Jay P. Greene's Blog

Checker Finn and the folks at Fordham have made the “conservative case” in support of Common Core.  In it they have reassured those concerned about centralized control that Common Core embodies a “tight-loose” approach, which is tight on the ends of education but loose on the means for accomplishing those ends.  Common Core doesn’t dictate curriculum or pedagogy Checker assured us, it only requires that “everybody’s schools use the same academic targets and metrics to track their academic performance”  and “then those schools can and should be freed up to ‘run themselves’ in the ways that matter most: budget, staffing, curriculum, schedule, and more.”

Kathleen Porter-Magee and Sol Stern made the same argument in National Review Online:

Here’s what the Common Core State Standards do: They simply delineate what children should know at each grade level and describe the skills that they must acquire to stay on course toward college or career readiness. They are not a curriculum; it’s up to school districts to choose curricula that comply with the standards.

And Fordham’s Peter Meyer responded to criticism of the curricular and pedagogical implications of Common Core in the New York Times by asserting:

In fact, there is no Common Core curriculum, radical or otherwise. Words matter. The Times essay, Cunningham says, “conflates standards, which are agreed-upon expectations for what children should know in certain subjects by certain ages, with curricula, which are the materials and the approaches that teachers use to help kids learn.”  There is no such thing as a “radical curriculum” because there is no such thing as a common core curriculum.

These were the promises the Fordham folks made when they were courting us on adopting Common Core, but now that we’re married, they’ve changed their tune.  No longer do they bring us flowers, write love-poems, or assure us that Common Core in no way dictates how schools should teach or what they should teach — their pedagogy and curriculum.  Instead, Fordham and their friends are now judging schools on whether they are properly implementing “instructional shifts—ways in which the Common Core standards expect practice to differ significantly from what’s been the norm in most American classrooms.”

I thought Common Core didn’t determine “practice.”  Now Checker Finn and Kathleen Porter-Magee argue:

In order for standards to have any impact, however, they must change classroom practice. In Common Core states, the shifts that these new expectations demand are based on the best research and information we have about how to boost students’ reading comprehension and analysis and thereby prepare them more successfully for college and careers. Whether those shifts will truly transform classroom practice, however, remains to be seen.

The National Council on Teacher Quality, with support and praise from the Fordham Institute, are grading teacher training programs on whether “The program trains teacher candidates to teach reading as prescribed by the Common Core State Standards.”   Wait.  “Prescribed?”  I thought Common Core didn’t prescribe pedagogy.  But that was back when I was young and we were dating.

It would be nice if Fordham and others trying to hold down the right flank of the Common Core advocacy campaign could keep their story straight.  The switch once the fight has shifted from adoption to implementation creates the impression that these folks make whatever argument they think will help them prevail in the current debate rather than relying on principle, evidence, and intellectually serious policy discussion.

Matt has alerted me to an excellent analysis by Martin Feldstein on a potentially fatal (pardon the pun) difficulty with Obamacare.  He writes, in part:

The potentially fatal flaw in Obamacare is the very same feature that appeals most to its supporters: the ability of even those with a serious preexisting health condition to buy insurance at the standard premium.

That feature will encourage those who are not ill to become or remain uninsured until they have a potentially costly medical diagnosis. The resulting shift in enrollment away from low-cost healthy patients to those with predictably high costs will raise insurance companies’ cost per insured person, driving up the premiums that they must charge. As premiums rise, even more relatively healthy individuals will be encouraged to forego insurance until illness strikes, causing average costs and premiums to rise further….

The “wait-to-insure” option could cause the number of insured individuals to decline rapidly as premiums rise for those who remain insured. In this scenario, the unraveling of Obamacare could lead to renewed political pressure from the left for a European-style single-payer health-care system.

But it might also provide an opportunity for a better plan: eliminate the current enormously expensive tax subsidy for employer-financed insurance and use the revenue savings to subsidize everyone to buy comprehensive private insurance policies with income-related copayments. That restructuring of insurance would simultaneously protect individuals, increase labor mobility, and help to control health-care costs.

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the general approach of Obamcare — requiring everyone to purchase health insurance while subsidizing that purchase for people with fewer resources.  And I’ve been repulsed by the Republican response, with it’s hysterical over-reaction, strategically idiotic government shut-down, and lack of a reasonable alternative.  But Feldstein makes a lot of sense to me.  The problem is that Obamacare does not really require everyone to buy health insurance and the fines (err, I mean taxes) for not having insurance are too small so that many will rationally prefer the “wait-to-insure” option.

