effects of segregation on African American high school Seniors' academic achievement, The

Journal of Negro Education, The, Fall 1999 by Mickelson, Roslyn Arlin, Heath, Damien

In the years following the Swann decision, many studies attempted to assess desegregation's effects on student achievement, aspirations, minority self-esteem, and race relations. Still, no consensus emerged regarding desegregation's effects because the post-Swann findings were inconsistent with one another. Some studies found small positive effects; some found no effects, and others found negative effects (Armor, 1995; Rossell, 1990). Despite this inconsistency, some social scientists interpreted the early research record on the short-term effects of desegregation more optimistically (Bankston & Caldas, 1996, Hallinan, 1998; Hochschild, 1984; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP], 1991; Orfield & Eaton, 1996; Wells & Crain, 1994,1996). These scholars concluded that limited exposure to desegregated education in a school that does little to equalize educational opportunity brings no benefits to minority students, but when schools employ practices to enhance equality of opportunity (including the elimination of tracking and ability grouping), desegregation has clear, albeit modest, academic benefits for Black students while doing no harm to Whites.

More recent research offers unambiguous evidence of the positive effects of desegregated schooling. Using the entire state of Louisiana school population as a sample, Bankston and Caldas (1996) examined the influence of the racial/ethnic composition of a school on individual student achievement. They found that minority concentration in a school has a powerful negative effect on the academic achievement of Black and White students. Brown (1999) used data from the 1990 National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) to demonstrate that high schools with enrollments that are almost entirely White do not necessarily produce the best academic outcomes for all students. The ideal racial/ethnic mix, she contended, is between 61% and 90% White or Asian American and between 10% and 39% Black and Hispanic American. She found schools with this mix to have the highest academic achievement and the smallest gap between racial/ethnic groups in grades and test scores. Moreover, these trends were found to hold even when accounting for socioeconomic differences among students. Similarly, Schiff, Firestone, and Young (1999) report that after controlling for family background, both Black and White students who attended racially desegregated schools where Whites were the majority had higher National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and mathematics scores than did those who attended racially isolated White or racially isolated Black schools.

TRACKING AND EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT

The research on the effects of tracking consistently shows that, overall, the majority of students gain little from tracked schooling. There is some evidence that students benefit from the more rigorous instruction typically found in higher tracks, but those effects are small. Supporters of tracking maintain that the practice is effective for targeting instruction to maximize learning (Loveless, 1999). They assert that many of the shortcomings of tracking are unintended negative outcomes due to technical and implementation errors, not necessarily flaws in the principles of tracking (Hallinan, 1994a, 1994b). Critics of the practice argue that it is a significant source of inequality of opportunity within all schools where it is implemented (Oakes, 1990). The historical origins of tracking can be traced back to early 20th-century racist efforts to separate then-recent European and other immigrants, Blacks, and Hispanics from native-born White Americans of Northern and Western European descent, and to provide both groups with education commensurate with perceived racial/ethnic differences (Terman, 1923; Tyack, 1974). Today, however, tracking is generally not used for the formal purpose of providing unequal educational opportunities to children from different racial/ethnic and social-class backgrounds.1