 Good afternoon or really good morning. Good morning moving into good afternoon. It's great to see such a terrific and energetic crowd here today. I'm Michael Barr. I'm the Joan and Sanford Wildean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. It's my great pleasure to welcome you all here for book talks at the Ford School event today, featuring our special guest, Rucker Johnson. Really a leading mind in the economics of education and the way in which poverty and inequalities disproportionately affect both education and social mobility. Today, Rucker is joining us to discuss his just published book, just published literally yesterday. This is good. Children of the Dream, Why School Integration Works. Rucker is an associate professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley. He's a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. But most importantly, we know with pride that he's a Michigan grad. Rucker earned his PhD here and also as a Robert Wood Johnson fellow here. And Rucker, I'm pleased to welcome you back. Thank you. I'm going to say a few more nice things and I'll let you talk. We're really at a critical moment in many ways in our country's histories as policy makers and others debate, not only the future of public education, but really the kind of society that we want to live in. And if you think about the work that Rucker's been doing, the landmark case of Brown against Board of Education came down in 1954. But the concept of integration that that case embodied has not really become the reality that anyone would want or hope for. But still much progress has been made and Rucker's research really combines a wealth of different academic techniques and disciplines, economics, sociology, social history, qualitative and quantitative empirical research that really brings together this wealth of information and knowledge and seeks to counter the arguments that the policies of integration have not succeeded. And he does, I think, a tremendous job delineating the possibilities of integration and the need to continue with policies that place that goal as a central pillar of public education and really our progress, as I said, on broader societal questions. So I very much look forward to the insights Rucker's about to share. In our usual format, we'll have opportunity after Rucker's talk for questions that will be moderated by our students. Brian Jacob will help us stay somehow on track and I'll get out of the way. Dean, thank you. Real pleasure. Thank you. It's, for me, it feels like a homecoming. It feels like a family reunion. I spent many, many years here as a graduate student at the time more years than I would have liked, but not because it wasn't a great experience. I had great mentors. It's a great group and it's continued to thrive since I've left. I guess I want to say up front that I am also warmed by the fact that I think it's really fitting that the first day of the release of the book that there was no other place I'd rather be than back where it started. At least for me, intellectually this was kind of the origins of this work around equity and ways to really tackle issues of inequality across education, housing, health, and really the formation of a lot of that was developed here and incubated here within the University of Michigan environment. And the Ford School certainly played a part of that. So I'm just delighted to be here in that spirit. And let me also just say something that occurs to me as I look out and see other family and friends actually in the audience who my wife also went here in graduate school and so we think family and friends that warms my heart as well. But it reminds me of a quote that me now who was the first mung to be elected for the legislative seat in the country in Minnesota in the 2000s. She said, every time I get up to speak, I feel I get a lump in my throat. And my grandmother said, the lump you're feeling in your throat represents the voices of all of the ancestors that have gone before you that have had no voice. And now you have a voice and you're speaking on their behalf. And that's what you feel the lump in your throat is their voices demanding you represent their life experiences, unspoken voices. And it's that lump that I feel today as open in this talk that there's policy amnesia around the efficacy of our boldest education policy we've ever pursued in this nation. School integration is the most ambitious and controversial social experiment of the past 50 years, but it's widely misunderstood. And as Mark Twain once said, it's not what we know that kills us. Or actually he said, it's not what we don't know that kills us. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so. And as with this work, there are a lot of this amnesia about the efficacy of this policy has resulted in a series, a giant series of failed school reforms that I believe will continue. If we do not fail to take seriously the lessons that can be drawn from the actual effects of school integration, school funding reforms and expansions of pre-K that were rolled out with Head Start. I think it's imperative that we import those lessons from those three policies in their continuum and in their interactive effects. If we are to address in the contemporary policy debates the persistent gaps of opportunity that exist between children from lower income families and communities versus their more affluent counterparts. Now we think that we understand integration. We think we understand what it is and what it was. But I would offer to you that we don't and haven't. That there's actually three myths of school integration that I just want to put forth to you up front. One, we tried it for a very long time. Number two, it didn't work. And number three, it's no longer relevant for today. It's antiquated. There's no contemporary relevance beyond desk drawer history to be disposed of. It was just about shuffling school children around schools. Now, while I understand that that's kind of a simple set of facts that