Of course, I’m not sure whether actually requiring everyone to buy health insurance would pass constitutional muster given Roberts’ reasoning in the Obamacare case.  But it’s amazing how adroit in its reasoning the Supreme Court can be when the alternative is a policy disaster.

It would also be nice if the minimum policy required for purchase were not laden with expensive and unnecessary features, like coverage for birth control or annual mammograms from birth (or something like that).  The trouble is that every special interest tries to get its pet project into the minimum required coverage, so it isn’t very politically realistic to hope that we would only require catastrophic coverage.  But here’s hoping.

(HT to Minnesota Kid for the image)

(Guest Post by Collin Hitt)

Another gold standard, random assignment study has found that Boston charter schools are producing large test score gains.Yesterday the Boston Foundation released the newest installment of its studies of Bean Town charters. It updates results from previous studies and finds continued, large test score gains for charter middle and high schools. From the study:

Since 2009, the middle school charter yearly gains for math are 0.23σ compared to 0.26σ overall and the gains for ELA are 0.15σ compared to 0.14σ overall. The comparison for charter high schools is similar. In recent years, the high school charter gains for math are 0.38σ compared to 0.35σ overall and the gains for ELA are 0.33σ compared to 0.27σ overall.

You will notice that these are yearly gains. The authors show that results are almost always stronger for poor and minority students, as well as English language learners. This kind of progress, for students of color, could easily eliminate the racial achievement gap over the course of middle and high school.

The report also looks at the question of whether charter schools effectively push out low-performing students. The authors find that charter middle schools are significantly less likely than other public schools to see their students transfer elsewhere. In high school, charter students for a time were more likely for a time to transfer out, but that trend has completely vanished since a state policy change regarding charter enrollment rules in 2010 – a time since which the test score results of charter high schools have improved.

So, we have another random assignment study finding gains for charter school students. We have another study dispelling the myth that charter schools push out their students.

Soon we should expect a retraction from all the people who’ve made evidence-free claims to the contrary. Right?

With the support of the Gates Foundation, New York City created 150 small schools of choice between 2002 and 2008.  Five previous rigorous studies of this program and other small school initiatives have demonstrated significant benefits for students.  Now we have a sixth study from the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative at MIT.

The authors, Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Weiwei Hu, and Parag Pathak, are economists at Duke and MIT.  They take advantage of lotteries to gain admission to these non-selective small schools of choice to conduct a random assignment experiment. The full study can be read here, but it does not allow me to cut and paste text  to summarize the results. According to the press release:

The study follows cohorts of rising 9th graders for five application years from 2003-04 through 2007-08. For these students, small schools boost performance across all five major Regents exams: Math, English, Living Environment, Global History, and US History.  Students randomly offered a seat at a small school accumulate 1.4 more credits per year, attend school for 4 more days each year, and are 9% more likely to receive a high school diploma. 

 

As the cohorts have aged, it is now possible to measure the effects of small schools on college enrollment and choice, outcomes that have never been examined before.   Compared to the college enrollment rate of 37% for those not offered, students at small schools are 7% more likely to attend college and 6% more likely to attend a four-year college.  Most of these gains come at four-year public institutions.  There is a marked 7% increase in the fraction of students who enroll in the CUNY system. Small schools cause students to clear CUNY remediation requirements in writing or reading.  The early evidence suggests that students are more likely to persist in college, as measured by attempting at least two academic semesters.  Students in the lottery study are too young to say anything definitive about college graduation. 

 

A major innovation in the study is its use of information contained in NYC’s Learning Environment Surveys to characterize the small school environment for those in the experiment.  Small schools are rated higher than fallback schools by student survey respondents on the overwhelming majority of questions on engagement, safety and respect, academic expectations, and communication.  Surveys indicate that students feel safer and have closer interactions with their peers and teachers, despite reporting a smaller variety of course offerings and activities.  Teachers indicate greater feedback, increased safety, and improved collaboration.

 

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation. The research team includes Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Professor of Economics, Weiwei Hu, PhD Candidate at Duke University and Parag Pathak, Associate Professor of Economics at MIT and SEII Director.  The study uses data provided by the New York City Department of Education.  The findings are being released in the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper series this week. 

