Was school integration a “failed experiment”? Is the impact of policy limited when it comes to education?  

In this episode, Goldman Professor Rucker Johnson debunks the myths around school integration and shares insights from his new book, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works.

In this second episode of our series on Policy Design and Implementation, Sarah Edwards (MPP ’20) speaks with Professor Johnson about the way well-designed policy can lead to significant outcomes for all children. The conversation covers the impacts of historic desegregation, the dangers of current resegregation, and the best combination of policies to achieve diversity and educational excellence.  

As with many of the issues that Talk Policy to Me covers, there is more to the story of integration and race in schools than we could cover in this short episode. Here are a few resources we suggest if you are interested in diving deeper:  

Check out Children of the Dream, available at your local bookstore 

Read “It Was Never About Busing” by Nikole Hannah-Jones 

Explore the Washington Posts’ map on school district diversity 

Transcript

Rucker: [00:00:00] Segregation has historically long been policy engineered. It's not something that just happens or it's not just a reflection of parental choice, but there's actually policies that have been designed intentionally for those aims. And at the same time, it would stand to reason that if those were man made, then they can be reverse engineered to be inclusive.

Sarah: [00:00:31] That was Rucker Johnson Goldman School professor and author of the new book Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. Rucker's book covers both policies around integration, but also how an integrated approach to policy design is the most successful way to improve educational outcomes for all children. I'm Sarah Edwards and this is Talk Policy To Me. Today on the podcast talking school integration policy. Before we dive in, we wanted to ground the conversation in a bit of context. I'm here with my co-host, Khalid Khaldi.

Khalid: [00:01:17] All right, Sarah, so you talked to Rucker Johnson about school integration. Now, considering I haven't read his book and some of our listeners may not be familiar with his work, what what's some of the context surrounding the conversation that you guys had that we should be keeping in mind as we listen?

Sarah: [00:01:34] That's a great question. Our first few episodes this season, we're talking about policy design and implementation, and I think Rucker's work really fits well within that frame because it's not just why we need these policies, but it's how we can specifically design policies in education to result in positive outcomes for all children. Another thing that I think is really important, kind of the timeline of how integration went down and how while it was like not what anyone would actually want in real life now, it's actually been really useful to go back and use that to study it. So it took court cases, it took several mandates and so it kind of happened unevenly across the country and even in different cities. And because of that unevenness, Rucker’s able to like look at a kid in one school at the same year that was being integrated as a kid in another school that wasn't.

Khalid: [00:02:27] You know, somewhere after the late 1980s, which was the peak of school integration, a couple of Supreme Court decisions lifted those mandates for school districts to integrate students. And there was also several decisions that made it unconstitutional for school districts to consider an individual student's race when deciding where to enroll them. Is that correct?

Sarah: [00:02:49] So there were some of it is that there were these federal mandates for desegregation that like had a time limit on it for reasons that do not make any sense to me. So it's less that there's decisions being made that, you know, we don't need it anymore, but that they're timing out. But then you're right. Also, some of these Supreme Court decisions I know the Seattle, United, and Milliken or two of the really big ones that people talk about that have kind of changed the way even if you do want to be ensuring that you have an integrated school, it's changing the way that you can do that.

Khalid: [00:03:22] I think that's a great segue into talking a little bit about kind of the push back to school integration. Whenever there is a focus on policies that have to do with racial equity in America, there tends to be a white backlash. And in this case, the white backlash centered around this concept of bussing that was the term being used to kind of manufacture a controversy around school integration. So do you want to talk a little bit about bussing and and what the significance of that word is?

Sarah: [00:03:50] You really hit the nail on the head like it's it never was about bussing. It's just that it was this area that parents could really push against instead of being outwardly like white parents saying they didn't want their kids to go to school with black kids. When we have segregated neighborhoods to ensure that kids are going to diverse schools like that requires moving kids from their segregated neighborhood to like a point where they can mix. Right. But it's like it's it's never been about the bussing.

Khalid: [00:04:16] The issue here was that they were being sent on busses to schools that had black children and Latino children and Asian children. And that's kind of where the pushback was. So it was it was definitely a fallacy. Is there anything else that we should keep in mind as we dive into the interview?