people think are true, the reality is quite the opposite. That the reality is we only really had a 15 year window of significant integration efforts. So while we're approaching the 65th anniversary of Brown, the window of time in which significant integration activity actually occurred within schools is this really compressed window. Okay, where we gave up far too soon and where we've reached peak integration levels in 1988. And in every year since, we've regressed progressively so that we're now at the levels of segregation that prevailed before busing even began. Our schools and our classrooms are segregated in such a way that it's hard to detect Brown ever even occurred. Now, this second point about it didn't work. I hope to convince you today not only of the evidence that it worked, but the point that the greatest period of convergence in racial convergence and educational attainment and achievement gaps and earnings and health in various other indicators of well being in poverty. The greatest convergence that we have witnessed is the period that corresponds and overlaps with cohorts that were exposed to this significant integration. I hope to convince you that that is not a coincidence, but it's a direct product of these efforts, but it remains largely an unfinished agenda. And finally, the relevance issue. I want to offer to you today that the surges of racial prejudice, the political polarization, the increasing economic inequality we've witnessed. I want to offer to you that those aren't coincidences either. That these are long term exposures that we're able that are exacerbated by the inequality of resources across our public schools. It's not that all of the issues have their roots in public schools, but it's that our public schools have reinscribed some of the inequality and reproduced it across generations in ways that can be counteracted in evidence based ways. So what I want to do in this talk, if I'm able to do due diligence, is to just provide a capsule of a part, like in a kind of book tour way, like a tour of the book as in like just to give you some of the elements of the argument to transform this conversation from ones that have to do with Mr. Truce. Okay, and remember, I'm not really here to give my opinion. You don't really need another person with an opinion. And without data, really, we're just another person with an opinion. This is about evidence based advocacy around policy prescriptions about what works, why does it work, when does it work, and causal evidence about whether we can replicate the success of past policies and how that could be leveraged going forward. Now, I guess what I want to say up front that has to do with these components is that segregation is not just about separation of people, but it's actually a hoarding of fact, a hoarding in fact of opportunity. It's that what we're talking about with regard to desegregation is going from desegregation to integration is moving from access to inclusion. It's moving from exposure to understanding. And that's not a process that starts overnight, but it is something that's not simply about the diversity of school children and how many black kids are in the same classroom as white kids. It's about how resources are distributed across schools, whether all kids have access to high quality teachers and culturally relevant pedagogy and beginning in the earliest years. So even when I'm talking about integration, I don't only mean integration as the policy that is aimed to assign students to schools and more so that they're exposed to more diverse peers. But I'm actually talking about teacher diversity. I'm talking about teachers as the most important resource that schools offer. I'm talking about the ways we invest in our teachers through per-people spending and the ways it affects class sizes. I'm talking about how early we invest in these schools to accommodate the fact that half of the achievement gap that we see a parent in third grade was already a parent at kindergarten entry. I'm talking about we have to have an integration of the approaches of school funding reform, pre-case spending, but all in the kind of foundational building blocks and integrated environments. That is going to be the key argument that I'm going to put forth to you today. And I just want to put up front that the politics of reform are often overtaking the evidence around these issues. That politicians tend to be fixated on budget deficits, short-run deficits when we should be more concerned with the deficits of opportunity facing children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Now, I am an empirical researcher, an economist, a public policy professor, and what we try to arm our students at the Goldman School, when I'm sure it's true here at the Ford School, is there's a certain part of the job that we're trying to impart to students that can be seen as a type of meteorologist, where we diagnose, we make projections, we use the best available evidence to form our policy prescriptions. And what's clear about the forecast is that diversity is the centerpiece of our collective future as a nation. The only question is whether we're going to prepare our students today for that reality and harness the immense value of diversity. That's the choice before us. And what I'm going to just try to lay out is why this is an imperative and urgent agenda today. Despite the unprecedented racial diversity of our school children today, again, half of today's children attend hyper segregated schools where more than three-quarters of their peers are of the same race, either all white, three-quarters white, or all minority, three-quarters minority. So that is important as a backstory. Now, what I want to kind of outline to you as a starting point is that the achievement gap that you're seeing here by income. Sean Reit and others have documented this, but that the achievement gap by income has increased significantly by about two-thirds since, you know, over the last several decades. And what is important