This seems like a gross concept error in relation to the proposal. Or a straw man. Either way, it’s not responding to the actual OP and follow up pro-bussing arguments.
I don’t think so. And a significant part of the reason is that we aren’t doing this anywhere since the mid-1990s, and even then it was only randomized in a very small number of jurisdictions (as opposed to voluntary). But, of course, if what we have is a lack of good evidence, then we have a lack of good evidence. It isn’t evidence for the opposite conclusion, which people are reaching in rather non-evidence-based ways. Why should we believe that parents’ gut instincts on the question is accurate, given the circumstances?
And while this is characterized as some kind of massive social experiment requiring extraordinary evidence of effectiveness, that characterization is wrong. We’ve done exactly this policy before in some places, and we know the effects are not some radical diminishment of white achievement. We aren’t talking about any kind of radical re-ordering of society. We’re talking about assigning public school kids to schools slightly farther away. To hear people talk about it, you’d think we were proposing splicing their genes or something.
Requiring extraordinary evidence to justify a lack of harm to white kids (itself a rather, uh, distinctive requirement) strikes me as a sort of ad hoc requirement put up because of unstated reasons for disliking the policy, and not because the policy itself is so extreme as to justify them.
Critics have then further narrowed the acceptable evidence to evidence of achievement on standardized tests, even though there is also relevant evidence showing gains for social and critical thinking skills that are harder to objectively test. Indeed, if you situate this question in the larger education literature, what you’ll find is that there is vanishingly little strong evidence that anything we can measure about a school environment makes any difference at all in adult outcomes.
All that said, note again the language from the synthesis of studies on math scores:
12 studies discuss the effects of racial or SES composition for White students in detail.
[ul]
[li]seven reported that as minority segregation increases, Whites’ math outcomes decrease[/li][li]1 study noted that the relationship between racially isolated minority schools and diminished achievement for Whites is weaker than it is for Blacks.[/li][li]3 of the twelve studies found that while attending a diverse school had no positive effect on the math achievement of Whites, neither did it have a negative effect.[/li][li]2 studies reported that, for Whites, schools with racially diverse student bodies (within specific thresholds) foster higher math achievement than do racially isolated White schools.[/li][/ul]
Are these studies strong evidence that integration benefits white math achievement? I don’t think so, in large part because they are basically regression studies looking at the relationship between racial isolation and outcomes, but there are a lot of confounding issues there, including multicollinearity.
But are these studies evidence against the apparently widespread belief that integration is harmful to white students? I don’t think so. It may not be conclusive, but it should be enough to cause you to question your assumption in that area.
And, everywhere I look that attempts to study that question seems to show similar evidence. So where should I be looking, precisely, for countervailing evidence?
That should read “I think so,” not “I don’t think so.”
If a racially balanced school is inherently superior to one with almost all one race, and if forced bussing improves outcomes for all students, then outcomes for the all-black schools would be improved if we bussed a few white, Asian, or Hispanic students in. Correct?
NB - I appended your correction to the earlier quote.
Seven of the twelve found it hurt white students, three found no effect, and two found a positive effect. ISTM that it certainly is evidence that integration hurts white student achievement in math.
And it isn’t quite fair (IMO) for you to say that the studies aren’t good enough to prove one thing, but are still good enough to disprove something else.
If you don’t have better evidence, then you won’t be able to justify forced bussing with claims that it helps everyone. As others have mentioned, this is a relatively disruptive social experiment, based on unproven claims. And it affects people’s children and their children’s education, which is a very important part of parenting, and in which people have a lot invested.
“We want to do X to your child. The balance of the evidence is that it will hurt him in ways that we can measure, but we are hoping that will be made up for in ways that benefit someone else that we can’t measure.” Not a very sweet deal, AFAICT.
Regards,
Shodan
No. I misread it that way too, but that’s not correct. They found that minority segregation is associated with decreased white achievement. That means integration improves white achievement.
On rereading, you are correct - the cite says that segregation is associated with lower white math scores. OTOH, that is not exactly the same as saying that integration thru forced bussing raises white math scores. For that, you would need before and after, with other factors held equal, which would be quite difficult to achieve.
Is it the case, IOW, that you have a nearly all-white school, you bus in some black kids, and then math scores improve for the white kids? For instance, in the New York Times article monstro linked to, would the math and reading scores for the white kids improve after the re-zoning? Two-thirds of the kids in the 59% white school passed their tests. If they were moved to the majority black school, would it be closer to three-quarters?