Sarah: [00:04:35] I think something that I want to call out, just because it took me a minute to kind of wrap my head around it. So Rucker's book is called Children of the Dream Why School Integration Works, and you can read that quite literally as school integration is actually a success as opposed to a failure that it's often kind of talked about in the media. But the other part is Rucker’s whole thing about integrating policies that integrated policies when applied to the school setting are really what is the most effective outcome. So I'm really excited for us to dive in and kind of listen to what he has to say about that. There's something that I've heard you say before that I think really captures what we want to be looking at today. I heard you say the how matters as much as the what. So this season for Talk Policy To Me, we're thinking about policy, design, and implementation. And I think that concept fits really, really well within that. And I'm hoping today we can kind of touch on both the what and the how and a little bit of the why as well. So what sparked this for you?

Rucker: [00:05:40] Yeah, I think, you know what what's exciting to me and what propels my work in general, I think is trying to figure out what types of research and insights help us realize the promise of equal opportunity. If you think about children and their access to opportunity, it's really in the areas of education and housing that we've had the more difficult struggle in achieving that promise and realization of equal educational opportunity in particular. And so I was aiming to try to create significant barriers to ensuring that all children have access to the best school resources, the best access to teacher quality, the best, you know, reductions in class size. And a lot of that doesn't tend to happen in segregated systems. It was first a research question around was integration really a failed social experiment, or does school spending matter? Do early pre-K investments really have long term impacts, or is the conventional wisdom that those were failed policy initiatives and that they have not led to lasting impacts? Was that the correct empirical fact, you know, and building science to create answers to that that would otherwise be more vulnerable to the politicization of those questions?

Sarah: [00:07:09] Definitely. And not to spoil the punch line. I think the answer to all of those things as they didn't fail.

Rucker: [00:07:15] Yes. Yeah. And I think a big part of our failure is really a failure of patience to both invest in a sustained and equitable way, beginning in the earliest years, but also to foster a commitment to integration even in the face of opposition. I think as a society we generally thought of segregation and the problems of it as something that are specific to minority or low income families, and it's really a problem that's affecting us all collectively.

Sarah: [00:07:46] You know, I feel like you could have written this book in a very, like, academic, very wonky kind of way, but it seems like it was very purposeful that you included these personal stories. You made it feel like very accessible. I think this book lays out very clearly the ways in which these programs can work.

Rucker: [00:08:03] Yes, I hope that. Thank you for that. I think that I was excited about. There's a lot of living history with us, and I think the stories actually propelled me to dig deeper, to think about my own commitment to these issues and to see civil rights and education, to see education as a civil right and something that is worthy to tackle head on. And some of that means that the hands off of federal approach to integration that we've witnessed over the last 25 years, where we've basically accepted highly segregated educational environments for our kids by race and class, and we've just kind of accepted that that's something policies impotent to address or a political will to address it. And instead, what we've kind of said instead is that we're just going to try to funnel more resources to those higher poverty districts. And while money matters and those resources are certainly important, I think a big part that's missing is the role of teachers and the role that concentrated poverty. Schools have demonstrated not to be able to create equitable educational opportunities. And it's partly what Thurgood Marshall said at the very outset that separate is inherently unequal.

Sarah: [00:09:30] And kind of you mentioned these three different areas and how they how they really work in concert, the desegregation, school finance and pre-K. What would be the outcome of addressing all three of these areas at once as opposed to addressing each area individually?

Rucker: [00:09:50] So if you think about the three biggest equal educational opportunity policy initiatives we've pursued in this country, they are school desegregation, the most controversial of school funding reforms that really were designed to bring much more resource equity across districts that have historically been funded through local property tax law to lessen and create school funding formulas that would. Lesson How much school funding depends on the wealth of our local community and then pre-K investments to recognize that the timing of educational investments is critical because those gaps open up early. But our policy responses tend to happen much later. So what I aimed first to do is to use nationally representative data following cohorts. The earliest cohorts that were born between 1950 and 1975 that have been followed through into adulthood, and those cohorts that faced the earliest transitions from completely segregated schools remember segregated schools like Brown 15 years after Brown was really when we saw significant integration begin in earnest. So we're talking like the first decade after Brown very limited integration was actually achieved. And by looking at that timing and that differential timing allowed me to be able to analyze the impacts because it created these kind of virtual parallel universes where you could look at a district or a set of children that were otherwise similar, but really experienced very different exposure to integrated schools. That was really a boundary change in their access to school resources.

Sarah: [00:11:35] You know, it's interesting because it's like in the ideal world, I mean, we would have never even needed. Brown Right. Like, we would have never had segregated schools to begin with. But, you know, the ideal world of Brown, it would have been implemented immediately and everything would have gone smoothly. But for the sake of actually the analysis, it's useful that we can use the unfortunate, uneven nature of the desegregation efforts.

