(upbeat music)
(happy music)
- Welcome to the living room
at the Goldman School of Public Policy.
We have here today
professor Rucker Johnson
who's a professor at the Goldman School.
He's just written an
extraordinary new book.
It's about segregation
it's about integration
and it's about education in America
and it's about how to make
America a better place
by improving its educational system
and making everybody better off.
Professor Johnson in your
book towards the end,
you say your goal is not condemnation,
it's not to just diagnose an illness
it's to try to cure the illness.
Exactly how are you trying to do that
what do you want to do with this book.
- Okay, Well thanks,
thanks for engaging with me on the book.
we're really excited about it.
I think one of the
animated features of it,
is that generally Brown
v. Board is considered
the beginning of this of
the civil rights movement
- and that was in the 50s of course 53
and 54 the successor Brown
- Yes
- and the question is, it's
clearly that with all the laws
that were changed,
with all of the war on poverty initiatives
and progress that as made.
Today we still find ourselves facing many
of the same problems
and in groping in the dark
seemingly with you know,
the average black-white
achievement gap big
that for black children on average,
roughly two garde levels
behind their white counterparts
that children from the poorest districts,
are estimated to be on average
four grade levels behind,
the most affluent districts
children's outcomes.
So that kind of leaves us with
a question mark around maybe,
with all of the things that we're trying,
why are we still here?
- So so let me just stop so that...
maybe everything failed,
maybe Brown versus Board of Education
although was morally the
right thing to desegregate
the schools, maybe it just
didn't have much impact
on improving the schools
maybe school finance reform
which was something we tried
and the decades following didn't succeed
and maybe Head Start a
great great society program,
maybe that failed too, But
your book claims otherwise.
exactly and I think that's
that's the thing is that,
a lot of our efforts,
are kind of thinking about
inequality in a vacuum
and just like,
you know, people have
intergenerational lineages
so do policies. When you
go to the doctor you...
the first thing that they do
when they are trying to
diagnose something is
they'll ask you not just
about your own blood pressure
or your own blood pressure
reading but they'll ask you
about your own familial
history in areas of health.
And in the same way,
we had to take inventory
of the three biggest key,
equal education opportunity
policy initiatives
that we pursued.
School desegregation,
school finance reform
as you say in Pre-K,
expansions of public investments in Pre-K
and really what we had to
do is be skeptical first
of the conventional wisdom
that none of those policies had worked
and really look at it with a fresh eye
with new sets of data and methods
- So let's take each one of those in turn
but let's start first
with just talking about,
how could you even begin
to figure out whether
those things would work
or had worked what is
the technique you used
and just give us a brief
overview of how that worked.
- Yes, I mean I think that the
most important thing is that,
these are age-old questions
but with the advent of big data
with the advent of new research methods
to really kind of isolate
and tease out causal effects
and long term impacts
we are able to say
something more definitive,
around what works while not
focusing narrowly on test scores
while not using just snapshots
of what may happen at a point in time
but rather following children's lives
from birth to adulthood.
- So first you looked at
outcomes like employment,
wages, health outcomes and other things
that happen to people 20 30 40 years
after they'd experienced
some of these programs,
like school integration
or school finance reform,
so that's right?
- That's right so we're trying to first,
leverage longitudinal data,
using the panel study of income dynamics
that can bridge a nasty
representative portrait
of how the childhood conditions,
were shaped using data
matched with the kind
of school reform timing,
of school desegregation,
of school finance reforms,
of the timing of Head Start
and the family backgrounds
of those children.
So that we have the kind
of intersectional nature
of the multiple factors
that affect life chances.
- So you've got data over time of families
that have been interviewed
since the late 60s?
- That's right.
- All over the country
- For decades
- a nationally representative sample
and you can follow them all
the way up to the present day
and you know all sorts of
things about these families,
including the places where
they lived which is essential
for what you're trying to do because,
how did you use the
places they lived as a way
to get at with the results
of these programs were.
- Yeah so what's what's key is
you really want to kind of characterize
how where people grow up,
affects the set of
opportunities they had access to
and so sometimes people
think of brown as something
that happened 1954
and all of a sudden the
light switch was turned on
and all of a sudden the
vestiges of Jim Crow
were automatically overnight overturned
and that's just not how it happened.