 

The study uses an innovative research design based on admissions lotteries contained in the high school match.  The lottery-based research design relies on apples-to-apples comparisons: among those who apply to a given set of small schools, applicants who were randomly offered are compared with otherwise similar students who were not offered a seat.  The study covers more than 108 oversubscribed high school programs with 9th grade entry, which represent 70% of unselective small high schools opened between 2002-2008.

 

“These results indicate important possibilities for urban small schools reform,” said Pathak.  “The collaboration partnership between key stakeholders in New York City shows that within-district reform strategies can substantially improve student achievement.”

(Guest Post by James Shuls)

As a child, I spent several years in the Cub Scouts. That experience taught me many valuable lessons, like how to carve a car out of a block of wood. More importantly, I learned a bit about orienteering. There is really one thing you must know about plotting your course — where you are in relationship to where you want to be. This is true in all areas of life. At first blush, it seems this lesson was lost on the folks at the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). Unfortunately, it was not the only lesson lost on Missouri’s education department.

DESE recently revamped the state’s teacher licensing process. They jettisoned the widely used Praxis teacher licensure exams and instituted new standardized exams. Among the new tests is one called the Missouri Educator Profile. The profile “is an assessment of work style preferences used to support the development of effective educator habits.” Pre-service teachers take this exam upon entering a college education program and again just prior to exiting their education program. Though teachers are expected to “develop” in their preparation programs, the Missouri Educator Profile website tells us that “there are no right or wrong answers.”

Progress, development, growth, improvement; these things cannot happen unless you know where you are in relationship to where to want to be. You must have a goal.

There are no pass/fail scores on the Educator Profile; but as a point of fact, this new Educator Profile does have right and wrong answers. When designing the test, DESE officials had “exceptional teachers” take the assessment. These exceptional teachers became the norming group for whom all prospective teachers will be compared.

The initial results will provide the student and advisor with information about how the student’s work styles match the work styles of successful teachers. The results also suggest ways in which the students can improve their work styles. This is an important step in helping the students choose whether or not professional education is the right career choice.

This highlights another important lesson that was apparently lost on the folks at DESE—selecting on the dependent variable is a poor research strategy and a poor way to identify effective teaching practices. This represents more of a Cargo Cult mentality than true scholarly research. We cannot identify what makes a teacher successful by only looking at successful teachers. We need a comparison group at the very least. Emulating the habits of others will not necessarily bring about the same results and you simply cannot make causal claims by selecting on the dependent variable.

DESE officials were wrong when they said “there are no right and wrong” answers on this new exam. Teachers whose attitudes, dispositions, and habits don’t match DESE’s preconceived notion of a good teacher will have wrong answers. They will be counseled out of their education major or they will be encouraged to fall in line and conform to the DESE standard. This can have a devastating impact on ingenuity and creativity in the classroom.

At first blush, it seemed DESE officials had not learned the lesson about orienteering. But perhaps they have learned the lesson all too well and they know exactly where they want to go. In Missouri, DESE is implementing new licensure exams, Common Core Standards, new requirements for teacher preparation programs, new Pre-K standards and tests, a new K-12 evaluation system, among other reforms. I think they know exactly where they are going: they have plotted a course for greater centralized control of Missouri’s education system.

James Shuls is the education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute.

(Guest post by Patrick Wolf)

For this year’s Al Copeland Award I nominate another amazing Al:  Weird Al Yankovic.  The “Al” is intended to honor an entrepreneur or activist who has significantly improved the human condition but has not been fully recognized for their contribution.  Weird Al Yankovic fully satisfies all three criteria.

If you have been living under a rock for the past 30 years, or you pay absolutely no attention to pop music or comedy, you may not know Weird Al.  Born Alfred Matthew Yankovic in 1959 in southern California, his parents chose accordion over guitar lessons for Al because, according to Yankovic, “My parents…were convinced that [the accordion] would revolutionize rock music.”  While earning a degree in architecture at Cal Tech, Al began performing musical parodies in local coffee shops and got the famous Dr. Demento radio personality to play some of his demo tapes.

His first professionally recorded song was a 1979 parody of The Knack’s “My Sharona,” called “My Bologna.”  The next year he recorded “Another One Rides the Bus,” a parody of Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust,” live on the Dr. Demento radio show.  “Another One Rides the Bus” went on to become the greatest-selling rock song of all time.  (Okay, I just made that last part up but it WAS a hit.)