Rucker: [00:11:58] There's only about a 10 to 15 year window where we had significant integration efforts and reaching a peak in 1988. And then we've subsequently and since the early nineties, had a series of factors that have led to a significant resegregation of schools where basically somewhere between 40 and 42% of minority children attend schools where only less than 10% of their peers are white. So, you know, we have a set of schoolchildren being educated today that are more diverse than earlier eras. But still, the concentrations and where they're being educated separately is still a part that's with us. So what we did in the earlier period is to first look at how it affected school resources. We found it significantly narrowed those gaps. We then subsequently looked at the chronology of attainments showing increases in high school graduation rates, increases in the likelihood of going to college and completing college for minority children that were able to attend integrated schools that were dramatic and were probably the largest kind of policy instrument to close achievement gaps we see in this era are folks that were born in this period between 1950 and 1975. There was the greatest narrowing in educational achievement gaps in earnings, even in health outcomes that hospital desegregation actually played a role in. So we see these lasting impacts on what we were able to document is that even there children, that those cohorts are now in their thirties, forties and fifties and have had their own children and those children actually have significantly better cognitive test scores, high school graduation and college going rates because of the attainments and benefits of desegregation that they were able to pass down to their children. So I think there's a lot to both learn, but to measure in terms of what schools can produce in leveling the intergenerational playing field versus re inscribing inequality and reproducing it across generations. Those are things that our policy instruments can play a catalytic role.

Sarah: [00:14:12] With that we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, how do we apply this understanding of historic racialized policies to design a better approach?

Speaker 1: [00:14:39] Have you checked out the Berkeley Public Policy Journal? The Journal is a student led publication here at the Goldman School that aims to engage readers in critical discussions about the most pressing policy issues. The Journal publishes articles that critique, analyze and provide recommendations with the goal of influencing policy choices. You can find the Journal online at bppj.berkeley.edu and on Twitter @BerkeleyPolicy.

Sarah: [00:15:31] Welcome back. We're talking today with Goldman Professor Rucker Johnson about school integration and the role of policy design and implementation. Now, 65 years after Brown people are looking at this again in the recent Democratic primaries, it's been coming up. And again, it feels it does feel like it's this conversation about bussing, not about racism and racial impacts of segregation. So I'm kind of curious, what if if you were able to come in and, like, have a talk with them and be like, this is how we need to discuss this issue? You know, how would you want them to be really talking about it?

Rucker: [00:16:04] Yes, I think the key thing is being able to follow the earlier era for the purposes of extracting and importing the lessons learned. I think that's really the goal. The goal isn't to do a historical exercise, but rather the issues of segregation are not new and they're not old, meaning they're with us today. Our schools and many places are just as segregated as the earlier kind of like 1970 period in terms of the ways in which socio economic or lack thereof of social diversity in schools, the concentration of poverty within schools. What desegregation did is it significantly lessened the gaps in school resources or significantly reduced class sizes for African-American children, It significantly increased access to school spending. And a lot of times people think of the segregation and desegregation policies as simply the proportion of black and white kids that are in a given school. But really, it's a big part of it is the school resources, the school practices, the teacher quality, the curricular quality. And without kind of thinking about integration in a holistic way, you know, it's going desegregation to integration is going from access to inclusion. It's moving from exposure to understanding. And those processes are things that require communities to heal from divisions. When, you know, some people use the language of bussing and the coded language of bussing that was really used to reframe the argument away from integration for people who are resisting integration. But remember, bussing was even needed only because of the historical housing practices and patterns of discrimination that led minority families, particularly African-American families, to be confined to certain neighborhoods due to redlining, due to a many zoning, exclusionary zoning policies and practices. So effectively without bussing and reduced crime redrawing district school boundary lines, it was going to be very and almost nearly impossible to actually ensure integration actually took hold.

Sarah: [00:18:12] Definitely, and especially within the framework of like this myth that integration didn't work. It's like it's so obviously did, you know, we just didn't give it enough time. Kind of on that point, you speak to the Head Start program and kind of the impacts of pre-K. I think that's the one thing that's a little more nebulous. You know, someone can think about what an integrated school looks like or what equitably financed schools look like. But what does an effective pre-K program look like?

