A blueprint for the American Dream

May 2019 marked the sixty-fifth anniversary of the landmark school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education. Sadly, American schools are more segregated than ever.

A timely and important book may renew our collective effort to achieve the equity Brown promised in 1954. In “Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works,” UC Berkeley Professor Rucker Johnson exploits a vast treasure trove of data, coupled with history and personal interviews, to demonstrate the lasting success of school integration.

Johnson not only shows the lasting positive effects of integration, but also how two other educational reforms — school funding reform and pre-K, magnify the success of integration and are themselves enhanced by school integration. Johnson proves that implementing these policies together is key to improving outcomes for our children and our communities.

As Johnson notes, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the “gold standard” of research, but cannot ethically or practically be done with school children. However, the implementation of desegregation in this country was haphazard, which allowed Johnson to simulate an RCT in analyzing its effects.

The author overlays data on court desegregation orders, school quality and long-term life outcomes to show the success of school integration.

Johnson found that court desegregation orders were immediately followed by sharp increases in spending on schools in which AfricanAmerican students learned and reduction in class sizes for those students. School conditions improved immediately following integration.

The positive long-term effects of integration on black children include increases in annual earnings, annual work time, marital stability and rates of good health, as well as decreases in the likelihood of being incarcerated and the incidence of poverty. Integration even results in improved academic and life outcomes for the children of those who learned in integrated schools. The data also show that this profound improvement in life outcomes did not depress positive outcomes for white students.

Like integration, school funding and pre-K reforms were implemented in random areas of the country, allowing Johnson again to simulate a randomized controlled trial.

Nationwide, increased spending in K-12 education resulting from school funding reform has resulted in improved life outcomes, such as increased educational attainment, better health, employment, and earningsparticularly for poor children. Head Start — nurturing, play-based pre-K — has had similar positive effects on life outcomes. Johnson notes that Head Start also has provided vital health care, including eye care, dental care and vaccination to millions of children. The resultant improved health has boosted children’s cognitive development and readiness to learn.

Reflecting on billionaire Robert Smith’s recent pledge to pay for the college debt of the Morehouse College 2019 graduating class, American University Professor Ibram Kendi wrote in The Atlantic how Smith acknowledged something the rich and powerful rarely do — that he was “community-made.”

A major contribution of this book is proving how the success of these individual reforms are amplified when coupled with another. For example, the results of increased K-12 funding are greater when preceded by a well-funded Head Start program. Similarly, Head Start’s positive effects are augmented when children then proceed to K-12 schools with increased spending. These positive outcomes include, high school graduation, increased adult wages and a decreased incidence of adult poverty. The same synergy exists with school funding and integration.

The proof Johnson provides that together, these reforms make remarkable differences in children’s lives — and in their communities — leads to the inescapable question: Why aren’t we implementing all of these three reforms together throughout the nation?

As the author points out throughout the book, these successful policies have not been fully embraced because of specious claims that they are failures. Often, those making the claims point to short-sighted, tenuously connected “outcomes,” such as test scores, to doom these policies.

For example, Johnson debunks the pernicious myth that this nation tried integration and it failed. He details the widespread opposition to and the nation’s shameful retreat from integration almost as soon as it began. The author points to parallel, erroneous claims that Head Start and school funding reforms do not work as excuses to abandon those investments.

Reflecting on billionaire Robert Smith’s recent pledge to pay for the college debt of the Morehouse College 2019 graduating class, American University Professor Ibram Kendi wrote in The Atlantic how Smith acknowledged something the rich and powerful rarely do — that he was “community-made.” Throughout his life, Smith benefited from opportunities he was given that other African-Americans were not afforded. Kendi concludes that true success “means assuming power and changing policy and maximizing impact to reopen windows for all. Because we can’t be community-made if we are not making the community.”

Rucker Johnson’s gift to us, with “Children of the Dream,” is providing the blueprint for how to make that community so all our children benefit from the American dream of equal opportunity.