No doubt operationalizing the previous proposition is harder, but maybe we can also get agreement on the (empirical) proposition - spending per pupil at a public school, and hence public school quality, tends to mirror the wealth of the community where the school is located. Then busing might seem at least a partial answer to how children from low to moderate income families get a decent education, and it may seem all the more attractive as a solution when integrating housing is not in the cards.
My prior, however, is that there are substantial limits to what busing might achieve because of the "school within a school" phenomenon that I've written about several times, most recently in the post America in Its Addled Essence. For both the junior high school/middle school and senior high school that I attended there was busing of African-American students to the schools. Yet the SP classes in junior high had only one African-American student among a total of about 200 students in SP in my graduating class (determined by eyeballing photos from the yearbook). Likewise, there was only one African-American student in Arista for my graduating class in high school. (I'm guessing there were about 250 kids in Arista in my grade, though I've got no way to count that now.) Incidentally, I'm about nine and a half years older than Kamala Harris and I believe I started tenth grade the same year she started kindergarten. Of course, geographical differences may matter here. While I lived in Bayside, the schools I attended were NYC public schools. I'm guessing now, but I believe Berkeley has its own self-contained public school system, connected neither to the San Francisco public schools, nor to the public school systems of other communities in the Bay Area. The year I started high school (ninth grade) was also the year of the big NYC teachers' strike. While I saw no evidence of this in junior high school, racial tensions were obvious in high school. And when I was in 10th grade, we were on the late session, starting school around 11:30 AM and not leaving school till about 5:40 PM. This was necessary because the school was so crowded. There weren't enough classrooms to have all the students there simultaneously. Both of these factors created their own sense of disorientation.
From doing some background reading on tracking in the schools, I've come to realize that my experience may not be definitive on the matter, as the system changed quite a bit after I graduated from high school. SP classes are no more. If there is tracking at all in middle school now, it is on a subject by subject basis. This may have been how it was when I was in high school, for those students within the academic curriculum. But then there was a commercial diploma and a general diploma, in addition to an academic diploma. I seem to recall that they got rid of the other diplomas soon after I graduated. My experience, which may not have been typical of students in Arista, of this I'm not sure, is that the only time I didn't take an academic class with an honors designation is because there was only one version of the class (e.g., earth science in 9th grade and economics in 12th grade). Now, at least in principle, some students make take an honors class in one subject, a regular class in another subject, and a remedial class in a third subject. And many schools have embraced having students of heterogeneous abilities within the same class, meaning no tracking whatsoever.
But it is a mistake to assume the playing field has been completely leveled now and all students have equal opportunity to excel in school. Indeed the research seems to suggest a movement back to clustering students by ability and that much of this reinforces current socioeconomic status. When I was a kid school was said to be an engine for upward social mobility. But now it seems to mainly reinforce the status quo. In this regard, the most heartbreaking thing to read is about students in the middle track who perform well there and should be boosted to the top track when they enter the next grade level, only to find that there is a slot constraint for the top track, so that if no other kid gets demoted from the top track, the high performing middle track kid stays put, which is incredibly discouraging. I found this book review of Tracking Inequality: Stratification and Mobility in American High Schools, by Samuel Roundfield Lucas, helpful in understanding the new reality. In the concluding paragraph the reviewer writes:
Notwithstanding the above contingencies, I find Lucas’s work to make an important contribution to the sociology of education. Its strength is its combination of thoughtful statistical analyses and grounded sociological theory. Overall, Tracking Inequality provides convincing evidence of the persisting disparities in our educational system and shows us that inequities remain, but have simply taken on a different form.
Likewise, I found the Executive Summary in this paper by Loveless useful, particularly on the efficacy issues, where much less is known than we'd like:
Heterogeneous grouping has not been adopted by enough middle and high schools to conclude whether detracking produces achievement gains—for poor, minority, and low achieving students or anyone else. In sum, research comparing tracking and heterogeneous grouping cannot conclusively declare one or the other as the better way of organizing students.
