Sociology 3901: Outline--Week Eleven
I. Brown vs Board of Education: desegregation of the school was to proceed
with "all deliberate speed" in the 17 states where schools were legally
desegrated (distinguish de jure vs de facto segregation)
III. Communities where integration was successful
A.. Thomas Pettigrew, "Social Psychology and Desegregation Research,"
American Psychologist, No. 16, 1961.
What was the difference between communities like Little Rock, that were
violent, and others like Norfolk, Virginia, or Winston-Salem, North Carolina,
where integration proceeded peacefully? Pettigrew shows that at least one
key factor was whether authorities support the inevitability of integration
with "firm and forceful leadership" or whether they communicate
their opposition or their belief that it's being pushed too fast or indicate
that if there are disturbances, it may be postponed.
Remember President Eisenhower's initial comments about integration in
the Little Rock Schools
Another example: President Ford's comments about busing to promote integration
in the Boston schools, as ordered by Federal Judge Garrity
B. Elliott Aronson and Jigsaw Groups: 1971, Austin, Texas
Can integrated schools work? You can make kids attend classes together,
but can you make them like and respect each other, across well-established
lines of prejudice. Aronson and his colleagues called in to consult in a situation
where integration had left minority scores lagging behind and racial separation
the norm. Identified two possible problems: 1. Competitive structure of classrooms
2. Not a situation of equal status contact, as laid out by Gordon Allport
in his classic book, The Nature of Prejudice:
Prejudice... may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and
minority groups in the pursuit of common goals. The effect is greatly enhanced
if this contact is sanctioned by institutional supports (i.e., by law, custom,
or local atmosphere) and provided it is of a sort that leads to the perception
of common interests and common humanity between the two groups. (1954, p.
281)
Looking for a way to create this kind of interdependence and perception
of common interests, they invented the jigsaw classroom. Everyone in both an expert group and a jigsaw group. Can only do well if you can learn from the other members of your jigsaw group.
Introduced in ten fifth-grade classrooms in seven elementary schools, 45
minutes a day, 3 days a week, for six weeks. Results compared to control classes
taught by highly rated teachers using traditional methods. Increased self-esteem
among minorities and majorities; increased mutual respect; increased liking
for school, except among Mexican-Americans; improved exam performance. "Finally,
teachers enjoyed using the technique and found it to be effective. Most of
the teachers who agreed to use the jigsaw method as part of the experiment
voluntarily continued to use it after the experiment was over." It was
later found equally effective at the junior high and high school levels, in
schools around the country, and it continues to be a widespread educational
technique to this day.
What's more, it changed the informal groupings that characterize so many
interracial settings in the United States.
Thus if we seem as a society to have given up on integrated schools, it's
not because we don't know some things that work.
IV. Groups--questions from chapters 3 &4 in Kozol
V. The Politics of integration and resegregation. Major source. Gary Orfield and Susan Eaton: Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown vs Board of Education, 1996
Orfield, p. 43: "Policies devised and implemented by the courts, and indeed, the very composition of courts, are the products of prolonged political battles over ideology."
A. Civil War (1861-1865), Reconstruction (1865-1877) and the Compromise of 1877 that put Hayes in office as president. Why do we allow those with a strong interest in destroying a program to provide the main testimony about its failure?
1. By the time of the Plessy decision (1896)and the full-scale construction of a segregated system in all aspects of public life, including the disenfranchisement of black voters, very little outcry. The narrative established with the end of Reconstruction was that we as a society had pushed too far, too fast, after the civil war (when in Orfield's view, we had not pushed far enough).
2. Lieberson, A Piece of the Pie. Extensively documents the fact that after the Civil War, black southerners were more committed to their kids' education than white southerners. But to little or no avail, as integration was turned away and the funding for black schools diminished to a fraction of the funding for white schools. Indeed, in much of the south, black high schools not even available, as we saw in "Simple Justice."
B. Brown vs Board of Education: 1954
1. Integration proceeded very slowly. Orfield: "By 1964, only one-fiftieth of Southern black children attended integrated schools."
2. But in the years following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court established much stiffer standards for southern schools, and by 1970, southern schools were more integrated than schools in other areas of the country.
C. Resegregation: Nixon, Reagan, Bush and the Supreme Court. Nixon's political strategy from the first involved capturing the white southern vote. . Note his appointment of Chief Justice Rehnquist, who believed that Brown v Board of Education had been a mistake and had said so at the time.
1. Milliken v. Bradley, 1974. Supreme Court disallowed urban/suburban integration for Detroit. ("By 1991, African Americans in Michigan were more segregated than in any other state." Orfield) 4 of the 5 votes were Nixon appointees. Reinforced and rewarded suburbanization and "white flight."
