Cross-distict voluntary programs like those in St. Louis and Boston, which enable low-income minorities to attend predominantly middle class and white schools, have produced consistently positive results.

Since you use the word “voluntary” there, have you ever heard of the term “selection effects”?

To test the hypothesis that “disadvantaged children in the more integrated school will do better, other things being equal”, you need to make sure that other things are equal. Unfortunately for the purposes of scientific research in most parts of the world, which school a child attends is heavily affected by parental choice on such matters as where to live. A disadvantaged child who happens to be in an integrated school may plausibly differ in many ways from a disadvantaged child who is in a segregated school. Perhaps reported parental income is low, but the parents can live in a rich area because their grandparents brought them a house there. In the case of racial groups, a child living in an integrated area may very plausibly differ in many ways from a child of the same ethnic group living in a segregated area in many ways other than which school they attend, and their parents may well differ from the parents living in segregated areas. Consequently we need to control for this plausible source of difference before we can conclude that putting disadvantaged children in a more-integrated school will improve their educational outcomes.

So what you want is an experiment that randomly assigns children to more- or less- integrated schools. As far as I know the Coleman report did not draw on such research. Consequently its results are untrustworthy compared to a study that uses random assignment. As is any subsequent research that does not use random assignment.

Studies supporting the law of evolution use even more controlled experiments than is possible in educational research (we can’t breed a bunch of genetically-identical children as our starting point like genetic researchers do with fruit flies). I have not looked at the studies of global warming as closely, so I do not know how they control for confounding factors. However, I get the impression that they are more substantive than finding a statistical correlation and calling it a day. And if we could run a thousand Earths in a properly-controlled experiment of global warming, the results of that experiment would trump any number of statistical correlations.

And it doesn’t matter if I, or kdeRosa is a serious scholar of education policy or not. What matters is the quality of the education research.

My blogger profile.

But let’s get back to the topic at hand.

The various Coleman Reports noted many correlations:

• academic achievement was less related to the quality of a student’s school, and more related to the social composition of the school, the student’s sense of control of his environment and future, the verbal skills of teachers, and the student’s family background.

• school funding was not closely related to academic achievement;

• smaller classes had no effect on academic achievement.

• school laboratories had no effect on academic achievement.

• school counseling had no effect on academic achievement.

• higher teacher salaries had no effect on academic achievement.

• higher teacher qualifications had no effect on academic achievement.

• even after family background factors were controlled, private and Catholic schools provided a better education than public schools.

• busing had failed, largely because it had prompted “white flight.”

Coleman did predict that black children who attended integrated schools would have higher test scores if a majority of their classmates were white. But it was Pettigrew who, after reanalyzing the data, concluded that black students attending mostly white schools had achievement levels much higher than those in segregated schools. Also, in these schools, the white students’ performance was no worse than that of whites in segregated schools.

However, as I pointed out above, Pettigrew apparently thought all blacks were the same, those who lived in neighborhoods that were integrated (i.e., middle class) and those from the inner city (i.e., very low-SES). The analysis did not take into account the difference in the homes, the language models, and the other differences in child-rearing practices between integrated blacks and urban blacks. The relevant difference was that when integrated blacks entered school they were far advanced over the inner-city blacks in skill, knowledge, and language proficiency.

This is at least why all your hypothesis, which is all these correlation studies give you anyway, has failed in practice.

To the extent that we have conducted legitimate research, the research goes decidedly against your hypothesis. See the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, the Minnesota Twin Family Study and Brouchard’s Reanalysis, and the Minnesota Texas Adoption Research Project and Willerman’s various analyses. The findings are consistent. Placing a low-SES child in the nurturing environment of a high-SES household and high-SES school has failed to yield significant academic gains. By age 17, the adopted children performs like a low-SES child, despite the change in environment.

Also, to the extent any study you can dig up contends to show “consistently positive” results you can bet the studies also are not statistically significant (p > 0.05), not educationally significant (s < 0.25), don’t adequately define or control for SES, and/or do not use a valid testing instrument.

If you have any cites for your studies, let me know.