Weird Al–a childhood nickname given to him by school bullies that he embraced, thereby literally getting the last laugh (well, he embraced the nickname, not the bullies, but I digress)—proceeded to produce a string of parody hits with obvious targets including “Like a Surgeon,” “Eat It,” “I’m Fat”, and “Smells Like Nirvana.”  His parodies of rap hits like “Amish Paradise” and “White and Nerdy” work especially well because, in the Weird Al tradition, his band reproduces the original music almost perfectly while contrasting the hard-edged hip-hop style with lyrics about the bland lifestyles of Amish people and suburban brainiacs.  His Star Wars parodies – “The Saga Begins” (set to Don McClean’s“American Pie”) and “Yoda” (from The Kinks’ “Lola”) are nothing short of genius.  Weird Al Yankovic is the pop music parody icon.

Yes but “What have the Romans ever done for us?”  I mean, what has Weird Al done for humanity?  Tons.  If you want to see the impact that Weird Al has had on improving the human condition, just take your 13-year-old son and his best friend to a Weird Al concert (as I did on Saturday) and watch them smile, laugh, and sing the night away.  Joy is only one of Weird Al’s many contributions to humanity.  More importantly, Weird Al humbles the haughty and over-serious members of the entertainment industry through his gentle and creative jabs.  For example, when I was young, there was a popular but sad rock ballad called, “Alone Again, Naturally.”  After the movie Rocky V was released (and bombed), Weird Al artfully penned “Stallone Again, Naturally.”  Weird Al literally aids humanity by humbling those who view themselves as superior beings, thereby reminding them and us we are all so very human.  Finally, by mocking high-brow musical art, Weird Al also celebrates it.  You have never really made it in the pop music world until Weird Al has parodied one of your songs.

Weird Al actually is an accomplished musician.  Rock accordion solos are really hard to play.  When people urge Weird Al to branch out into writing and performing serious pop songs, his stock response is:  “There’s enough people that do unfunny music.  I’ll leave the serious stuff to Paris Hilton and Kevin Federline.”

Weird Al has received some recognition for his accomplishments.  He is rich and famous, which doesn’t disqualify him from receiving an “Al”, as Al Copeland was rich and famous, too.  Those aren’t necessarily bad things.  Weird Al has received three Grammy Awards, but those were in recognition of his contributions to music and not for his contributions to humanity.

I must say that actually attending a Weird Al concert prompted my brilliant idea (I am SOOOOO amazing) to nominate him for the “Al.”  The epiphany came when I approached the snack bar at the theatre and noticed that the only food item available was spicy chicken, lathered in ranch dressing, served in a box that you can use as a roller bag, with the following statement on the cover:  “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”  And this year’s (Weird) Al goes to…

I’ve been railing against education policy arguments based on identifying places with successful outcomes and then claiming we should imitate certain practices or policy features of those places to achieve success elsewhere.  I argued forcefully against it in my review of Marc Tucker’s book.  Anytime someone says Finland (or Massachusetts or whoever) is doing well because they have high standards or little choice or no school athletics, or whatever, they are just engaging in quackery — pure BS.

It is a matter of basic logic that one cannot know what causes success only by looking at a successful place (or set of successful places).  You cannot know whether any factor contributes to success without also considering unsuccessful places and examining whether that same factor tends to be more present or absent in successful relative to unsuccessful places.  This is an error known as “selection on dependent variable” and it is taught in any decent introduction to research methods course.

People who regularly draw policy recommendations based on the Finland du jour should be made to hold up a giant sign that says “I do not understand the basic research methods of the field in which I claim to be an expert.”  And that’s just it.  These people aren’t really experts.  There used to be a time when a clever writer could be considered an expert on education policy simply by virtue of articulating a clear-sounding argument.  That time is gone.

Even journalists should be expected to have some basic understanding of the methods in education policy research.  No one would accept that science reporters could be ignorant of fundamental principles of the scientific method.  No one would accept that diplomatic correspondents would have no knowledge of diplomatic history.  Even journalists — especially when they are writing book-length arguments — need to have some understanding of research methods that would include the obvious point that no causal claims can be made from selection on dependent variable analyses.