Regards,
Shodan
Very few parents would want to send their kids to a school with stats like this.
And yet the school exists because parents must either send their kids to the school they are assigned to or come up with a more expensive alternative. If you don’t have a lot of money, guess what you end up doing? Why should only people with means have their “wants” catered to?
Some people seem to think schools like this are unavoidable…that we should accept their existence the same way we accept hurricanes and tornadoes.
But I think schools like this exist when you have a high concentration of low-income and special-needs kids within a school. If housing was better mixed socioeconomically, we wouldn’t see this happening so frequently. And it’s not something we have just to accept it. Dilute a high-poverty student body with kids from higher income brackets, and the school suddenly doesn’t look so scary. Maybe it won’t ever have the best stats evah, but maybe people should stop pitting schools against each other so that there’s always a “best” to envy and a “worst” to point and laugh at. These are artificial divisions that serve no good purpose other than to give some segment of the population a feeling of superiority.
I totally get that middle class parents don’t want their kid to be in that first cohort of “diluters”. They don’t want to entertain the possibility that their kid will be the lone “rich” kid on the playground–the kid who gets bullied for speaking “proper” and being a goody-goody. I think this is an understandable fear, and unfortunately I don’t think there’s a magical bullet to address it other than everyone understanding that suboptimal situations are par for the couse in any system.
I agree. I acknowledge that we don’t have strong evidence. We have only weak evidence, but weak evidence that fairly consistently points in one direction, as far as I’ve seen.
I don’t know.
I’m not even sure what the mechanism here is. I think there are obvious plausible mechanisms with respect to things like the development of better critical thinking skills and empathy. And you can see how those would maybe even play into language arts scores. But all else being equal, my null hypothesis would be that math scores wouldn’t change much, at least if you control for school funding.
But, ISTM, there’s sort of two interrelated questions here. One is what kind of evidence about white achievement should be necessary before approving of this policy, and the second is whether that threshold is met. I suspect that our larger disagreement might be over the first question than the second. In my view, especially given that white achievement is not the sole or most important benefit to integration, the available weak evidence is enough.
The research brief you cited proposes the following as the mechanisms by which integration benefits students:
NB: I don’t see that these are meant to be in any particular order, but I’ve numbered them so I can refer back to them easily.
Let’s go through that list:
[ol]
[li]If busing creates more experienced and qualified teachers, it is not obvious. What busing seems more likely to do is to give some students better teachers than they otherwise would have and other students worse teachers than they otherwise would have.[/li][li]This would seem to be inextricably tied to the first mechanism.[/li][li]I presume busing would retain this advantage.[/li][li]Let’s assume for the sake of argument that busing would retain this advantage, too.[/li][li]It’s not clear that busing instantly creates more involved parents, is it?[/li][li]Busing certainly doesn’t increase overall resources available. Again, it gives some students access to more resources and other students access to less resources.[/li][/ol]
So busing entirely omits at least half of the claimed mechanisms.
Meanwhile, as NPR notes in an article supporting the basic contention that integration is good for white students:
Which seems to run counter to what you’re suggesting: that we can just bring back busing and everyone wins!
Given the foregoing, it’s not obvious to me that your proposal actually is to the betterment of everyone’s kids, and I echo John Mace in asserting that you’re going to have to convince people that their kids will be better off by being sent to worse schools if you’re to win their support. We know that busing was unpopular in the 70s, it was unpopular in the 90s, and there’s no particular reason to think it would be popular now. I contend that “there’s weak evidence that integration will help your kid, and busing achieves integration” is insufficient to overcome that opposition.
And therefore I will do my utmost to keep my kids away from it.
That’s fine, as long as it is understood that my duty as a parent is to fight like fury to ensure that the suboptimal solution falls on somebody else’s kid. I make no apologies for putting my own children’s welfare first. When it comes to education in particular, my kids’ interests come first, and everything else is tied for last.
If you got a win-win solution, that’s great. If it’s win-lose, you bet your sweet Aunt Fanny that I am going to see to it that my kid ain’t the one that loses. If my kids get the best of what’s going because Jimmy is being raised by a single mother who is too stressed out to come to conferences or do the PTA or make sure Jimmy does his homework and pays attention, I’m sorry for that. But not very.