As for court-ordered busing, the problem was that the lion’s share of children involved, both white and black, were from low-income families living in cities. Mixing low-income kids of different races doesn’t overcome the socio-economic concentration problem. Cross-distict voluntary programs like those in St. Louis and Boston, which enable low-income minorities to attend predominantly middle class and white schools, have produced consistently positive results.

What we are likely to see are poorly designed “studies” that try to correlate SES and achievement, broadly defined, with no control groups. The studies will also imply a causation even though the studies couldn’t possibly show causation.

This is how it’s done in education and this is why none of the proposed solutions ever work. It also helps to have a short memory and conveniently forget that after teh Coleman Report we tried bussing low SES kids to high SES schools and failed to achieve any gains, suggesting that the expected causation was incorrect.

Your first question, in #1, is based on a misunderstanding. We are talking about integrated schools (which Satz and Anderson both argue for), not schools with large numbers of advantaged and small numbers of disadvantaged children, and assuming (implausibly, perhaps, and that is one reason that non-integrative strategies may be superior in some circumstances, as I argue elsewhere) that the problem of intra-school competition over resources is solved (as is unlikely in the NCLB results). Still, we could be clearer about that, certainly.

I am entirely in favour of hesitating to draw strong conclusions from one study. What I was questioning in your paper was which studies you do draw from when you say “The disadvantaged children in the more integrated school will do better, other things being equal, because they have fewer competitors for the limited resources.”

In your paper you do not mention even one study supporting this view. And, I note it is a strong view. Not “there is some evidence to suggest…” but just a bold statement that children “will do better, other things being equal”. Surely someone who hesitates to draw conclusions from one study must have a variety of studies behind such a strong claim. What are these studies that are behind your claim? And, out of curiousity, why don’t you mention them in your report?

Richard—read the paper (not ours, hers). There’s an interesting question about what to hold constant when thinking about these issues. Anderson holds constant the assumption that there will be elites and that there will be very limited social mobility—assuming that (what you find creepy), I am a bit sceptical about the feasibility of implementing inclusionary zoning and inclusionary schooling, as Anderson calls for, at least in any meaningful way. But I also concede that on that assumption her recommednations are extremely urgent.

sam—that’s interesting about teachers. I agree that some people will just be good at one kind of teaching, and others at another. But most, early in the careers, have a range of abilities, and it is impossible (and would be inefficient) to develop them all. The system provides incentives for them to develop some rather than others, and what actually happens in the public school system in the US is that teachers with a wide range of talents are encouraged to develo the talent to teach the higher achievers, and to gravitate to the schools where those students are. Lower achivers (usually from lower SES groups) are in schools with a lot of teacher turnover, in which teachers have less exeprience and have not developed their talents well yet, and often with less capable principals.

We don’t talk about setting/streaming/tracking in the paper (which is relevant to your comment) because it takes us too close to the practical world, and because we don’t have full command of the issue. That said, it seems to me very odd to have comprehensive classrooms past a certain age, in subjects like math, the sciences, and writing intensive subjects like English. Many high schools track without tracking, but offering electives that enable middle class parents to put their children into Shakespeare classes; ie they track by social class rather than by potential for achievement; not a fan of that, either, myself. But this is strictly off-topic.

It’s startling what a difference controlling for genetic relationships makes to studies on parents’ effects on children’s behaviour. I keep reading newspaper articles and mutter to myself “Well, maybe the causation is the other way round – teenagers who are willing to let their parents monitor them are less likely to do drugs anyway, rather than that parents who closely monitor their kids cause their kids less likely to be doing drugs”.

And I had better specifically note that I do find it very plausible that appalling parents, ones who beat their children, or lock them in the cellar for years, or who never touch them but live in such a state of domestic violence that the child’s brain is soaked in stress chemicals for years, do damage their children directly. All the studies I know of that control for the relationship between genes and child outcomes only look at decent parents, for obvious ethical reasons.

On the one hand, I realise you’re probably saying “no rich ghettoes,” on the other, this is the creepiest sentence I’ve seen all week, bringing to mind especially-bred politico-children (with enhanced White TeethTM), destined to continue legacies in Congress, who have to be able to press flesh with the stinking horde without grimacing.