So, I was delighted to see the Brookings Institution’s Russ Whitehurst take on David Kirp’s book, Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools, which draws lessons from an examination of one “successful” district — Union City, NJ.  Whitehurst begins by illustrating why selection on dependent variable does not allow for causal claims:

A while back, I read a journalistic account of a small island off Italy in which people live to be quite old.  Could it be because they sleep late, or drink lots of wine, or live a communal existence, or don’t eat refined sugar?  Unfortunately there is no way to know based on the information provided in the article if it is one or more of the lifestyle characteristics the author identified as distinctive, or whether something else is going on.  Even the claim of unusual longevity is questionable since there is no birth registry. And taking everything at face value, maybe there are other places in Italy in which people live as long or longer with different lifestyles.

Whitehurst goes on to question whether Union City is really such a successful district.  And then he applies the problems of his Italy example to Kirp’s use of Union City to make causal conclusions about how school improvement can be achieved.  Lastly, Whitehurst concludes with:

Once we have valid descriptions of the distinctive operational differences between good and not-so-good schools, controlling for differences in student background and out-of-school factors that are beyond district control, the social science of district reform can move to planned and carefully evaluated interventions.  That is our playbook. That is where we need to be.  I don’t think the path goes through Union City.

Amen, Brother Russ.

A number of years ago a Princeton philosophy professor, Harry Frankfurt, gave a brilliant lecture, “On Bullshit,”  which was later published as a very short book.  In the book Frankfurt spends some time defining the term, distinguishing it from similar concepts, like a lie or humbug.  He suggests that bullshit is something that is “grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”

Frankfurt acknowledges that there are some positive uses of bullshit. It sometimes just allows us to get along.  Rather than struggle at all times with everyone over what the truth is, bullshit is something that we all spout and accept as — if you will excuse the imagery — a type of social lubricant.  We would never be able to get along in large organizations without a fair amount of bullshit, which is part of why we see so much of it in all of our work lives.  Politics, which requires managing conflict, is also a bullshit-laden activity.

While bullshit is unavoidable and sometimes useful, it is overall a very destructive thing.  As Frankfurt puts it, “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”  It is corrosive to the very process by which we seek truth by embracing an indifference to the truth.  The triumph of bullshit is not the triumph of falsehood, but the triumph of nihilism.  Bullshit makes us not care about the truth, so why should we care about anything?  To maintain a good society, bullshit must be held in check.

Unfortunately, Frankfurt suspects that bullshit is growing, not being held in check.  It is growing, he suggests because bullshit is a part of communication and as communication grows so does bullshit.  We are talking all of the freakin’ time and on all matters of public and private concern.  The extent to which we are communicating about all of these things far exceeds our ability to know the truth of them or even be concerned with the process of discovering the truth about them.  Facebook and Twitter pre-date Frankfurt’s lecture, but they nicely illustrate the relationship between increasing communication and increasing bullshit.   Frankfurt also blames the rise of bullshit partially on post-modern philosophies that actively promote and rationalize an indifference to the truth.

But I suspect that there is another force at work in the growth of bullshit.  I suspect that as violence becomes less permissible within modern societies, bullshit has substituted for violence as a mechanism for manipulating or coercing others.  The famous Prussian military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz, once said “War is the continuation of policy by other means.”  I think bullshit is the continuation of violence by other means.

Earlier in our country’s history, before the domestic use of violence was so limited, differences were often settled through violence.  When Carnegie Steel was faced with a strike at a Pittsburgh plant, Henry Clay Frick called out 300 Pinkerton detectives who killed 16 striking workers and wounded 23 more.  Unions were similarly known to take baseball bats to workers who crossed their picket lines.

So when a modern day Andrew Carnegie, like Bill Gates, wants to have his way, he doesn’t hire a private army of Pinkerton detectives to beat us into submission.  Instead, he hires an army of foundation staff and advocacy organizations to spout bullshit.  And in response the unions don’t take up baseball bats, they take up blogging.  Violence, like bullshit, is indifferent to truth; it is simply a mechanism for prevailing.  As violence becomes less available as a strategy for winning a dispute, bullshitting becomes more prominent.

If bullshit is on the rise and is corrosive to a good society, how can we limit or even reduce it?  Science and its weaker sister, social science, are the antitheses of bullshit.  They are enterprises entirely committed to the pursuit of truth.  Unfortunately, bullshit has infiltrated science and social science as those activities become more politicized and embedded within large bureaucratic organizations.  The scientist or social scientist may be as likely to promote bullshit as to man the barricades against it.  Instead, we need something stronger, more resistance to corruption, than the scientist to fight bullshit.  We need the skeptic.

