Giving Compass' Take:

• Professor Rucker Johnson explains how school integration helps black students and what the current level of school segregation means for the community. 

• How can funders work to support integration at scale? What does school integration look like in your community? 

• Learn about America's racial school funding gap. 

Most Americans believe that after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, everyone tried their best to integrate schools and it just didn’t work. But that’s a myth, professor Rucker Johnson argues in a new book.

Johnson, in his new book Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works, argues that integration did improve the academic and life outcomes of black students, and that America ignores those lessons at its peril, particularly as schools have become starkly re-segregated in recent decades.

“We’re both in a place where we have unprecedented racial diversity among our population of today’s schoolchildren … [and] the classrooms in which they’re being educated are hugely segregated, to the point that it’s really hard to detect that Brown ever occurred,” Johnson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told The 74.

Johnson’s book examines the effects of integration, particularly during the peak of desegregation in the 1970s and 1980s. The slow rollout of school desegregation efforts across the country meant that otherwise similar students were effectively divided into “treatment” groups that experienced integrated schools and “control” groups that did not. Data from school districts and a nationally representative data set of life outcomes, when paired with the “treatment” and “control” groups, let Johnson set up what he called “parallel universes” to evaluate the effects of desegregation.

Among his findings:

  • Black children who experienced integrated schools from K-12 completed over a full year of education more than comparable black children in segregated schools.
  • Five years in a desegregated school led to increased wages and work hours that, combined, came to a 30 percent increase in earnings.
  • Exposure to desegregated schools in elementary school led to a 22-point decline in the probability the student would be incarcerated as an adult.

Read the full article about school integration by Carolyn Phenicie at The 74.