So it requires having a sustained picture
and that's how why we have
to kind of follow children
over extended periods of time.
- But actually turns out
although it was probably not a good thing
that it took so long to implement
Brown versus Board of Education.
From your perspective as a researcher,
it gives you leverage
in trying to figure out
what the impacts were
because you look at young
people who were in districts
that were desegregated,
versus those who were in districts
that weren't desegregated
and compare them to see
if school desegregation
actually had an impact.
- Exactly and so that's really the
the kind of hallmark of having kind of
laboratories of experimentation
where you could take a child
that was born in say 1960
and they may have been born in 1960
but they lived in a district
where they were exposed
to integrated schools
throughout their school ed years
and you can contrast it with
the child that was born in
maybe a similar area, in similar region
but they weren't exposed
to integration at all
because of the timing of implementation
of the desegregation court orders in their
neighborhood and community of upbringing.
- So it's almost like a clinical trial,
that the health care people use
where you randomly assign
people to one treatment
or the other that one treatment
being you get the medicine
and the other one you don't get anything
but in this case it turns out people
were more or less randomly
because of the way these
programs were implemented.
More or less randomly given
the school desegregation treatment
versus those who were continuing
in segregated schools.
- Well that's right because
partly what happened was that
while Brown decision,
gave a vision for what
a just system in society
should look like with
regard to integration
and said what segregation should not be,
it did not really give the
the it left the details
up to someone else to fill in.
- So what did you find?
let's start with Brown
versus Board of Education
and integration what did you find?
was it helpful to these young people
- Yes I mean
- who had the chance?
- I think I think part
of what is is is key
is understanding,
what was integration itself
and what kind of changes did it
what kind of cascading
changes did it elicit
and one of the things is that
most people think of it as
how many black kids are going
into school with white kids
but a big part of the changes
actually came through the way
integration affected
access to school resources.
The ways in which it
affect average class size
for African-American
children in particular
the way it affected
access to teacher quality
and school facilities and after-school
programs and activities
and a big piece is also,
it integrated the teaching workforce
in a way where now teachers were teaching,
a kind of multi-ethnic set of classrooms
and and and that took time
it wasn't something overnight.
But so what we're able to show is that,
if we think of your example
of like a clinical trial,
it's a type of medicine,
where we're saying that
the medicine treatment
call it desegregation.
It works but it also depends on the dose,
and the duration of exposure.
So when we find children only exposed
to integrated environments
only in their last two years
of high school.
We see much more muted impacts
when we see that they were exposed
to integrated environments
but it didn't significantly
affect their access
to school resources or reduce class sizes
in a significant way in the like
we don't see the same
large impacts that we see
when the integration both was something
that happened earlier in the school career
particularly in elementary school years
and was sustained.
- So what are some of those larger impacts
in terms of wages say or employment
or something like that
- Yeah
- So I'll say chronologically
just to give you a sense
of the array of outcomes
that we find impacts on,
but beginning with high
school graduation rates,
beginning with educational
attainment including college
enrollment college completion rates
as late as 1960,
only about 20% of black males
graduate from high school
as late as 1960.
Compare with 50 percent of white males
in that same by 1960 roughly,
only 3% of black males
graduate from college
13% among white males as late as 1960.
So those are vast educational differences
when we look at outcomes like
education, health, earnings,
the single area in which we saw
the biggest racial
convergence in those outcomes
black-white differences
narrowing substantially
the only period in which we've seen
that narrow so dramatically
is this era of cohorts that were exposed
differentially, to school integration.
And we really are able to tie and connect
the dots to that convergence
in educational attainment
so that by the late 70s and early 80's,
the college enrollment rates of eight...
of eighteen and nineteen year
old black folks' children
were around the same rates
that were experienced for white
for those cohorts.
- So that's an astonishing convergence.
- In in in a 15-year window.
- Of course the great complaint
of white racists in the South,
was that this was going
to ruin the white race
and it was going to be terrible for whites
to be integrated with
blacks. What do you find?
- What we find is that
the beneficial impacts
that we find for African Americans,
did not come at the expense of whites
and moreover we see no
negative impacts across
earnings, wages, employment,
incarceration, health
you name it.
