An investigation of school desegregation and its effects on black student achievement

American Education, Dec, 1984 by Thomas R. Ascik

The National Institute of Education (NIE) has just published a collection of papers that will shed a great deal of light on one of the great social science issues of our times, namely, the issue of the effects of school desegregation on black student achievement. In addition, it may establish new standards for the use of social science research in the arena of public policy.

The importance of the issue to

public policy

Although the political history of the relationship betwen desegregation and black student achievement has yet to be written, there can be no doubt about the importance of this relationship--to the federal courts, to officials at all levels of government, to school officials, to social scientists, and to parents. The public interest in this issue was launched,of course, by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954); the Social Science Statement submitted to the Court on behalf of the Brown plaintiffs by social psychologists Isidor Chein, Kenneth Clark, and Stuart Cook; and the Supreme Court's own psychological musings in the text of the brown decision along with its judicial notice of the authority of social science research in the now famous Footnote eleven of the decision.

The Supreme Court had to make three key decisions to arrive at its holdings in Brown. The first was its decision not simply to overturn its ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that "separate but equal" facilities for the two races were constitutionally permissible. The second was its decision to issue a ruling about racial inequality in education regardless of whether "the physical facilities and other 'tangible' factors" were unequal. The third was its finding that the history and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment--the amendment upon which the holding would rest--were "inconclusive." With this admission that the reasons for a strictly legal holding in the case were "inconclusive," the Court foreclosed such a holding. And when it said in its most important utterance in the case that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," it meant not that they were unequal in the allocation of measurable, "tangible" educational resources, including "buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers," but that they were unequal because racial separation itself causes an unequal effect on the self-esteem of children. And the resultant "sense of inferiority" caused by the low esteem of black children affected "the motivation of a child to learn" and retarded "the educational and mental development of Negro children."

The issue was self-esteem in education. A low esteem affected the educational performance of black children. Norman Miller, one of the NIE authors, remarked in his paper that the Social Science Statement made the same connection between self-esteem and academic achievement, for it "clearly emphasized a casual pattern in which personality variables (self-concept and achievement motivation) caused subsequent changes in academic performance." It has been argued by Jack Greenberg, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs in Brown, that "since everyone looks to these results [i.e., test results], they should not be an impediment" to desegregation.

In federal court decisions since Brown, black academic achievement has taken on a more explicit role. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, the lower federal courts began to regard achievement test scores as evidence of unequal educational opportunity. For several years, the Supreme Court itself did not comment on such evidence, although the "facts" of the cases it was reviewing were sometimes based on test scores. However, inthe 1977 case of Milliken v. Bradley, the Court dramatically expanded the scope of judicial remedies in desegregation cases from mere student assignment and re-assignment to the prescription of remedial educational programs. This case made the academic performance of black students a primary concern in the fashioning of judicial remedies for segregation offenses. Indeed, in the many urban areas where resegregation has occurred, the question of racial balance and busing has become moot, and judges have increasingly turned to educational remedies for segregative acts.

Prior research on school

desegregation and

black student achievement

The first large-scale study of the effects of school segregation (and desegregation) on the academic performance of black students was the landmark Coleman Report (1966), the intended political purpuses of which were to document statistically the view of the U.S. Office of Education that there were huge differences in the quality of white and black schools and in black and white achievement. Six hundred thousand students and sixty thousand teachers took verbal and mathematics tests and answered questionnaires about their family and economic backgrounds. The well-known conclusion of the report, that student achievement was related more to family background than to either race or schooling, contradicted expectations and has had a larger impact on education than any other piece of social science research. One of its more important effects has been its introduction into desegregation litigation.