Academic success is not a matter of dollars and cents

DESEGREGATION is at a crossroads. As many analysts are declaring the integration experiment a failure, Harvard’s desegregation guru, Gary Orfield, keeps telling us that minority education could be fixed if only we desegregated more. Educators and the media routinely slam city schools for poor minority performance while holding up affluent suburban districts as models because of their better test scores. Yet, if Orfield is right that segregated districts don’t produce equal outcomes, no one has answered the more important question, which is whether “integrated” districts produce equal outcomes.

Oddly, while the courts have used inequality as the justification for busing, Orfield himself notes in his 1991 book The Closing Door that there isn’t much direct evidence that busing creates more equality. Almost as a footnote, he concedes that you would have to examine data broken down by race within mixed districts to prove that busing actually resulted in better performance for minorities.

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Arthur Hu

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DESEGREGATION is at a crossroads. As many analysts are declaring the integration experiment a failure, Harvard’s desegregation guru, Gary Orfield, keeps telling us that minority education could be fixed if only we desegregated more. Educators and the media routinely slam city schools for poor minority performance while holding up affluent suburban districts as models because of their better test scores. Yet, if Orfield is right that segregated districts don’t produce equal outcomes, no one has answered the more important question, which is whether “integrated” districts produce equal outcomes.

Oddly, while the courts have used inequality as the justification for busing, Orfield himself notes in his 1991 book The Closing Door that there isn’t much direct evidence that busing creates more equality. Almost as a footnote, he concedes that you would have to examine data broken down by race within mixed districts to prove that busing actually resulted in better performance for minorities.