We don't find any negative
impacts for whites and moreover
we find significant
beneficial impacts, on aspects
that have to do with racial
attitudes in adulthood
that when they are exposed to
more integrated environments,
their attitudes around
race, racial tolerance,
their perspectives around racial diversity
and you're a scholar of
the political polarization,
you've written a major book on the kind of
the political polarization
that we've seen.
We actually can kind of
document how the early
experiences in diverse schools
shape subsequent political
attitudes in adulthood.
- And reduced polarization
- And reduce prejudice
- Increased tolerance, understanding
ability to have
friends of another race
- Yes
- And to work presumably
with folk who look different
than you do.
Which in course is increasingly important
in many jobs in America,
especially in big cities
where you're going
to be dealing with a diverse workforce.
So what's really wonderful about your book
is you you not only talk about
how the integration mattered
and you talk about the complexity
of the treatment of integration
what did integration really do?
but then you start to unpack that,
you say okay what was it
that made integration work well
and so you move to school finance reform
and this the lessons you have
there are actually lessons
not just for African Americans,
they're for everybody
because we find out that
it turns out that school finance reform,
actually is one way to make
our educational system better.
So so talk about that.
- Well I think one of the
things to even discuss
the impacts of a reform is to kind
of make sure we appreciate
what the status quo was.
So historically the way we
have funded public schools
in the United States is through
the local property tax base.
And local property tax wealth differences
because of segregation by income,
in neighborhoods wealth differences
create vast differences in
the ability to raise revenue,
through the property tax base
and that was creating
significant vast differences in
where poor districts
would have to leverage
much higher property tax rates,
just to generate almost half of the level
that very affluent areas were having.
And that really I would say
set the table in the stage following
the school desegregation court rulings,
for the school finance reform movement.
To challenge the constitutionality
of solely local systems of finance.
And so what the state court
ordered school finance reforms
began to do with
California being the first,
it's interesting because
California's both the
kind of first and actually now represents
among the most recent and
bold progressive formulas
in the most recent five years.
But the first one was
done here in California
and the idea is simply to
narrow the spending disparity
to richen the ...
- On a on a moral grounds its very simple
is that every child deserves
an equal opportunity
in K through 12 and therefore
that's not equal if we're
spending vastly different sums
in Beverly Hills than we
are in East Los Angeles.
There's a literature out there
that says additional school
spending isn't worth it
we don't get anything
for it it's just wasted.
- Yes
- You don't find that
- Yes yes and so this is
again where the kind of
conventional wisdom around
integration being a
failed social experiment,
school spending leading to great waste
and not really boosting student outcomes.
The reason why some of those,
premature conclusions had been reached,
enlist that what we find in our work
is inadequate attention to
accounting for a family
background, important
but really isolating
how the school spending
where the money flows to,
what students are affected
and what school districts at the time
and when we isolate the school spending
what we find is significant
improvements on a whole host
of educational trajectory.
- And and I say
another thing you do is you say
that it's not just about test scores
that some other the problems
with some of this literature,
is it's focused on
does school spending increased
test scores but it turns out
that may not be the best
measure of what schools do
and indeed if you think about it
what we ultimately care
about is not test scores
but whether people go on to get jobs
and whether they stay out of prison
and they don't stay off
welfare and things like that
and you find that when you
use those kinds of measures,
you get significant positive effects
- That's right and we do actually
find it on test scores too
like my colleague Jesse Rosting
and his colleagues Jad-Diane...
they certainly find
outcomes on test scores.
But I would say if we
focus solely on test scores
we would miss a huge
and understate the potential
for school reforms like these
to really break the
intergenerational cycle of poverty
and so that's a key piece.
Now one thing I think
that's important about the
school spending piece is,
one of the things because
people often come to me
and they say haven't we
already tried these things?
and I think one of the things
you have to consider is that,
all of these things were
tried one at a time, not
and unevenly and consistently
not with sustained investment.
What we find is that,
the very nature of learning
beginning future learning,
is that half of the achievement
gap among third graders
is already apparent on the
first day of kindergarten.
That footprint of these
early life experiences,
has to be kind of part of
the investment strategy
that would include Pre-K.
- Ok so let's talk about Pre-K so you...
and then I want talk about
the interaction of Pre-K,
with school funding Which I heard is one
of the most interesting findings, you have
but let's first talk about Pre-K.
