Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good. See after how long their outcomes become equivalent. Do so at different grade levels to measure the convergence time versus age of displacement.
And now for the actual experiment: how do you impactfully present such results? I assume no outcome. Just the existence of an outcome.
I posit that priceless data would be worthless in American society.
Amongst progressives, busing is considered one of the only effective mechanisms for reducing educational inequality.
That it only moderately alters test scores is also true, but that is far, far from being the same thing as a failure.
Busing is largely out of favor because it’s inconvenient for parents. Even I, who live in Berkeley precisely because it still buses-to-desegregate its students, was relieved when the school lottery meant my daughter would attend our nearest school.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
>> Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good.
there's different types of 'good' and 'bad'.
for example, the whole IQ thing came into the light in the UK when poor Jewish kids from the ghetto (bad) were clearly outperforming their non-Jewish counterparts from more affluent (good) neighborhoods.
How many parents, who probably paid a lot of money and work two full-time jobs to live in the "good" place so their kids could go to the good school, are going to be OK with this experiment? Do you plan to force them, if there aren't enough volunteers to get statistically significant results?
30 percent of children in San Francisco attend private schools — the highest rate of private-school attendance in California, and the third-highest in the nation
All school is private. Sometimes you pay tuition, which seems better for accountability, and sometimes you pay more for housing. That people send their kids to school is unfortunate. It seems like if you took the daycare out of it, school would not be structured the way that it is at all. It is a source of daycare for children first, and an attempt at productively using that time second.
The thought experiment isn't doing the bussing (effectively impossible as others have noted). The thought experiment is how would you present the resulting data.
I'm not a fan of bussing. It is unfair to the good kids. "Bad" kids know how to deal with other "bad" kids. They grow up in that environment and know the rules of the game.
Good kids grow up in a different environment. The consequences of not knowing to handle oneself around "bad" kids are very high. There is no doubt that on average "bad" kids are much bigger bullies with lower empathy.
The consequences of not knowing how to conduct oneself around good kids as a "bad" kid are much lower in severity. For the most part, the parents of good kids set limits to the aggression of their children. For example, the biggest social rejects at my upper middle class schools weren't ever really bullied. People pitied the complete rejects and most people thought anyone who would bully the rejects is a complete douchebag.
I can't imagine how the social rejects or even the normal nerdy kids at my high school would have fared at a "bad" school.
Then there is the minority immigrant issue. Segregation is good for certain minority groups that do not have the language skills and cultural knowledge to integrate into America. They segregate themselves into a separate community that can provide support for its members. Desegregating these communities and their children will have negative effects.
The children of these immigrants will have the worst time dealing with the "bad" kids because they may have stunted language skills and lack cultural knowledge and context to be able to effectively navigate bad situations.
And to get a better picture of the winners and losers:
- > 90% of African Americans are born in America (and presumably have parents, family and connections who know English and understand American culture).
- Spanish is ubiquitous in the USA and the Hispanic population is huge. Hispanic people have a much lower need to congregate into a community compared to other minorities.
Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good. See after how long their outcomes become equivalent. Do so at different grade levels to measure the convergence time versus age of displacement.
And now for the actual experiment: how do you impactfully present such results? I assume no outcome. Just the existence of an outcome.
I posit that priceless data would be worthless in American society.