We should consider the underlying causes that support these findings. On the persistence of tracking, it is understood that many parents game the system on behalf of their child, presumably with the goal of getting the kid into an elite college. These parents treat the top track as a gateway toward this goal so want to assure their child's membership in the top track, putting school administrators and teachers under a lot of pressure. To an economist, an obvious partial remedy to this situation is to expand the slots at elite colleges, thereby lowering the selectivity and making the competition for the slots less fierce. I've not seen such a solution being discussed as a policy option, but maybe it should be given some consideration. Indeed, supply of such slots has increased, by some universities that had been perceived as moderately good, e.g. NYU, now part of the elite. But the Ivy League schools and the Stanfords of the world haven't expanded their capacity, to my knowledge. Doing so would be resisted by those who already get in, as it would diminish the "economic rent" they get from the degree. But socially, I believe that would be desirable. In other words, if you want to improve the opportunities for people closer to the middle of the pack, lower the rewards for people who reach the top. In the absence of doing that, this will simply repeat, over and over again.
On the perhaps mixed results of grouping students with heterogeneous ability, let's consider inter-student effects, which really can go both ways. A shy student, who may lack confidence about his ability, might find it off putting to endure the the obnoxious nerd student (think of the Sheldon character in the Big Bang Theory) and those sort of interactions could be stigmatizing to the shy student. There has been much written about the tracking causing stigma for those students in the lower tracks. While this is likely correct, we should not assume there will be no stigma in a heterogeneous group, when some students feel uncomfortable there. Alternatively, if the nerd proves to be friendly rather than obnoxious, then the nerd might become something of a teacher and help other students in the group learn. In my time at school, where I played the role of the nerd, while I was no Sheldon I've experienced the reaction of other students as if I were, while at other times I've experienced other students expressing gratitude for what I taught them. So, it should also be noted that the learning is bi-directional. The nerd stereotype is high on cognitive ability, but low on emotional intelligence. Such interactions give the students feedback on how they are perceived by others whom they don't already know well. The students may come to understand themselves better as a result.
One might then want to consider how to encourage the teacher effect while discouraging the off putting obnoxious alternative. As apart from my own kids being in school I've had very little experience with K-12 since I graduated high school, I will merely speculate about this here, based on my considering the analogous questions, but in the college setting, where I feel more on terra firma. During the first year of this blog I wrote a series of posts on Inward Looking Service Learning, where students a year or two further along would serve as peer mentors for younger students. Some of the mentoring would be purely academic, but other parts might be more emotional and attitudinal. It seems to me that if schools valued such peer mentoring in ways that are evident to the students, it would encourage the nerd to reconsider the value in being obnoxious and maybe soften the kid that way, and likewise it might encourage the shy student to be more outgoing and seek learning opportunities from other students. Wishing for this is definitely not the same as making it happen and surely there will be some bumps in implementing any program of this sort. But as teachers are overburdened already, utilizing the students as a resource for helping more junior students, which in turn will encourage their own growth, should be something to try, and not just by dipping a toe in the water.
Let me close this bit with one more point and then return to busing as a near term solution for promoting equality of opportunity in education. This is about heterogeneous grouping holding back the highest ability students regarding their measured performance. We are now suffering through a time where many very good students learn how to please others by their performance, but never learn how to direct their own learn purely for their own satisfaction. Documenting this phenomenon we have books like Excellent Sheep and Op-Eds like What Straight-A Students Get Wrong. Regarding my own education when I was in high school, in a recent post called Should School Be Hard Work For The Good Student? I explained that I had free time to do with as I chose, which is necessary if the kid is to learn to be self-directed. If you talk with college educators today, many will complain that the kids are over programmed. Boosting the resume ends up driving the activity, not the kids intrinsic interest in the matter. We need to break this pattern, as it is inherently unhealthy for the kids and produces misery rather than satisfaction. Yet the parents who push the teachers and school administrators into keeping their child in the top track almost surely push the child as well to care mainly, if not exclusively, about measured academic performance. Expecting these parents to lighten up on their own seems an exercise in wishful thinking, at best. This, then, offers another reason for expanding the number of slots for admission at elite universities. Everyone will chill out, at least somewhat, if the competition is less fierce.
Let's now return to busing. Brown v. Board of Education is the law of the land. That decision was 65 years ago. If you were an optimist then, you might have hoped the issue would no longer be relevant by now. Obviously, it still is. Busing remains a necessary tool to avoid separate schools that are inherently unequal. The point of this essay, however, is that busing is not sufficient and the school within a school issue also needs to be addressed fully, for otherwise busing will mainly be a charade, not a real remedy. Since Kamala Harris took on the issue about busing in the debate, perhaps she can embrace this fuller view of what effective remedies should look like. And with that let's hope that 65 years hence we are further along than we are now.
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