So, Head Start was an attempt
on the part of the Great
Society Lyndon Johnson
to say that we've got to
really do a better job
of providing education for young people,
before they even get to kindergarten.
And there's been lots of people who said
that never worked
- Right and this...
- But again you don't find that.
- Right! and this goes back to,
being too enamored with
easily measured overnight,
kind of metrics like test scores
that there have been evidence
that have shown test score
improvements have faded out
in the years following
Head Start attendance
but the question is
that fade out reflective
of the policies inadequacies
or is it just a byproduct of
any great early investment
is still dependent on
the quality of subsequent investments.
- So one of your most extraordinary
findings seems to me is
that you find out that Pre-K is especially
has an especially big impact
when in fact subsequently
school districts,
actually invest money to provide more help
and service two students
who are getting Pre-K
so in other words there's
an interaction effect
- Yes
- And then You've got a
as you say keep going with the
treatment and if you do that,
you find suddenly that
Pre-K actually has an impact
and a long lasting impact.
- That's right we think of
this as kind of synergies that,
when we combine these policies
in a strategic investment
implementation way
what happens is, you invest
early you cause children
those are investments are not
investments in acquisition
of knowledge but they
give greater ability for
the acquisition of future knowledge
and that enables them to be
more likely to be school ready
as they enter kindergarten
and then they can take more advantage of
the k-12 educational opportunities,
because they're in a system
that's not poorly funded in
the k-12 years and so we
actually do find fade out.
If you do the Pre-K
and they subsequently attend
poorly funded schools in
the k-12 years.
We do find that the
effects do not last long
when that happens
and similarly even the
K12 spending investments,
don't yield the same return
if they're not preceded,
by high quality high
quality Pre-K investments.
- I mean you would think of
an exercise regime for example
if you thought that somehow
well I used to exercise 30
years ago I should be fine today
that's rather foolish you know...
we know they probably have
to keep it up at least
at some level
and that's what you're
really basically saying
is that we it's great that we have Pre-K
but we've got to follow up with schools
that actually capitalize on that Pre-K
and so I think that's an
extraordinarily important finding
That we can't just assume
there's a magic bullet
that one of these
programs all the problems
- Exactly, exactly and
it's very much like,
going back to an initial
question you asked which is,
what's the frame of the book?
and what the book is aimed to do,
is to provide a blueprint,
an educational opportunity
blueprint for what kind
of investments are requisite
what are the essential ingredients
for kids opportunities
no matter their zip code,
no matter their race, ethnicity
to be insured no matter
their poverty status
to be insured to have
opportunities to thrive.
- So your book is very
hopeful it seems to me
and that you say if we
just would be more intense
about saying let's keep up
our desegregation efforts,
let's keep up our efforts to fund schools
in a responsible manner to
make sure that money gets to
the places it's got to get and
we add Pre-K that we're gonna
have a system that
actually does a lot better.
The sad part of your book,
is the second half when
you start talking about
the fact that we've actually
pulled back on a lot
of these policies especially desegregation
and to some extent school finance reform
- Yes so there is a kind of misnomer
that we actually did a lot
of school finance reforms
and so maybe the kind
of spending disparities
are no longer there by
say income and actually
that's not true that we find
23 states as late as 2012
and those rates haven't really changed in
the last five years that among 23 states,
average spending in
more affluent districts
is significantly greater
than in poor districts
so I think one of the key things is
that we reached a peak level
of integration in the late 80s.
1988 we're at the peak
level of integration,
in many ways we were seeing
a lot of the positive impacts
but they weren't actually well documented
so while they were happening,
in real time they weren't being documented
and that created a window for
some of the political backlash
that would want to kind of move back to
what is cast a school choice
or local control or...
what other words
forced busing like these
are very loaded words
but underneath them sometimes,
the motivation has a little bit of a
fear of race and integration.
And so beginning in the early 90s
there began to say be a kind of legal
change in which basically court rulings
lifted and made it easier
to lift court orders.
- So there's a court order that
said you had to desegregate
- Then you'd have to have a
- and you have to work hard
- desegregation plan to integrate
and it was incumbent upon the district
to ensure that there be racial balance,
in those things.
