Further, don't underestimate the power of white flight. It's happened many a time before.
I think it would be pretty surprising if this hyper-integration plan didn't result in a sudden and substantial drop in the quality of education in the nicer schools (more classroom disruption which is, anecdotally from the several teachers I know, a huge problem in lower-income schools, more teacher time spent catching the new students up, et c.) and I 100% guarantee that any parents, of any color, who could afford to leave those districts to unaffected ones or switch to private schools would do so ASAP. So yeah, white (and/or not-poor) flight, instantly. And probably some fairly intense protest action by any who couldn't afford to get their kids out.
Oak Park is tiny and known for its school system.
The western side Austin Ave, which divides Chicago from Oak Park, hosts an unbroken row of multi-family dwellings, many of them large apartment buildings. The occupants of those buildings are people who would otherwise live in Austin, but move to Oak Park to get their kids into Oak Park schools.
This has been going on for decades in Oak Park, and we continue to have excellent schools, and continue to be a high-status magnet for professionals who want to live somewhere connected to the CTA trains but not part of CPS schools.
It doesn't happen in Kennilworth or Wilmette, because those suburbs aren't directly adjacent to troubled neighborhoods in Chicago. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that the carrying capacity for lower-income students of those suburbs --- the majority of Chicago suburbs, which like Wilmette and unlike Oak Park, aren't city-adjacent --- is any less than that of Oak Park.
So, no, I don't think your hypothesis about inner-city kids disrupting suburban schools is accurate, nor do I think "instant white flight" is going to happen.
"White flight" was an irrational, racist reaction to housing integration. It's not a law of nature; it was/is a growing pain of the US getting over centuries of segregation.
> "White flight" was an irrational
What's irrational about it? The suburbs created as a result of "white flight" are objectively vastly safer than the places the now middle-class suburbanites were fleeing from.
It's not like the people fleeing the inner cities salted the earth when they left. They simply refused to put up with increasing crime and poverty. I'm not sure how one would rationally consider anyone to be a "victim" of that peaceful outmigration.
Not even a difficult call.
Why do you think they were motivated by racism? Safety and superior economic environments were far and away the most pressing factors that led the middle class to flee declining urban areas.
> deliberately trying to recreate segregation.
They weren't deliberately trying to create segregation; they were trying to protect themselves and their families, both physically and financially. De facto segregation may have been a consequence of that, but we have no reason to suspect that it was an explicit goal.
Like I said: I'm willing to concede that not all of the participants in white flight were wearing Klan hoods. What I'm not willing to do is blame their victims for the systemic, perpetual disadvantage this phenomenon created.
The main reason we term the situation "white" flight is that the whites could afford to move out of the city, and most blacks could not. If the majority of blacks had as much money as whites, they would have moved away too.
It's telling that when this crime wave ended, whites started to move back to the cities, even though the racial composition of the cities they were moving back to was less white than it was when they left. If they left in the first place because of racial diversity, they would not have moved back -- but they did move back, and are continuing to do so.
The idea that the arrival of black people in a homogenous white neighborhood is a harbinger of intractable crime problems is itself an example of systemic racism. I don't care if you feel it's justifiable racism.
There are places in the US --- St. Louis is probably the best example --- where you can observe white flight creating strata of suburbs like the rings on a tree. Ferguson was one of those suburbs: 99% white in 1970, majority black now, but (until very recently) with institutions controlled by whites.
If white people are re-colonizing the inner cities of some of these places, I'm not prepared to see that as a purely hopeful sign (or, worse, a sign that white flight was itself benign or justified). Rather, I'd worry that we're progressing towards an outcome that France has seen in its own cities, with vital city centers ringed by poor, disadvantaged suburbs.
Actual crime arrived in those neighborhoods. There is no shortage of statistics to prove this.
You need to get your cause and effect in order.
People saw high crime in all-black neighborhoods created by the great migration, lost their shit, and moved to escape the black people. In doing so, they fucked up the tax base for their previous cities, and created new ghettos. Predictably, crime followed their exodus, (falsely) confirming the predictions of the fleeing white people, creating a cascade.
(High crime in endogenously black neighborhoods is also not hard to explain: well-integrated neighborhoods in the Chicagoland MSA have low crime rates, but crime rates in places like Englewood are sky-high; this is a legacy of disadvantage and lack of opportunity and mobility that traces directly from virulent racism. Simply put: you systemically disfavor a population, and the areas inhabited primarily by the disfavored population have poorer outcomes. Who'd have thunk it?)
The endogenously black neighborhoods did not experience erosion of the tax base due to white flight, because there were few, if any, whites living there in the first place. So, why did crime increase dramatically in the endogenously black neighborhoods during the time period we are talking about? Whatever the reason is, why wouldn't it be the same reason crime increased in the areas subject to white flight?