Rucker: [00:18:39] Yeah, So I think part of it is that we've often been looking narrowly at test scores to characterize what schools produce, and yet we are seeing that the early antecedents of criminal involvement, the early antecedents of higher risk of high school dropout are actually rooted in these earlier life experiences. And when children have access to nurturing interpersonal relationships that are cultivated in the pre early child school years, the evidence on early brain development that's been pioneering and the neuroscience research is highlighting that the science of brain development, that there's a million new neuro connections developed every second in the young developing brain between especially years 0 to 3. And those are periods of great opportunity to intervene, particularly for children born into a less advantaged, economically disadvantaged neighborhood and family context. And what we really found is that exposure to diversity, that exposure to access to opportunity, beginning in the early years, it builds and it's like a cumulative process that builds and begets future learning people.

Sarah: [00:19:51] It feels like people are increasingly thinking about the issue of segregation. I'm thinking about how we can fix it, and I hope people are able to like, pick up your book and really unpack the nuance that we just can't change the way we do the money. It's that there's all of these separate pieces that really need to be working together to create this change.

Rucker: [00:20:08] That's right. And so we care about student diversity within schools, but we also care about teacher diversity and supporting teachers, multicultural curriculum. Those are all aspects of a holistic integration that really enables all children to have what we need because there's no shortage of parents that want their best for their kids. But there's a shortage of people trying to create a system of public education that enable that access to be achieved irrespective of race, economic status. I think a powerful prism to understand this is that oftentimes people are look. Being at this as a zero sum game, that the benefits for minorities somehow came at the expense of whites. And actually, that's not the the facts that we see. We see no negative effects for whites. And actually, we see that if you look at the types of outcomes of schools that are possible when we have exposure to school diversity in the elementary and middle school years, what we actually see is non-Hispanic whites expressing much less polarized political views and added much more openness to racial diversity. They are sending their kids more likely to diverse schools as adults themselves. So we do see this ripple effect. And the converse, though, is with resegregation of schools, we see these surges and racial animus with racial intolerance, and we're able to really trace those increases back to the lack of diversity in the earlier school age years. And that's played a significant role going forward.

Sarah: [00:21:40] So I wanted to just pull out a few things. You know, we're here, we're in California. I pulled out one of the lines that you have that says it was easier and much more convenient to blame the South for its shortcomings than to confront one's own shortcomings. The simple and ugly truth was that segregation was nearly as bad in the North and the West as it was in the Deep South. So I think there's a little bit of a perspective, at least among Native Californians, that, like California, doesn't have the problems that the South has. How do we go about deconstructing that? And what is the danger if we don't?

Rucker: [00:22:17] Yes, I think that's a very important point, that there's a fast distinction between de jure, which is segregation of the law by the law versus de facto, which typically has to do with segregation. That may be due to historical segregation and residential segregation. But really, irrespective of whether it's laws, historical laws that explicitly versus via housing patterns that were also discriminatory, those distinctions really are not the thing that affects whether kids well-being is harmed by segregation. So I think what's critical is that we understand even in California, that even in a place like Berkeley, that the first integrated elementary schools that Kamala Harris was the second cohort didn't happen to the late sixties, and that certainly a voluntary integration plan. But still and the as late as 1965, they were mostly all black and all white elementary schools here in Berkeley. So that's just a testament. But I think the key thing in the current environment is there's a lot of evidence of gerrymander school district boundaries that act to further segregate. That's rampant across the country. And so examples abound in which instead of moving to opportunity, affluent parents are using their political power to redraw the school district boundaries and secede from the existing district to form their own. And there's also this use of increasing use of charter schools as a pathway to effectively secede secession from traditional public schools while often being exempt from desegregation. Other equity guidelines. And this is troubling in states and localities in which some of that charter school growth is unregulated. And it's not that charter schools can't be an important instrument for expanding access, but it is the why is the how and the why that that matters about whether charter schools are used to expand opportunity or not. And we can there's examples even in our own backyard in a city right outside of San Francisco, Marin County, where there was a major desegregation litigation suit ruling that showed that they were had used the charter school to basically create more segregated systems. And so they're now having to rectify that. But that's after a two year investigation. And so the Milliken decision even goes back to the Milliken decision in 1974 that ruled school desegregation plans could not be across district lines. And that provided some of the first impetus to create these invisible boundaries through school district boundary lines to basically not be part of the nation's integration project. It basically enabled more affluent suburban areas to not have to be a part of the task on the project of integration in this country. And that's something that's staying with us. But I think as we think about the path forward, there's also a lot of things that I'm very excited about that I think are possibilities for today and some of those really promising avenues of how integration can be achieved today is we have a place and a number of cities are having rapidly diversifying suburbs. We have gentrifying neighborhoods and urban communities. Local school board elections can play a big role. Reversing this tide. And there's a lot of housing policy, implementing inclusionary zoning reforms and expanding affordable housing in neighborhoods with great schools, coupled with more vigorous enforcement of fair housing and anti-discrimination laws. I think the question is, will we have the political will and mobilize action? Because the time to act is now.

