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Comment by frgtpsswrdlame | Hacker News Reader

That depends on what you classify as failure. It failed in the sense that the white and wealthy mostly fled to the suburbs and reversed any progress integration had made. It succeeded in the sense that in the places and times where schools were well integrated the racial achievement gap closed.

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The racial achievement gap closed? That would be a huge story and I would be surprised if I missed it...unless you mean the gap closed within the school (i.e. not relative to society at large) because the remaining whites achievements were lower than the average before they fled, i.e. selection bias :)

To save people from litigating busing, there was a thread on this earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13902960 (I cited evidence saying that busing did not close the gap).

Integrated schools help to reduce racial achievement gaps. In fact, the racial achievement gap in K–12 education closed more rapidly during the peak years of school desegregation in the 1970s and 1980s than it has overall in the decades that followed—when many desegregation policies were dismantled. More recently, black and Latino students had smaller achievement gaps with white students on the 2007 and 2009 NAEP when they were less likely to be stuck in high-poverty school environments. The gap in SAT scores between black and white students continues to be larger in segregated districts, and one study showed that change from complete segregation to complete integration in a district could reduce as much as one quarter of the current SAT score disparity.

https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomica...

Not only were they more successful in school, they were more successful in life as well. A 2011 study by the Berkeley public policy professor Rucker C. Johnson concludes that black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re also healthier — the equivalent of being seven years younger.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/integration...

Desegregation and Black Dropout Rates J, Guryan. 2001. has some good data on the decline in black dropout rates in districts with integration.

Why I don't find that evidence convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13904403

Care to summarize? It's a wall of quotes.

Summary from the post: "My take is that if desegregation has any impact on achievement, it is small and drowned out by other factors."

Sorry for the late response. I haven't gone to the links yet but the quotes in italics give me pause. They seem to be at pains to state things in a way which looks like it means one thing but may mean another. The second sentence is a nice start to an investigation but is not evidence really, just a temporal association. The third sentence is about poverty, not integration.

The fact that the gap is larger in segregated districts is difficult to interpret without knowing if the comparison is to the population as a whole (i.e. blacks in the district to whites as a whole) or within the district (i.e. blacks in the district to whites in the district). I'd also want to know if how those districts compared to other districts. Were these high achieving schools? Low achieving? Somewhere in the middle?

I guess if I were to boil it down it'd come to this. If integration doesn't help minority students then you have to believe in seperate but equal. If you don't believe that our schools are seperate but equal then you should be in favor of integration so that everybody has ownership in the problems our schools and children face.

But I mean let's be honest here, are you really going to accept that integration worked? I'd like to believe it but experience tells me probably not. Because of the backfire effect I don't think you're likely to be convinced by some guy on the internet quoting social science research (especially since no research is perfect.) So here, let me give you a more human element. Here's three This American Life episodes, the first two are explicitly about integration and the third is about kids from a poor, public school visiting a rich, private school which is slightly less topical but helps to get the point across I think. Just listen and consider please.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/563/...

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/550/...

Do you have any pointers to data showing this close? Most of what I've seen shows the gap being shockingly persistent in the face of intervention across a wide variety of systems, but I'm always looking for more.

I reccomend Malcolm Gladwell's podcast on the subject. He makes a strong argument that the failure to integrate teachers to any degree caused a large part of the failure. Some of his sources are on the page, but I haven't reviewed them well personally.

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-per...

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