I find it very unlikely that the endogenously black neighborhoods experienced an increase in crime for one reason, and the nearby white flight neighborhoods experienced an increase in crime for a totally different reason (such as erosion of the tax base after white people left). Obviously the erosion of the tax base made things worse, but unless that caused all of the increase in crime, something else was going on.
If you are going to argue that crime increases after white flight were a self-fulfilling prophecy and would not have occurred without white flight, that's a pretty extraordinary claim.
If you answer in the affirmative, you'll need to bring some proof.
This is how I'm addressing your argument about causality. If any of the crime increases happened before white flight, or if the increases would have happened anyway, then you are wrong about causality. The best you can do is to claim that white flight made a pre-existing increase in crime worse. That is not what you have argued up to now.
Your claim was wrong.
Since you appear to be unwilling to even address the rebuttal of your argument, let alone concede the point, I'm not interested in the rest of your arguments.
This thread is deep enough already.
[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...
With that said, I have some doubts that such a policy would accomplish what you might hope for. Most people, even those who wish people wouldn't, understand and sympathize with parents trying to get the best possible education for their kids.
So with that having been said, and recognizing my own role:
Why exactly should we sympathize with parents who react to problems in their school systems by using their economic leverage both to exempt their own kids from those problems and also, by altering the tax base for their original school system, making those problems worse? Why is that praiseworthy? It doesn't seem praiseworthy to me. It seems to me like just another of those little pragmatic immoralities we all undertake regularly.
We have few problems seeing the problem when it takes the form of kids going to Choate and Bowdoin. But at the smaller scale we all deal with, we seem unable to recognize the same thing happening. We seem to believe can't possibly be a part of the problem. But, of course, we are.
I don't mean to crucify anyone for doing it. After all, I did it too. But I think we can reasonably draw the line at rationalizing or valorizing the de facto privatization of good public education in our country.
I think we should be careful about the difference between rationalizing and understanding the decisions parents make. The two are readily confused on the best of days, and political discussions about school quality generally don't happen on the best of days.
I think that most people tend to think that parents have a responsibility to help their kids as much as they can within fairly wide constraints. Parent's loyalty to their children above the children of others is one of the fundamental building blocks of our society like it or not.
1. Though some studies seem to indicate this won't really help.
This is a mountain range of slippery slopes, of course, but the fundamental moral point here seems pretty obvious.
Is it fair that I can straightforwardly buy myself a better life than is available to others without means?
Is this more or less unfair than than what I can buy for my child? If anything I would say that the personal luxuries I buy for myself are more unfair than the educational opportunities I can buy for my kid. At least the latter is in pursuit of human capital formation and not just luxury spending.
Which is essentially just a long way of saying that the moral weights on inequality and mobility/opportunity aren't the same.
I'm not prepared to crucify people for making these kinds of moral compromises, but I think it's important not to go the other direction and valorize them.
"Bad" urban schools with often poor student outcomes often have significantly higher spending per pupil than the tony suburban schools. There are lots of reasons why this would be the case of course. But it's not exclusively, or even primarily, a matter of relative spending levels.
It is not enough to defend privileged with taxation, institutions and laws but they must use astounding double-think to convince themselves that the result is somehow fair. Part of that self-indoctrination is putting huge effort into convincing everyone around them of these absurd views.
I'm open to the possibility that the measured quality of a school does not change if you make significant changes to its constituent populations, but it seems like a large enough question to not be assumed in passing.
That can't be what you mean to imply, so I think maybe step back and examine how you've ended up in an incoherent position.
We can certainly debate how many (as a % or raw number) challenging students a "good school" can import before overall quality begins to degrade. But I don't think that it's especially controversial to say that degradation will happen at some point.
I don't know that I agree with the intervention he's recommending, but the underlying point he's making makes sense.
Consider Raj Chetty's work; he shows that the primary determinant of student performance is intrinsic student qualities, but that teachers also matter a fair bit.
http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf
http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/w19423.pdf
Why would you consider this factual claim to be an "incoherent position"?
If you were actually correct, and teacher quality was the primary determinant, then we could skip VAM and just use raw test scores to measure teacher quality.
I.e., if teacher A had a class of underprivileged black students while teacher B had a class of rich Asian students, and teacher B got higher test scores, that would be evidence teacher B was a better teacher. Is this actually your belief?
The context of the thread you've jumped into is what the best intervention to circumstance might be to improve outcomes for students. You appear to be begging the question.
The educational experience of students is not dictated wholly by teachers, curriculum, and facilities.