Regards,
Shodan
If the proposal was that a student from an underperforming school could attend the school of their choice, even including a funding component for transportation like bussing, I’d be supportive of that. If the proposal was that students in higher performing schools *must *go to an underperforming school, I’d be totally opposed to that.
I’m not sure the first would totally achieve the goals (racial equity, educational outcomes), but it would be an incremental improvement and less disruptive.
Yeah, the crux of the matter is not so much that people don’t want kids from underperforming schools to be given the opportunity to go to better schools. It’s that they don’t want to send kids from high performing schools over to low performing schools. Few parents are going to agree to that, and it’s unclear to me that the studies show that method of integration will improve those kids’ test scores.
The solution then is simple: Close the underperforming schools, expand the high performing schools, and bus the kids from the former to the latter. 
I think the mechanism is that support, economic, political, and otherwise, follows white kids. That’s certainly how it looks when you look at racial demographics and teacher pay in most areas in 2017.
I don’t think that claim is contrary to my position at all. Redistricting is likely far less effective than bussing, and neither is sufficient on its own to create diversity, which is about more than just getting kids with different demographics to the same building. That is a necessary but not sufficient element.
But that’s just punditry. I’m not interested in punditry. I agree that this policy is very unpopular. What I’m interested in is whether it is a good idea on its merits.
Hmm. Would you also support making those schools bigger to support the additional students?
What is being accomplished by that difference that is salient in your mind? Is the idea that the students at underperforming schools ought to be the ones to bear the burden of travel? Or is the idea that there’s something intrinsic about the underperforming schools that would not follow the students who leave?
I would support making schools larger if the attendance calls for it. I think there are other issues related to school size that come into play, like neighborhood planning, traffic, etc. Schools are generally designed to support the population of the neighborhood, so (just making up numbers) if a local high school is designed for 1000 students, is doing great, etc. and then all the sudden in a 1-4 year period there are 5000 students that want to go there, that’s probably going to be unworkable. In a situation with that type of scarcity, there needs to be a way to make choices on who can attend and right now, that’s largely based on geography. That makes real estate in that geography more valuable if the school is high performing, and less valuable if the school is lower performing.
I think most schools can handle a slight increase, but at some point it’s not reasonable to expect a school to continually expand. New schools can be built, but then it doesn’t quite make sense to build a new school in a given neighborhood if it’s being designed to support the population outside the neighborhood, it would make more sense to build it where the need is. But then you’re back to the whole segregation problem.
If the selection criteria isn’t based on geography, that can change the calculus. I know in San Francisco, for public school selection it’s basically a lottery. You could live in region 1, but based on lottery selection you can be designated to a school in region 5. Given it could take 1 hour to get there, that’s pretty terrible and one of the reasons I think that SF is a terrible terrible place for children. The percent population of school age children in the city proper reflect that sentiment.
I personally like the geographical component because it does a couple things. It gives a bit of certainty which is better for planning. I live at X, I go to school at Y. Compare that to SF where you can buy a house at X, have kids, then get assigned to school Z and suddenly your housing situation doesn’t make any sense. That’s disruptive. I also like that this tends to self select based on income. Higher performing schools will attract higher home values, which creates non physical barriers to the neighborhood. I know that generally, the population of students at those schools will be from higher income households. That means they will typically have more resources, both at home, and at the school which means more extra circulars, more ability to deal with issues, things like hungry children being disruptive doesn’t happen nearly as much, etc. It provides for better educational outcomes which is what I want, and has nothing whatsoever to do with racial equity.
The biggest thing to me is probably what would also make this approach unsuccessful in the long run. That being choice. People should be able to choose, and forced bussing eliminates that choice. Optional school selection increases choice, so that’s better, IMO. I think in the short term, it would have incremental benefits, some students will have more opportunity. If the schools are able to absorb the population,that would be great. Over time however, I think we’d see some instances of flight away from schools if they start underperforming, or if there were better options. On balance we be better off in some cases probably, but it wouldn’t necessarily solve the issue in a macro sense. It would probably reduce the issue in limited areas.
I would go further, and say that 3 and 5 are also not immediately apparent.
3 is “Student populations are more stable.” Why would it be more stable? I would expect the opposite - students being bussed to a more distant school are more likely to get pulled, or at least the geographic of a local school becomes much less of a factor that discourages mobility. And with “white flight”, as white parents pull out of a remote school, the district has to replace the white students from the ones remaining at other schools, if they want to maintain racial balance.
