Rucker Johnson

Many Americans believe that the racial integration of US schools was a social experiment doomed from the start. But in fact, economist Rucker C. Johnson contends, school integration efforts in the 1970s and 1980s were overwhelmingly successful, and our retreat from them has had dire effects on our society. 

In Children of the Dream, Johnson unearths the astonishing truth about integration’s spectacular achievement in America. Drawing on original longitudinal studies going back to the 1960s, he shows that students who attended integrated and well-funded schools were more successful in life than those who did not—and that this holds true for children of all races. Indeed, Johnson's research shows that such schools were nothing less than the primary engine of social mobility in the decades after the civil rights movement. Yet in the face of racial backlash, America gave up on integration. Since the highpoint of integration in 1988, we have regressed, and segregation again prevails.   

Explaining why integration worked, why it was abandoned, and how it can be revived to the benefit of all, Children of the Dream offers a radical new perspective on American social policy. It is essential reading in our divided times.

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We compare the adult outcomes of cohorts who were differentially exposed to policy-induced changes in Head Start and K12 spending, depending on place and year of birth. IV and sibling-difference estimates indicate that, for poor children, these policies both increased educational attainment and earnings, and reduced poverty and incarceration. The benefits of Head Start were larger when followed by access to better-funded schools, and increases in K12 spending were more efficacious when preceded by Head Start exposure. The findings suggest dynamic complementarities, implying that early educational investments that are sustained may break the cycle of poverty.

Title I funding has been the largest federal program of K-12 education for the past 50 years with the objective to eliminate the educational disadvantage associated with poverty. I provide new evidence on the long-term effects of school spending from Title I on children's educational and adult economic outcomes. To study effects of Title I, I link school district spending and administrative data on Title I funding to nationally-representative data on children born between 1950 and 1977 and followed through 2011. Models include controls for birth cohort and school district fixed effects, childhood family and neighborhood characteristics, and other policies. I find that increases in Title I funding are significantly related to increases in educational attainment, high school graduation rates, higher earnings and work hours, reductions in grade repetition, school suspension/expulsion, incarceration, and reductions in the annual incidence of poverty in adulthood; effects on educational outcomes are more pronounced for poor children.

Since the Coleman Report, many have questioned whether public school spending affects student outcomes. The school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused dramatic changes to the structure of K–12 education spending in the United States. To study the effect of these school finance reform–induced changes in public school spending on long-run adult outcomes, we link school spending and school finance reform data to detailed, nationally representative data on children born between 1955 and 1985 and followed through 2011. We use the timing of the passage of court-mandated reforms and their associated type of funding formula change as exogenous shifters of school spending, and we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts that were differentially exposed to school finance reforms, depending on place and year of birth. Event study and instrumental variable models reveal that a 10% increase in per pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public school leads to 0.31 more completed years of education, about 7% higher wages, and a 3.2 percentage point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty; effects are much more pronounced for children from low-income families. Exogenous spending increases were associated with notable improvements in measured school inputs, including reductions in student-to-teacher ratios, increases in teacher salaries, and longer school years.

We estimate the effect of changes in incarceration rates on changes in crime rates using state-level panel data. We develop an instrument for future changes in incarceration rates based on the theoretically predicted dynamic adjustment path of the aggregate incarceration rate in response to a shock to prison entrance or exit transition probabilities. Given that incarceration rates adjust to permanent changes in behavior with a dynamic lag, one can identify variation in incarceration rates that is not contaminated by contemporary changes in criminal behavior. For the period 1978-2004, we find crime-prison elasticities that are considerably larger than those implied by ordinary least squares estimates. We also present results for two sub-periods: 1978-90 and 1991-2004. Our instrumental variables estimates for the earlier period suggest relatively large crime-prison effects. For the later time period, however, the effects of changes in incarceration rates on crime rates are much smaller.