Sarah: [00:26:00] You know, there's a few different places where it feels like a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. Right. So talking about these typically wealthy white parents who are putting their kids in charter schools or are trying to splinter off into a different district, one would have to imagine that it's unlikely that those parents had the positive impacts of going to an integrated school themselves. And so kind of how can we how can we flip that and get people to see the benefits of integration when they maybe historically have not experienced it themselves?

Rucker: [00:26:32] Right. And I think that's why in order for integrated systems to be able to thrive, you have to deal with the school resource disparities because middle class parents that have access to resources aren't going to choose to send their kids to overcrowded, less performing schools. So if that difference is and the quality of schools is driven by funding disparities, we have to center the funding disparities. It's kind of like reverse engineer the integration where you lead with school resource equity teacher diversity, and basically student assignment is the last thing. So if you instead of like having student to school reassignment as the central thing, imagine access to high quality teachers and access to school resources being the first thing that you do, then the ways people embrace being an integrated spaces would have much more smooth road to realizing integration in a holistic way. But the order matters. That's where the how matters as much as the what and leaving the teacher part out of the equation or leaving the resources out of the equation and just focusing on how students are assigned to schools is a very incomplete and superficial way of thinking about what makes integration work.

Sarah: [00:27:48] You know, you are an academic studying this on a deep level, but you're also a parent. So how did you go about choosing where kids came to school and how did that like align with your deep understanding of the ins and outs of these issues?

Rucker: [00:28:03] It's unfortunate that today when you're looking for a house, you're actually the housing prices are capturing as much about the square footage, the number of bedrooms of that house as what mobility prospects your children will have because of the access to schools in that local community. And so you can just look in our backyard of Piedmont that's in this kind of enclave of very significant parental wealth and has therefore much higher school spending because of it. But it's not diverse at all. We wanted to be in a community that had both excellence, but we didn't have to trade off diversity to do that. And so our kids are in a very good public school here in Oakland, Montclair Elementary School, and they've loved it. We've loved the teacher diversity, we've loved the parental involvement, we've loved the school set of programing. And, you know, we really feel like a kinship among parents. It's not something that I think enough children have that exposure to diversity, and it's really those biases that seep into adults. Children aren't born with that and they have a certain openness. And so that's what we were looking for, to have an environment where our kids were in high performing schools, but also instrumentally, that diversity was a centerpiece. And too often we think of the problems of high quality schools and integrated schools as separable and kind of like the diversity versus the high quality as being something that should be thought of as a separate, separable issue. And what we've really found, at least in our children's experience, is that having both, it's an and both.

Sarah: [00:29:51] So I think that's a great place for us to end.

Khalid: [00:29:53] I'm actually really glad you were able to get him to explore that personal element, that personal choice of where he's sending his kid to school, because it's crazy how pivotal education and especially early education is in a child's life. I mean, as Ricker said in the interview, educational outcomes determine health outcomes. They determine economic outcomes. So whatever you can do to give your child the best education possible you're going to do. For me, the takeaway from this interview is that when we want to focus on school integration, we really can't do much without also looking at neighborhood segregation, which speaks to this element of integrating policies together and making sure that you take a broader look at the landscape of the policy interventions that you're going to be using to to fix a problem.

Sarah: [00:30:40] As we're looking at policy design and implementation. We kind of need to look like external and internal, like what policies does this large policy interact with, but also like what individual components are building this policy that we're taking as a singular thing?

Khalid: [00:30:55] Totally. And it just underscores the point that public policy is so dynamic and no one policy exists in a vacuum.

Sarah: [00:31:01] Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, we will be looking forward to the next episode on design and implementation. Music heard on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller and Blue Dot Sessions. Our engineer is Michael Quiroz. Our executive producers are Sarah Swanbeck and Bora Lee Reed. For show notes and more information, visit us at TalkPolicyToMe.org. Get Rucker's book at your local bookstore–Children of the Dream Why School Integration Works. I'm Sarah Edwards. Catch you next time.