about that is it's currently about the same magnitude as the black-white achievement gap was before Brown. Okay, we're talking about more than one-and-a-half grade levels behind. On average, poor kids are from lower income backgrounds than more fluent backgrounds. And at the same time, when we look at the black-white achievement gap, what you see in the figure in the dotted is a black-white achievement gap that was reduced by about 40 percent. And then has been stagnant since, basically, birth cohorts beyond 1980. And what I want to convey to you is that, again, that's not a coincidence, that that period of unprecedented narrowing of the achievement gap is corresponding directly. And we show that school integration played a dominant role in that convergence. And the resegregation of our schools is playing a critical role in that stagnation and the increases in the academic achievement gap that we've seen. Are we good? I'm kind of more of a call-and-response type of person, so I just need to know that we're on the same page. Okay, so every now and then I'm going to say, amen, now I'm just kidding. But I'm going to say, are you with me? Okay, so let me just remind us where we started. So Brown, before Brown, we have a map here just displaying that most of the time when people think about Brown, they think of it as a singular case from Topeka, Kansas, and, you know, it's this singular case when, in fact, it represented five cases across five different states. And the kind of approach that was used to enable Brown to be successful that NLACP pursued is actually has some correlates, some parallels with the empirical approach taken in the book. Meaning that we're not really looking to provide evidence from a single place or a single point in time, but we're looking to create nationally representative evidence to summon a new consensus around race and opportunity that's using the best available data, longitudinal from birth to adulthood across several generations to kind of isolate and map out the mechanism through which these policies are having an effect. Now what you see here is simply legal segregation required throughout the Confederate South, and you're seeing, say, in California, legal segregation permitted in green. You're seeing basically, including DC, legal segregation required. So it's the de jure versus de facto segregation. Now what I want to kind of point out is that it wasn't as if Brown happened and a light switch turned on and all of a sudden schools became integrated. Now you should know that when we're talking about, again, moving from desegregation to integration, these require a set of processes where when I'm talking about integration, I want you to recognize that integration is about redistributing school children to accomplish the goal of equal education opportunity. School funding reform is about redistributing school resources, and the pre-K expansion of pre-K investments through Head Start is about redistributing the timing of investments and moving them back to the earliest years of cognitive development. And what I'm offering is that what we find is not only do these three policies independently have important effects, but the most important takeaway from the work is the synergies between these three approaches to equal opportunity, that when we do them in concert, that the impact and the combined impact is much greater than the sum of the individual parts or the effects of doing them in isolation. And too much of the time we have drawn on the integration or the school funding reform or the pre-K investments as panacea is that you could do them and expect everything else to be disconnected, as if children's lives are disconnected in such a way, when in fact the connections between early life educational and health investments have to be connected to the educational environments that they attend. Now, some people offer when I'm kind of in the first points of this to say, haven't we already tried these things? And again, I'm just trying to relay that we've done them in very inconsistent, not just inconsistent, but incomplete ways, not the kind of holistic way, and it's also been uneven across place and time. But it's exactly that reality that gives researchers like me the right conditions for natural experiments of policy innovation to be able to extract places that are otherwise similar children, but exposed to vastly different school environments of opportunity, and then contrast what their life trajectories were as a consequence. And it's that kind of randomized quasi-experimental design where the slow and uneven pace of integration creates this ability to credibly evaluate what works and when doesn't work. So while some black students, they born in 1960, may have been exposed to integration throughout their school age years, another black child born in a different district may not have experienced integration for any of their school age years simply because integration and court orders occurred much later in their district of upbringing. And similarly, there may be a child who was born in 1950, and they were already older than 17 by the time court order integration came to their school district of upbringing, but their younger sibling, who was five years younger, experienced all of their middle school and high school years in integrated environments. We're able to make contrast that sharp, and we see really abrupt differences in the life outcomes. Now what I want to say about the life outcomes is we want to understand the mechanism about whether it's class size reductions, whether it's school spending increases, whether it's the pre-K investments, we want to kind of unpack those things. But first I want to begin with what was school integration because a lot of the time people think of it as just a peer exposure when in fact a big component was the school resource equity that was achieved from it because most of the school spending before integration and court orders were drawn were allocated disproportionately to the majority