You seemed to disagree with his claim. Due to this apparent disagreement, I interpreted "intrinsic" to mean something other than teachers, curriculum and facilities. The Chetty paper, and the entire need for VAM (as opposed to just measuring raw test scores), shows this to be true. Do you believe this to be false?
For example, the kid's quality of life outside of school. Which is demonstrably improved by helping poor kids with rent. Which I believe he is trying to argue against.
I may be misreading. I'd like a second opinion. I'd rather not assume people I'm arguing with hold revolting core beliefs. This would not be, like, the first time I'd jumped the gun on something like this: I myself hold a (probably faulty) core belief that the median HN participant is likely to host retrograde beliefs about race, which is unfair of me too.
If you want a summary, I don't share your religious faith that God ensured an identical statistical distribution of genes across all subpopulations when he created man. But Kalium's argument is not dependent on this - there are more things in the world than simply teachers, curriculum, facilities and genetics. For example, poor people might be disproportionately bad parents (perhaps they exhibit many bad behaviors which also make them poor) and this might cause their children to be disruptive in school.
That's a concrete theory that's directly compatible with your secular faith in statistically identical genetic distributions, but still supports Kalium's claim.
And have you also "discovered" a correlation between this academic performance gene and melanin content? Or gender too? Surely you don't want to deprive us of such important "discoveries".
And who can blame them? If you started putting a bunch of high-risk no-income people in section 8 housing in a formerly nice neighborhood, any rational person who could afford it would move away.
This is a classist dogwhistle labeling the poor as lazy, violent people.
"The poor" is not the same as "people who live in public housing". There are a lot of dirt-poor rural areas that are very safe (and generally more employable).
The poor are lazy: http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication... Table 3 on page 21.
They are also disproportionately violent: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf
I have no data on section 8 recipients in particular; do you?
The rich would be violent, too, if they were threatened by losing their wealth. Being able to reject violence wholesale is privileged.
Let's just agree never to interact; I think we'll both be happier.
Ah, so not beating your wife, as discussed in the paper, is privileged? It's OK for poor people to do it?
Avoiding conviction certainly is.
I've seen first hand in Boston how hard it is for someone in public housing to get a job. Can't imagine some random suburb.
TLDR is massive NIMBY and some pretty ugly stuff. Highly recommend listening to the episode.
Are roads in wealthy neighbourhoods repaired on a different schedule than poor neighbourhoods too?
School budgets are a small part of the effect, if any. Typically (at least around here) teachers in good districts are paid substantially less than in bad districts, and per-student spending is often lower in good districts than bad.
As far as I can tell the good-district/bad-district effect is caused by a series of self-reinforcing loops, one of which is that schools full of the kids of parents who both can and will spend more on housing to be in a good school district tend to be better because they're full of those kids.
[EDIT] I took your question about roads to mean whether, broadly, rich areas receive more government spending than poor areas, which is sometimes true for some things but does not seem to be a major driver of school inequality AFAIK
This was challenged as a 14th Amendment (Equal Protection) violation in a famous supreme court case, San Antonio v. Rodriguez [0].
The court found that, since education is not a constitutional right, the 14th Amendment was not violated.
Put another way, the US Federal (or an individual state) government lacks the authority to dictate how individual municipalities fund their schools systems. That authority would be necessary to enforce the equality you expect.
I don't know where you're from, but perhaps your confusion stems from a more homogenous body politic? In America, there is a massive web of overlapping towns, cities, counties, districts, and states, each with their own political authority, and often with massively different demographic makeups.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School...
The core issue is the idea of mingling "underprivileged" kids with "privileged" ones; with intuitive expected result being some "lifting up" of the underprivileged kids at the expense of some of the education of the privileged kids.
Except there's no evidence this helps the underprivileged kids. There's lot of evidence it completely screws over the privileged kids and the end result is a dumpster fire of social engineering proportions. It's why we don't try to do it anymore, and every new generation needs to be taught the lesson lest they repeat it.
My siblings, 6 of us brought up on feeding pigs and making hay and fixing fences, all ended up going to college in medicine and engineering. All professionals; all successful. I always credited our going to school with all those 'city kids' with their high expectations.
So it can work.
Overall, I think the neighborhood works out for those in public housing, but there are downsides.
Anecdotally, I'm not sure if just dropping public housing in "good" districts is always a viable solution. Definitely, being in a good school district is beneficial and I think integration is helpful, but it's not as simple as just mashing two economic classes together.
I did look up the test scores for Cambridge Rindge and Latin which is the only public high school in Cambridge (which for those not familiar with the area has a tech/biotech boom in addition to being home to Harvard and MIT). It's in the bottom half for the state in spite of having some of the highest per-student spending in the state (and one of the better student/teacher ratios).