5 is “Parent involvement is greater.” Also counter-intuitive. Why would parents be more involved when the school is further away? Let alone the effect on parent commitment when their children are being sent to a school the parents don’t want. And why would it be more likely that a single parent would attend conferences and school events if her child was being bussed to a school further away?
I don’t have any hard figures on either of these, but if proponents of bussing are going to assert that bussing creates advantages, I don’t need them - the ones pushing the change have to bear the burden of proof.
And this as well -
Why doesn’t it? If making a school more diverse helps everyone, why wouldn’t redistricting have the same beneficial effects as bussing?
FWIW, I don’t doubt that bringing in a bunch of higher-performing students is good for the school, because higher-performing students are going to bring up the averages overall. And maybe the good example they set helps the lower-performing students, and the parental involvement of the higher-performers helps the school. But I have seen no indication that this will be to the benefit of the higher-performers - they are going to do just as well, or perhaps better, if they don’t spend an hour a day being driven to a school outside the district where their older brothers and sisters never attended.
Regards,
Shodan
Honest question. Did no one think to systematically study the effect of busing on academic performance in the 70’s and 80’s? This was not exactly the dark ages. For example the legendary Rand health insurance study was conducted in the 1970’s. And it doesn’t even have to be randomized. Just comparing what happened to similar schools without busing would shed some light especially if the sample sizes are large.
And while forced busing may not be a “massive social experiment” it does impose significant costs, both monetary and non-monetary, on students, their parents and the school system and we need to be confident that the benefits outweigh those costs. And yes, as a practical political matter this means assuring white (and increasingly Asian) parents that their children will benefit or at least not be harmed.
While I wouldn’t completely discount studies which show the benefits of diverse schools in general, they obviously don’t show that diversity through forced busing is beneficial.
Yes. Because you should care about others as much as yourself, which means you should care about other kids as much as your own.
This right wing attitude of caring about you and yours more than they and theirs is actually the reason I argue that being right wing is incompatible with Christianity.
Every kid you could have helped but didn’t counts against you, as told by Jesus himself.
Yes, well, not being a Christian, my conscience is clear while I help my kid; and, on a related note, I don’t much want the government in the ‘religion’ business.
Forgive me, but that strikes me as a non-answer, which means, I suspect, that I haven’t been clear. So let me rephrase. Good teachers are in finite supply. How does busing expand the supply of good teachers? If you know how to make better teachers, why is busing better than just making better teachers?
If your position is actually that you need busing plus something else to reap the benefits of diversity, why are we talking about busing without the “plus something else?” If we’re discussing busing without the “plus something else,” then we need to establish the benefit of busing without the “plus something else.”
Then you need to show that it’s a good idea, don’t you? Your argument as I understand it, is that busing must be good because integration is correlated with good results. But that certainly doesn’t follow. We need to look at the mechanisms by which integration is beneficial. If busing doesn’t preserve those mechanisms, then we shouldn’t expect busing to preserve those benefits. That’s not something I think you can just hand wave away.
Disclaimer: I’ve been following this discussion from the beginning, and maybe shouldn’t have chosen to jump in because I’m heading away for a long weekend and don’t know how much I’ll be able to post while out of town. If I don’t respond, it’s not for lack of interest!
There was some amount of study, if for no other reason than that the federal courts imposing these orders often required it. If you browse the legal opinions toward the end of that era, you encounter some statistics, but nothing I would regard as well-designed or strong evidence. But I’m very far from expert on it. Maybe there’s something I’m not aware of.
Yes, of course. But presumably we are entitled to look at the full range of benefits and not just the benefits to the math scores of white students.
I think that’s probably right. I actually think there are far larger political obstacles, including a level of racism that many people are in denial about. But I agree that, as a political matter, white achievement takes on outsize importance.
I’m also glad that you raised Asian students. One big difference from 1954 is that there is a much larger cohort of Asian and Latino students, and I suspect that changes some of the policy and political dynamics. The effect is probably positive on racially isolated schools in all cohorts, since Latino students at least have tended to settle in both rural and urban schools. It’s suburban schools that are now the most monolithically white, and even those families are increasingly opting to put their kids in exclusionary charter schools or private schools. To the extent these demographic changes have undermined the ability for neighborhood segregation to achieve the results that some white families desire, that might create more political space for less-geographically focused attendance policies.