School Desegregation and Intergroup Relations: A Review of the Literature

One of the most striking features of crime in America is its disproportionate concentration in disadvantaged, racially segregated communities, which has long raised concern that segregation itself may contribute to criminal behavior. Yet little is known about whether government efforts to reduce segregation can reduce crime. We address this question by studying the most important large-scale policy to reduce segregation in American life - court-ordered school desegregation. Our research design exploits variation across large urban school districts in the timing of when they were subject to local Federal court orders to desegregate. We find that for black youth, homicide victimization declines by around 25 percent when court orders are implemented; homicide arrests decline significantly as well. We also find evidence for spillover effects on other age and race groups, consistent with data indicating a sizable amount of offending across groups and with the fact that offending by different groups is also linked through the police budget constraint. Economic models for a "market for offenses" suggest the influence of this second mechanism should attenuate over time as victims respond to a shift in the supply of offenses by reducing investments in crime prevention. Consistent with this theory, we find police spending declines several years after court desegregation orders are enacted. The only detectable life-course-persistent effects are found among birth cohorts that attended desegregated schools.

The Effects of School Desegregation on Crime

this chapter I first offer a historical overview on how risk, equity, and schooling have been conceptualized with regard to youth from nondominant groups.1 I argue that the dominant discourses around these issues have been characterized by deficit assumptions that have been buffered by what were determined to be state of the art theories in psychology, sociology, and human development. These dominant discourses have positioned nondominant communities as passive recipients of structured hegemony and have not reflected the generative sources of resilience and resistance in these communities. Political critiques of the apparent, persistent, and historical educational risks faced by youth from nondominant groups document the structuring of inequality. One inadvertent consequence of the ways we have approached the topic of risks, equity, and schooling has been to position youth from nondominant groups outside the bounds of normative development and to restrict our investigations into isolated silos that separate thinking from emotions, that focus on one site of activity (e.g., the family or the school), and that have a restrictive vision of culture and its influences.

Historical Evolution of Risk and Equity: Interdisciplinary Issues and Critiques.

presented at the Annual Meeting of the

The history of black-white contact in the United States is long and complex. However, the last 35 years have seen changes in relations between blacks and whites of a magnitude virtually unparalleled before, except for the period immediately after the Civil War. One of the most controversial of these changes was the decision handed down in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case in 1954, in which the Supreme Court overturned the earlier doctrine that “separate but equal\" public facilities for blacks and whites could be mandated by state law. Instead, it argued that such separation in the schools \"generates a feeling of inferiority (in black children) that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.\" Thus, enforced segregation of the schools by race was held to violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution (Read, 1975; Wisdom, 1975) and to provide an inherently unequal education for black and white children. The Brown decision and later attempts to implement it raised a storm of controversy (Edelman, 1973; Hochschild, 1984; Kluger, 1976; Lukas, 1985). White resistance to the policy was expressed in an extraordinary number of ways, ranging from physical attacks on black students attempting to enroll in previously all-white schools, to legal stratagems aimed at delaying desegregation, to the founding of over 3,000 private academies set up to serve as alternatives to desegregated schools. Prince Edward County in Virginia literally closed down its public school system for several years rather than desegregate until the Supreme Court ruled that unacceptable (Bell, 1980; Kluger, 1976; Smith, 1965). Thus, efforts to achieve school desegregation were stymied for over 10 years. In fact, in 1964, a full 10 years after the Brown decision, about

Chapter 8: School Desegregation and Intergroup Relations: A Review of the Literature

The author asserts that the educational questions and issues being raised by many black parents, students, and teachers today are substantially different from the traditional concerns of experts. The black spokesmen are questioning the legitimacy of the educational institutions; they no longer believe that it is sufficient to try to increase the effectiveness of those institutions. This difference has caused a tension between those who have been victims of indifferent and inefficient policies and practices and those who believe it is still possible to make the existing institutions operable. Black people are calling for community control, not for integration. They are focusing as much on Afro-American culture and awareness as they are on verbal and arithmetic skills. Some black people are thinking of entirely new, comprehensive forms of education, based on substantially different normative values.

Charles V. Hamilton

Papers

Race and Education: A Search for Legitimacy