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...
Having said that, the biggest takeaway the podcast that I'm getting (still mid-read) is that it was /integration/, the incubation of children within a target culture and environment designed for success, that had the most profound impact.
It was society working, even if in an odd way, to extract people from a dysfunctional environment and raise them within a working one.
Based mostly on this and some anecdotal data, I feel that fighting 'segregation' the other direction, by trying to add 'non-problem students' to failed environments would have a similar effect on them; mostly in halting their growth and causing their integration within society that works to falter.
This suggests that the war on poverty isn't something that can be won by funding alone, but instead by fighting to spread the culture of 'good' society further.
(I normally prefer transcripts too, but the creators of TAL specifically recommend the show be listened to.)
At some point there are probably diminishing returns to the amount of $$ spent per student in a school system. But you can imagine that most suburban parents would have a hard time reducing the $$ spent on their own kids for the benefit of the greater good.
http://www.businessinsider.com/we-now-know-more-about-how-ne...
I would argue that the reason suburban students are better are most likely because their parents are also better, whatever being a 'better' parent means in this case.
Poorer communities often have a culture so different than the average HN reader that most of us can't possibly understand it. (I learned this as a result of being a foster parent)
If you were trying to rank parents wouldn't "prioritizes their children's education" be a factor in determining which parent was better? Just because something is a cultural difference doesn't mean we can't say it is better or worse.
As nice and easy it would be to measure a person's worth as a parent by how well their kids do in school, or how much they make as an adult (like this article), I don't think that's reasonable at all.
Look at a state like Connecticut, which features very affluent areas and very poor areas within. If you like at the top performing schools, sure the best ones tend to be in affluent areas, and the worst ones are in cities, but that's not at all how much money gets spent per student. For instance, the town in the state with the absolutely lowest spending per student, Wolcott, is one of the top school districts in the state, and even has a school that won the national "Blue Ribbon" aware for excellence last year.
There are also numerous studies (which I'm way too lazy to go find) that indicate the affluence of the parents to be more important than the affluence of the school on a child's school success (this article is about adult income, though).
I ask because I think it can be hard to generalize from an area like Connecticut that is really quite high population density and quite wealthy to the US in general (in CT a student might be a reasonable distance to 3 or 4 large high schools. In Nebraska, they might be a reasonable distance to 1 tiny school).
Keep in mind that CT is a bit of a sinking ship, with companies and jobs leaving, and the population often following it. It's not some place that everyone is flocking to, but it has a long history of being at the forefront of things like education and mental health.
I've also heard, from numerous people, that having a few years experience as a teacher here in CT will make getting a job teaching in most other places completely trivial.
The other cycle is self-reinforcing too: Low housing cost -> working class population -> less tax revenue -> worse schools -> reduced home demand -> lower housing cost -> even less affluent population ... ... ...
There doesn't seem to be an obvious weakest link, but I'd start with untying school funding from LOCAL taxes and from "school performance" which is code-word for "richer students". Allocate funds state-wide or even nation-wide to those schools with the highest need.
EDIT: Alternatively, let me send my kid to whatever school I want, regardless of which side of some artificial school district line I live.
Instead, in the 'good exurban schools' case, the evolution usually goes:
1. Rural, periphery area attracts affluent folks seeking bigger houses on cheaper land. High-end residential subdivisions are developed.
2. Increased tax revenue allows for good schools, nice government amenities.
3. Good schools attract additional residents. Residential population swells, commercial and industrial population remains low.
4. Residential brings fewer tax dollars per infrastructure cost than commercial or industrial. At some point, municipal costs (roads, sewer, fire, schools) begin to approach revenue. Services are cut. Schools decline, making residents eligible to contemplate moving to another area in step #1 or step #3. Those who can't afford to move to a newer area stay; they are thus on average lower-income than those who left. At this point, there is a danger of falling into the second cycle.
The evolution I laid out can be most readily observed in places where urban areas are not hemmed-in geographically, and easy access to cheaper undeveloped land exists, so new exurban nodes can be readily created. Right now, Northern Virginia (DC suburbs), Atlanta, Raleigh, Dallas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Kansas City, and Minneapolis are experiencing this in their urban areas. California yet again a special case because exurban areas are usually much, much further away than elsewhere (Santa Clarita, Temecula, Palmdale -> LA; Santa Rosa, Fairfield, Tracy -> SF/SJ).
Integration is the "give a man a fish" strategy.
Creating the social conditions for increased social mobility is the "teach (or allow) a man to fish" strategy.
This idea seems to be borne of a distinct "If poor inner city people can't have nice towns, no one can!" attitude. How about we try to actually improve poor inner city districts rather than making it someone else's problem?