of a school year] across the studies examined. The median gains were almost always greater than zero but were lower than the means and did not reliably differ from zero."
"Studies with the largest reading gains can be tentatively characterized [as having] small sample sizes two or more years of desegregation, desegregated children who outperformed their segregated counterparts even before desegregation began, and desegregation that occurred earlier in time, involved younger students, was voluntary, had larger percentages of whites per school, and was associated with enrichment programs. None of the above factors can be isolated, singly or in combination, as causes of any of the typically large achievement gains."
"Because of the small samples and apparently non-normal distributions, little confidence should be placed in any of the mean results presented earlier. I have little confidence that we know much about how desegregation affects reading "on the average" and, across the few studies examined, I find the variability in effect sizes more striking and less well understood than any measure of central tendency."
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My take is that if desegregation has any impact on achievement, it is small and drowned out by other factors.
Schools have since de facto resegregated due to changes in school districts and disparities in neighborhood demographics. In the aggregate, schools today are actually just as segregated as they were just before the mandatory desegregation, with a few notable exceptions.
From my reading of a lot of the literature, this was not exactly the case. The gap in teacher quality and facilities was part of the rationale, but not the whole thing. If the gap had just been in facilities or teacher quality, the courts and leadership would have just ordered improving the facilities in the black schools, which would have been politically a lot easier.
The primary theory for desegregation, was that segregated schools inherently lead to stigmatization and that stigmatization lead to lower self-esteem and lower achievement.
Here, for instance is from the conclusions of a committee from the state Board of Education in Massachusetts back in the 1960s ( https://archive.org/details/reportonracialim00unit ): "The experience of Negroes in the United States, from the destruction of their familial and cultural ties in the days of slavery to the demoralizing surroundings of the Negro ghetto and the predominantly Negro school, tends to transmit to each generation of Negro children a lack of self-esteem and a low level of aspiration, which are perpetuated and reinforced by the segregated environment of the public school...children attending racially imbalanced schools are aware of their segregated environment and, from that environment, draw conclusions about their place in American life ..."
From the same document, they site an academic sociologist about the problem of segregated schools: "Teachers expect less of the students, the students expect less of themselves, they are traumatized by the sense of rejection which stems from the segregation, hence academic performance cannot be achieved."
You can find similar quotes in the Brown decision, or the sociological work upon which Brown was based (The Carnegie Corporation's book An American Dilemma).
Now, I think that clearly this theory is wrong on multiple levels. And the solutions based on these theories did not work on any level. These theories seem to me like "just so" stories created for politically motivated reasons. It is especially interesting that discrimination has been cited as a reason for Asian-American academic overachievement. (The theory is that if you are discriminated against, you are going to work extra hard to achieve in areas where there are objective standards, such as math). I suspect that this is also something of a just-so story and that discrimination probably doesn't have much of an impact either way.
Sociology is process of rationalizing leftist social policy with the guise of science. In practice, it is just a modern form of Lysenkoism.
There is nothing theoretically wrong with studying human behavior, it is just too easy to always find the answer you are looking for in such an unrigorous environment.
> As a school reform idea, no.
This is a really strange conversation. Imagine the following conversation: "Ending slavery didn't work?" "As an anti-poverty program, no." So that's technically correct, but one has to be conscious of the implied assumptions about what matters.
I'm in favor of desegregation on capitalist grounds. I think it's unjust to legally force me to discriminate if I don't want to. In much the same way, I think it's unjust to force me to use yellow cabs rather than Uber, or prevent me from purchasing services from an unlicensed barber.
If a theory predicts X, and X doesn't occur, that shows the theory to be wrong. The theory should be discarded even if it supports policies I otherwise favor. That's true even if the predictions are on something that's unimportant.
Similarly, if I build a stock market prediction model, and it makes me money but incorrectly predicts how I make money, I'm probably switching it off. The reason is that it is clearly wrong, and will likely lose me money next time.