Children of the Dream

From Basic Books

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Kait Howard | 212-364-0663 | kait.howard@hbgusa.com

“In a highly diverse society and world like ours, integration matters. Most of us learn to live integrated lives through integrated schools. Rucker C. Johnson’s ground-breaking research should raise alarms for policy makers, educators, parents, and any other citizen concerned about America’s future in the face of classrooms that look today as segregated as they were when that practice was declared unlawful in 1954.” —Deval Patrick, Managing Director, Bain Capital Double Impact, and former Governor of Massachusetts

The Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared the racial segregation of American schools unconstitutional, was a landmark moment in our nation's history. But today the progress that Brown initiated seems increasingly tenuous. Since the high point of integration in 1988, American public schools have regressed back to segregation levels before busing began. Despite the unprecedented racial diversity of the overall population of US schoolchildren, more than half of children now attend hyper-segregated schools where over three-quarters of enrolled students are either white or minority.

But as economist Rucker C. Johnson contends, these bleak statistics overshadow the larger story about how the school integration efforts in the 1970s and 1980s worked stunningly well, and how they might point a way forward today. In CHILDREN OF THE DREAM: Why School Integration Works (Basic Books; April 16, 2019), Johnson draws on a rich trove of data to show that students who attended integrated and well-funded schools were more successful in life than those who did not—and that this holds true for children of all races. Such schools, Johnson argues, were nothing less than the primary engine of social mobility in the decades after the civil rights movement.

To better understand the effects of early integration efforts, Johnson analyzed longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics—which tracks the fates of 18,000 Americans across generations from birth to adulthood —as well as annual data on school district per-pupil spending, racial school segregation, class size, the timing of school desegregation efforts, and the timing of school funding reforms and pre-K expansions. He also conducted interviews with school leaders, teachers, judges, and policymakers grappling with entrenched inequality in schools across the nation.

The results of this research were stark. Alongside racially integrated classrooms, Johnson found that public school finance reform and public pre-K investments were crucial levers for educational opportunity in the decades after Brown. For example, a 25 percent increase in per-pupil spending throughout a child’s school years can eliminate the average attainment gaps between children from low-income and non-poor families, Johnson found. And for all the (sometimes warranted) criticisms of Head Start, those programs, when combined with increased K–12 funding, have raised educational attainment, increased earnings, decreased the likelihood of incarceration for the children they have served.

America’s experiment with school integration was all too brief, partly due to racial backlash and the unwillingness of even self-professed liberals to send their children to integrated schools. But as Johnson eloquently argues, segregation is bad not just for black students, but for our entire society.

“Segregation is not a black problem,” he writes, “but an American problem.”

Rigorous, eloquent, and eye-opening, CHILDREN OF THE DREAM offers a radical call for reform in our divided times.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rucker C. Johnson is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Johnson was the recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017. His research has appeared in leading academic journals and he has been invited to give policy briefings at the White House and on Capitol Hill. He lives in Oakland, California. 

Children of the Dream is available on Amazon.