2. A series of subsequent Supreme Court decisions provided means for resegregating southern schools. The key was the concept of "unitary status. " Any school system where segregation had been "remedied" was now freed from court supervision and could move dramatically in the direction of resegregation, provided they didn't announce that intention.
a. e.g. Austin, Texas, declared unitary in 1983 and district court relinquished jurisdiction in 1986. School board redrew attendance zones and created neighborhood schools. By 1983, one third of elementary schools had minority enrollments over 80%, in a district with a white majority
b. By 1995, 60% of sitting federal judges at all levels had been appointed by Reagan and Bush and the dominant narrative said that the effort to create equality through integrated schools had been a failure and that you couldn't overcome what Justice O'Connor called "natural, if unfortunate, demographic forces."
c. The resegregation of the southern schools has proceeded rapidly. "We have a system of residential segregation in most of our metropolitan areas that often approaches the level of segregation produced by the old apartheid laws. This system, together with the policies and practices of the school systems, produces highly segregated and increasingly unequal education for most minority students." Orfield, p. 50
3. Orfield convinced that this derives from a Republican strategy to make the once solidly Democratic South into a solidly Republican South, with a willingness to write off the black minority's vote. If this seems to you implausible, I would ask that you at least consider the fact that every Republican president since Nixon has owed his electoral majority to Southern white voters. Let's look at the last two presidential elections:
"Since the Nixon administration, the Republican party has received only about a tenth of the black vote. Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush (the elder Bush) all pledged to roll back civil rights enforcement and specifically critized urban school desegregation." (President Gerald Ford critical of bussing to achieve integration, as we will se in "The Keys to the Kingdom."
What about now? Bush the younger has also reduced civil rights enforcement, and in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, he took the vote of every southern state, with 160 electoral votes. Without the south, the U.S. would have elected Gore in 200 by a landslide, 266 electoral votes for Gore to 111 for Bush. Without the south, Kerry would have won, 252-126.
VI. Video: excerpt from "Making Schools Work"--Success for All
1. What is Success for All? "More than 1200 schools, mostly high poverty Title I schools, in 46 states are currently implementing the program with external assistance provided by the not-for-profit Success for All Foundation.
a. Students spend most of their day in traditional age-grouped classes, but are regrouped across grades for reading lessons (90 minutes a day, very scripted). Assessed and regrouped as necessary every 8 weeks. One on one tutoring for those who need additional help. Every school must hire someone to coordinate the SFA program.
b. Developed by Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden at the request of the Baltimore School system; piloted in one elementary school, 1977-1988. Four more Baltimore schools implemented the program in 1988-1989.
c. Other elements include: emphasis on cooperative learning methods, Family Support Team to increase parents' participation, full-time Program Facilitator
d. Cost per school from $261,060 to $646,500 per year, depending on size of school
2. Evaluation research: Borman (U of Wisconsin, Madison) and Hewes (Johns Hopkins University). "The Long-Term Effects and Cost-Effectiveness of Success for All"
a. The five original Baltimore elementary schools using the system were paired with other low income, high minority schools with similar student characteristics--a "quasi expermental" research design. The Baltimore schools were particularly low-performing schools, and at least 80% of their teachers voted to support the use of Teach for All.
b. Measurement issues.
1) Experimental and control groups. All the students who were in each school for first are considered part of the sample (or rather those of these students whose eighth grade scores are available from the same school system). Four independent cohorts of first-grade students from 1987-1988 and the next three years, yielding a totla sample of 1388 Success for All and 1849 control students. Students who transferred out -- and there's usually a lot of transfers among low-income students-- do not get the full Success for All Intervention, but are included in the final results, which the researchers rightly see as conservative. The eighth-graders remaining in the Baltimore school system and with full data available: 581 Success for All students and 729 control group students
2). Reading (and math performance) are measured by standardized tests already used in these school system at the beginning of first grade (CAT) and during eighth grade(CTBS/4). The Success for All students were actually lower in their math and reading test scores than the students in the control groups schools, though not by a lot. The researchers see this as reassuring in relation to issues of "quasi" rather than full experimental design.
3) For cost analysis, the researchers used cost figures for each school from the Baltimore school system
c. The results
1) The Success for All students scored in the 20th percentile in reading in eighth grade and the 17th percentile in math. The control group students scored in the 14th and 15th percentiles respectively. Adjusting the scores to represent the lower beginning point in the Success for All schools, this represents a 6-month advantage in reading and a 3-month advantage in math.
2) Success for All had no more costs, because of the extra costs in the control schools of more students assigned to special education and more students held back a grade. Success for All students averaged 0.55 years in special education, compared with 0.82 in the control group. 91% of Success for All students avoided being held back a grade, and 77% of the control group.
3. What are the things that Kozol finds so offensive about SFA, as implemented in the New York City School system, where it was mandated to be used in all the low-performing elementary schools?