Get Thee Some Graduate Students!

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon writes about the recent shift among school districts to integration policies based on economic status - not race - in light of last June's Supreme Court decision. Bazelon's review of the research on the impact of integration on student achievement highlights a serious problem for integration proponents - there just isn't much good research out there showing student achievement benefits from integration policies, whether they’re based on race or economic status.

I, unlike some people, find the logic behind creating “middle class schools” compelling – concentrated poverty brings with it a host of problems at the school-level, including fewer school resources and less qualified teachers, that tend to exacerbate any problems students are bringing with them from home. But I have yet to see any convincing research to show that busing students to create middle class schools will improve student achievement, at least as measured on standardized assessments.

In Bazelon’s article, for example, she cites research showing that low-income students in middle class schools score better than low-income students in majority low-income schools. That’s interesting, and indicates that concentrated poverty may have an effect on achievement, but it’s impossible to disentangle those results from other things that may be happening—the students in the middle class school may also live in more socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods, or, while they may qualify as low-income, their parents may have higher education levels or hold full-time (albeit low-paying) jobs. This type of anecdotal evidence leaves a lot to be desired, and leaves those who support integration policies with few genuine facts to grab hold of.

The evidence supporting gains beyond test scores, such as graduation rates, college attendance, and employment, also hint to positive outcomes from integration plans, but are frustratingly weak when it comes to research design. METCO, for example, Boston’s long-running integration program, which buses students from the city into neighboring suburban districts, reports that 87 percent of METCO students attend college, compared with 54 percent of Boston public school students as a whole. That’s great, but considering that there are 12,000 students on the waitlist for METCO and students are assigned to the program by lottery, why hasn’t anyone conducted a study comparing the students randomly selected to participate in METCO with those who were not selected? The results from that study would be taken much more seriously and would hold up better to scrutiny than simply reporting comparisons with Boston’s general student population.

Integration proponents' biggest hurdle may not be the recent Supreme Court case, instead, it may be the lack of rigorous research on integration and student achievement. While KIPP and other charter school networks are investing in longitudinal studies on student outcomes, those who would like to see resources spent on integration, rather than building new schools, will need to pursue similarly rigorous research efforts. If they don’t, public support for integration policies may wane in favor of efforts to create new neighborhood schools, segregated or not.