So that begins to be lifted
- Let's note that you give some examples
where that was done extremely well
that may be in Boston for example,
mistakes were made so for example
it as I read your book
it looks like the poorer communities,
bore the greater brunt
the poor white communities
than the rich white communities in Boston
and that that was a mistake
and that's not the way to do it
and then other communities realized,
that everybody had to share equally
if you're going to do this,
and then everybody would be better off.
- That's right.
- When you give examples of
where that's been been successfully.
- So a big part of it is just that the,
how matters as much as the what
so when we say integration we have to kind
of still think about you know
what is it that's making
things work together?
and what is it that can make it unravel?
and so it's the combination
of they lifted the court order
so half of the districts that
were ever under court order,
have been lifted of
court order that led to
significant resegregation.
Another example is like
a place like charlotte
that was like really
a model of integration
and now is basically you
know backtrack to become,
as segregated as they
were before busing began
and the part of the rationale
and part of the reason,
is not just you know without
policy playing a critical role.
So in this case,
I'll give you an example with
the North Carolina legislature
passed House bill 514 and what it did,
was it authorized for,
wealthy suburban districts
in the Mecklenburg County
to secede and form their
own charter districts.
- Apart from Charlotte
- Under the banner
of like school choice but
that would be their own charter districts
and predominantly white suburban
and that really enabled there
to be a significant also
resegregation of schools
that was furthered.
And the reason that kind of
piece is important is because
whereas before if you had
a set of racial prejudice
to kind of avoid integration,
you did have to like bear the
brunt of the financial cost.
When it's a charter school
it is the taxpayers money
that's actually subsidizing
the segregation.
So there are aspects about
how the instruments of policy,
can be used to further integration efforts
but in some places are being used to
further segregation and so that's,
one of the things I guess I should say
that is part of the
second half of the book
and I think it's part of our the goal of
the book in its entirety,
which is that we had the
quantitative evidence,
and nasty representative portrait
but we needed to marry that
like that provided an aerial view
of how the reforms were working
and whether there was long term impact
but we had to marry that
with qualitative evidence
around the stories of
people who were living these
experience changes within
the schools by talking to
superintendents and teachers and judges
and policymakers to
really get that texture,
to understand how this was
mirroring their lived experience
both the challenges and the successes.
- One of great things about the book
are those stories and then the evidence
that you bring from the
very careful econometric
and statistical work that you've done
and you marry that I think extremely well.
To show how in fact these
programs can and do work
and also to give us an idea
of why on the ground they work
but also why on the ground
sometimes even though they work
sometimes people reverse them
and don't continue with them.
And that's as I say that
the sad part of the book
but the hopeful part at the very end,
is that there are a set
of policy prescriptions
you put forth that will improve education
for everyone and why don't
you recount those again
just so that we summary of them.
- We cannot leave out school integration
because throwing money
at the problem only,
is insufficient to the task.
And so it's integrated
school environments,
combined with early Pre-K investments
and quality school finance
equalization policies
that ensure access to opportunity
and that includes teacher quality
and ensuring the development
of those teachers.
Now doing that in a kind of cohesive way,
is not something that should
be left up to one district at a
time but kind of really
requires some vision around
how that needs to be connected.
- Rucker Johnson you've
written an extraordinary book,
children of the-dream.
Why school integration works
but it's much more than that,
it's how to make our
educational system work better.
- For all children
- And better for everyone.
Not just for one group but for everybody
and how to solve a problem
that's been an American dilemma
for far too long and I thank
you for this very readable,
very exciting very amazing book.
- Can I just close with one quick thing,
I have a number of colleagues that were
instrumental in the work.
Economists Kirabo Jackson at Northwestern,
my colleague and former
PhD student Sean Tanner,
my current PhD student Sean
Darling-Hammond was instrumental
in research assistance and
other just insightful feedback,
and Alexander Nazarian a former
senior writer for Newsweek
also collaborated with
me on this on this work.
So I want to definitely give shoutouts
to a whole host of folks
that made this possible.
- You put together a great team
and I think the lesson of the team is,
it helps to get people
together to work together
to do things together
- Different perspectives.
and of all sorts of different perspectives
and backgrounds
- For sure.
- And that's that that's
the message of the book
in two ways.
Just in terms of what we
should be doing in this country
and in the way to write
one heck of a good book.
Thank you very much.
- Thank You Dean Brady
- Thanks
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