white schools within the district. What school integration did is basically lifted up the school resource spending to the levels that white children were already previously getting. So I was just drawing on the fact that there's about a thousand school desegregation court orders since 1954 and most of the activity took teeth after 1964 Civil Rights Act put teeth in enforcement. And basically that's why we see an acceleration in integration. Now what I want to just show you with this map is simply the map of this timing. Where you see a red is where the first court orders were drawn. This is 1954. I want you to see how little activity happens before 1964 and then accelerates so that by 1973 the south is more integrated than the rest of the country. Now the other thing I want you to see is by 1990 there becomes a resegregation of schools where there's a lifting of the court orders. It starts accelerating after 2007 and in the 2000s so that the pink represents the release of the court orders. And when there's a release of the court orders it's basically returning kids to be assigned to their neighborhood schools. And because of the entrenchment of residential segregation by race and class that really basically cements the resegregation patterns coupled with people gerrymandering school district boundaries to intensely resegregate and other aspects of charter school growth that I'll maybe touch on in the question and answer. But the reason why that kind of timing is important is as Walter Gilhorne legal scholar described the pace of integration as one of an extremely arthritic snail. And you have to appreciate like these were hard fought battles but the actual efforts were actually influencing quite slowly. So remember the 1960s is a history it's a miracle in policymaking meaning there's all kinds of the Medicare, Medicaid rollout title one food stamp act. You know higher education act that first put major federal investments in loans the federal fair housing act and I just ran out of room on a slide. So the point is you have to have a very effective research design that can identify the school integration school funding reform pre-K investments that are independent of all of these other components and that's where the timing of the implementation of these policies plays a critical role in being able to do that. Let me just say one last piece which is really about the book and how we know what we know. I had done a lot of the quantitative evidence and one thing I learned early on is that there's a lot of living history about how people experience integration that can't be extracted from quantitative data. And so what I realized early on is I had to actually talk to a great deal of the early pioneers of integration. We went to Charlotte and Memphis and Boston and to really get a clear-eyed look about what the actual dimensions of these policies were and that really aided significantly in our understanding of this. So let me just give you an example from Chicago Public Schools. This is the first integrated cohort of Chicago Public Schools. This is Avalon Park, anybody from Chicago? Okay, so this is Avalon Park. This is March 64. This is the kindergarten cohort. Now I want to pay particular attention to Paul Goren. Dr. Paul Goren is the current superintendent of Evanston Public Schools. Got his doctorate at Stanford and got mentored by, well I don't need to say all the networks, but the point is like he, this looks a pretty integrated environment, yes? Okay, by third grade this was his class. Now let me show you where Paul is because it's hard to see where Paul is. Paul is still smiling. But Paul doesn't have so many classmates that are of his race. The white flight that generally took hold in a lot of these places is a significant component. This is third grade. This is his fourth grade class. But this isn't just in Chicago Public Schools. This is really throughout the system. The white flight component was an important piece. Now what I'm going to try to document here in the work is simply that we're going to show how integration not only improved the outcomes for African-Americans. But that it did not harm whites, but in fact it increased their empathy and value of equity. That we look at racial attitudes and adulthood. And we show their relationship to how integrated their school environments were as children. And we show how their racial attitudes on politics, their racial attitudes on racial prejudice and indices that social psychologists have developed. We are able to document how those attitudes and adulthood expressed are connected with these exposures to integration. Now I didn't mention but one of Paul Goran's colleagues in these pictures, African-American Dr. Forrest Jones, who we also interviewed with these in-depth interviews throughout the book, he ended up becoming one of the leading physicians that would desegregate Chicago Public High Schools. I mean hospital I should say. And the other thing about this is that hospital desegregation played a critical role in some of the effects that we're going to translate. Now these are, this is Dorothy Count Skogins. She's the first to desegregate Charlotte Public Schools. It wasn't a worm reception. This is Zewania Kiles in Memphis 1961, first to integrate the Memphis Public Schools. Her dad was a pastor and was very close to Martin King in civil rights movement. So we use this timing of the court orders to be able to have quasi-experimental variation to isolate the school reform components of impacts apart from these other pieces. And the first pieces just to describe this is these are the years before the court orders and this is a measure of racial segregation. And what you're seeing is basically about no pre-existing time trend but basically a 30 percentage point drop in racial segregation following the court orders. And it happens quite rapidly. Now that has been documented elsewhere but this is a nasty representative evidence to do it for the whole universe of schools across the country over