The skeptic is someone entirely devoted to the task of discovering and debunking bullshit.  The skeptic may be a scientist but often isn’t.  And the skeptic can often be mistaken about what is and is not bullshit.  But the skeptic is always on the prowl for bullshit and is even more committed to the process of finding truth than the mere scientist is.

Penn Jillette and Teller are worthy of “The Al” because they are the most active and effective skeptics of our era.  They are illusionists who have extended their professional interest in deceiving others for entertainment  into a professional interest in uncovering and debunking the deception of bullshit for entertainment.  For eight seasons they hosted a series on Showtime that was, appropriately enough, called Bullshit.  They targeted everything from alternative medicine to recycling to lie detectors to the Bible.  The have also crusaded (irony intended) against bullshit in their stage show, in magazine articles, and in TV appearances on other people’s shows.  Penn and Teller speak truth to bullshit.

As it is, we are already knee-deep in bullshit.  Were it not for the efforts of skeptics like Penn and Teller we might well need a life raft.  For this, they deserve “The Al.“

Marcus Winters has an excellent new study on charter schools and special education.  Why are there large gaps between the percentages of students classified as disabled in charter and traditional public schools?  A large part of the explanation — about 80% of the difference — can be explained by the fact that charters are just less likely to classify students as disabled and more likely to declassify them.  That is, charters have students with almost the same distribution of true disabilities as found in traditional public schools, they just don’t put labels on as many of them.  Here’s how Marcus put it:

The gap in special education rates between charter and traditional public schools grows considerably as students progress from kindergarten through third grade. A large part (80 percent) of the growth in this gap over time is that charter schools are less likely than district schools to classify students as in need of special education services and more likely to declassify them….

…the results do not suggest that charter schools are refusing to admit or are pushing out students with special needs. In fact, more students with previously identified disabilities enter charter schools than exit them as they progress through elementary grade levels…

By far, the most substantial growth in the special education gap occurs in the least severe category, that of specific learning disability. Rates of classification in what might be considered the more severe (and less subjective) categories of special education—autism, speech or language impairment, or intellectual disability—remain quite similar in charter and traditional public schools over time.

So… charter schools are not taking on students with dramatically different true disabilities; the traditional public schools are just more strongly inclined to classify the same kind of student as disabled.  And the traditional public schools mostly do this in the more subjective categories of disability, like specific learning disability.

These findings follow the same pattern as what Patrick Wolf, David Fleming, and John Witte discovered with special education and private schools participating in Milwaukee’s voucher program.  Schools of choice appear to be open to students with disabilities but aren’t as bureaucratically inclined to label students as disabled as are traditional public schools.

University of Arkansas graduate students, Anna Egalite and Jonathan Mills, have an excellent piece in Education Next on the effects of Louisiana’s voucher program on integration in schools.  This is an important empirical question because the US Department of Justice has filed suit against the state’s voucher program over concerns that it undermines federal desegregation efforts.

Egalite and Mills find that when students use vouchers to switch from a traditional public school to a private school, they tend to improve the racial integration of the public school they are leaving.  A transfer improves integration if the student’s departure would make that school more closely resemble the racial composition of the metropolitan area in which it is located.  So, if an African-American student leaves a school that is more heavily African-American than the broader community in which it is located, his or her transfer is positive for integration.  And the reverse is true.  Here are their statewide results:

When Egalite and Mills focus on the 34 school districts that are under federal supervision for desegregation in Louisiana, they find that the voucher program contributes to improved integration both in the public schools from which students are transferring and the private schools that they are entering.  Here are the results for those 34 districts:

The political boundaries of school districts and attendance zones appear to be an important impediment to integrating schools.  If we remove those boundaries by letting students mix voluntarily, we actually see more integration.    Maybe assuming that everyone is a racist and having the federal government try to force them not to be so racist is a less productive strategy than trying to remove barriers to voluntary and positive mixing of people from different backgrounds and different neighborhoods.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed their lawsuit without bothering to do this type of analysis.  It will be fascinating to hear how they react to this evidence, but since they are closed right now I guess we’ll just have to wait for their response.