The Smart Society. Peter D. Salins
perpetuating a cycle of intergenerational educational and social dysfunction.1 For the purposes of discussion in this chapter and throughout the book, I will refer to this complex of low academic achievement affecting poorer Americans of all ethnicities as the country’s educational “Megagap.”
If it could be accomplished, no other measure would so completely transform American society as significantly narrowing the Megagap. A host of societal ills from poverty, poor health, crime, and child neglect would be sharply reduced; the economic significance of income inequality would virtually disappear; and the United States would truly become in reality what it has always imagined itself to be: an almost universally middle-class country. In the pursuit of just such a breakthrough (and as a collateral aspect of the civil rights movement), generations of political leaders and educators have, for more than fifty years, launched a long and varied sequence of policies aimed at transforming the American public school system—from Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to No Child Left Behind (2001) and Race to the Top (2009). The problem is that, by and large, the policies haven’t worked, at least with respect to their stated goal of enabling disadvantaged schoolchildren to catch up with the rest. While the scores of African American and Hispanic test-takers have actually risen modestly over the most recent decades, the spread separating them from those of mainstream whites is stubbornly persistent. In today’s information-age economy, the human-capital failure this represents is more problematical than ever. What, if anything, can be done?
We have long known that the educational Megagap is deeply rooted in familial socioeconomic circumstances, but since these are beyond the reach of government to change, we have counted on decades of educational reform efforts aimed at attacking it in school. We have strong proof that the Megagap can be significantly narrowed, if not eliminated altogether, with the right kinds of school interventions. One reason our progress on this front has been so disappointing is that education reformers have been too indiscriminate—and inconsistent—in their choice of reforms. The half-century-long Megagap closing effort has by now yielded an education reform garden so overgrown that, in classic Gresham’s Law fashion, the bad (meaning ineffective) ideas often overwhelm the good. In the pages that follow, I will review the most frequently adopted of these reforms (roughly in the chronological order of their popularity), and summarize what we have learned regarding their effectiveness. I will conclude by highlighting the two proven educational strategies that, where and when they have been properly implemented, have measurably increased the academic performance of Megagap children and permitted them to succeed, in later grades and beyond, at or near the level of their mainstream peers: namely, effective preschool education and expanded learning time.
DECADES OF EXPERIMENTATION
Racial Integration In the long sequence of ameliorations specifically focused on raising the scholastic achievement of African American schoolchildren, the first was racial integration. Driven initially by the constitutional imperative of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, court-ordered integration of de jure segregated schools in the South was followed soon after by court-ordered integration of de facto segregated schools in the north. The overwhelmingly dominant rationale behind these court decisions (promoted by liberal educators and racial advocates) was a firm conviction that integration would have a significant positive impact on the academic performance of African American children. The remedy most frequently imposed by the courts was intra-district busing, sending black schoolchildren to formerly majority-white schools and (less often) sending whites to formerly majority-black schools. Other attempts at fostering school integration have included the establishment of “magnet” schools with enriched facilities and programming to attract white students without coercion and, in already racially diverse municipalities, redrawing attendance-zone boundaries and permitting open enrollment across the district on a first-come-first-served basis.
After a half century of trials, all available evidence shows that the impact of integration on the African American Megagap has been limited at best. Desegregation initially resulted in increased funding of schools attended by blacks, most notably in the South, where it modestly lowered black dropout rates.2 Over time, however, the gains from desegregation efforts diminished significantly, especially outside the South. Most critically, it has been almost impossible to get whites to go along with integration on any meaningful scale. The most common consequence of integration initiatives, especially court-ordered busing, has been white flight to nonracially diverse suburbs.3 But even where, through chance or the good-faith efforts of liberal communities, racial integration has been possible, gap-closing progress has been minimal.
Three kinds of “natural experiments” might tell us whether racial integration raises the academic performance of minority (black or Hispanic) schoolchildren. Where school districts integrated their schools at a particular point in time (either through court order or voluntarily) we can look for positive changes in minority test scores and whether the white-minority performance gap narrowed. In suburban regions where the majority of districts are racially homogenous but some districts are integrated, we can see if minority children in integrated places do better than those in majority-minority districts. Along the same line, within districts whose schools vary in the extent of their racial integration, we can see if black and Hispanic student academic performance is positively correlated with greater integration.
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