Saatcioglu, Argun
Researchers: Argun Saatcioglu
University Affiliation: University of Kansas
Email: argun@ku.edu
Research Question:
Examines the effect of racial desegregation on promoting power of urban high schools.
Published: 1
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: Teacher College Record
Journal Entry: Vol. 112, No. 5, pp. 1391-1442
Year: 2010
Findings:
- Desegregation made a considerable difference in the way that high schools aggravated the dropout problem. Much of the difference was explained by key compositional changes such as reductions in minority, poverty, and nontraditional family concentration in the schools for minorities. Resegregation reversed those benefits.
- There is no evidence of White harm. Instead, Whites appear to have benefited from desegregated schools in ways similar to how minorities benefited, although to a lesser extent.
- Desegregation could be considered an effort that could considerably alter the high schools’ contribution to white dropouts in the face significant non-school problems.
- The relative decline in the white dropout problem constitutes evidence for the lack of white harm, at the individual level, due to desegregation.
- Even if desegregation did have a favorable effect on student performance, it could not outcompete the adverse influence of other, non-school impediments associated with the broader structure of urban deprivation.
- While the economic, family, and neighborhood variables used in this study may not fully capture the scope of non-school disadvantages in CMSD, they point to the ways in which the student-level benefits of desegregation may be precluded by forces beyond the reach of that policy.
- Under segregated conditions, both minorities and whites tended to suffer from adverse school-level effects.
- By aggravating individual tendencies to drop out, urban high schools tend to perpetuate the racial achievement gap.
- High schools for minorities tended to have higher levels of promoting power during the desegregation period, than they did prior to desegregation. There were also signs of decline in promoting power for minorities during the desegregation process though the extent of the losses was smaller than expected.
- Not only were white students at CMSD unharmed by desegregation, but they experienced considerable gains.
- As was the case for minorities, however, desegregation had no meaningful benefits for whites at the student level, most likely because white students in the district were subject to similar types of non-school problems as blacks and Hispanics were, though they were affected to a relatively lesser degree.