time. What we find though is that the impacts on school spending are significant particularly for minorities so that we find basically a 20 percentage, 20 percent increase in school spending for black kids that were supposed to integrate in environments versus the same amount of spending that people from those same schools were before the court order. So these kind of leveling up school resources to the level that whites were already getting is a significant increase in school spending that integration achieved and that led to significant reductions in class size. Now what you want to remember about a school budget is 80 percent of the school budget is somehow related to teachers that determine class size, that determine teacher salaries, so those are components that are important. Now we use data from the panel study of income dynamics housed here, administrative here at the University of Michigan, longest running panel data set in the world because you all should know about its richness. So I'm not going to describe its richness because you all should know since you all are here but if you don't it is a treasure trove of when you want to study questions that have to do with the factors that affect upward mobility. This is one of the best sources of that. We use data from 13,300 some folks who've been followed every year from birth to adulthood and we have the over sample of both blacks and low income families to have the power to detect effects. So because in the interest of time I just want to kind of give you the key take homes as opposed to all of this. So let me just, the key take homes first are as late as 1960, as late as 1960, let me make sure I get the statistic correct. As late as 1960 only 20 percent of black men graduated from high school compared to about 50 percent for white men. As late as 1960 only 3 percent of black men had college degrees compared to 13 percent of white men. By the late 70s and early 80s the rates of college enrollments for 18 and 19 year olds for African Americans had risen to the same level of whites. That's a striking convergence. What we're going to document is that school integration played the dominant role in that convergence. Now here is an example. The years leading up to integration, notice this is for whites. The first thing I want to point out is whites you're going to see a flat throughout most of these outcomes. That's not because it didn't have impacts on racial attitudes but on the education and economic outcomes. The key point is that the effects and positive effects for African Americans did not come at the expense of whites. Now the point is for African Americans there's a dose response that with each year of exposure there is a significant, so think about like if you have a, think about whether it's school funding reform or school desegregation or pre-K that's what I'm administering as the prescription for change and you can imagine that the longer the dose is administered the more significant improvement in the well-being and the health of the achievement of children. What we're seeing exactly in the number of years of exposure and the amount of school resource changes that happen as a result of the intervention, we're seeing significant dose response with regard to that. Are we okay? So we see that in educational attainment. We see this in high school graduation rates, significant improvements in high school graduation rates. We're seeing significant improvements in wages. We're talking about basically wages for children that were exposed to integration throughout their school age years that are about a third higher than children from the exact same district but who grew up in all segregated environments because of the year and time of birth. And again the most important component of this is that that then translated into a big enough effect to break the cycle of poverty that in adulthood they're likely at an incidence of poverty in adulthood was cut more than in half. And we're seeing just, you know, basically there's not been a school reform effort that has been as effective in terms of breaking the cycle of poverty. Okay? And we see a similar thing with regard to the fact that a lot of the early antecedents to criminal involvement are poor access to quality schools as a youth and poor school performance and the like. And what we really document not just in the school integration intervention but in the school spending reforms that we are able to document that the investments in school spending and school integration have been among the most effective crime fighting tools that we have to prevent criminal involvement. Remember prevention is the best cure. Okay? But what we're usually using criminal justice policies to do is to address what insufficient investments in health and education do not do. So the point of this is, you know, we're showing significant reductions in incarceration associated with not just school desegregation as I'm showing here but in the work we also find it for school spending as well as head start. Okay? And finally, let me just say that some of the ways in which these impacts occurred are also through hospital integration. So what hospital integration did is for the first time gave access and helped with access to pediatric care for lower income but particularly African Americans and that we show improved infant health and we then later showed that healthier children are better learners. So it's not like so surprising but it actually goes quite against the conventional wisdom around these policies not being able to not just work beyond education but these other outcomes. Okay? So one of the things that people often think about is it's often been said that the currency of inequality is best measured in differences in life expectancy and quality of life. And it's really in that way that the reciprocal of poverty is health. And what we show is that adult health status outcomes improved significantly for black children with access to integrated schools and better funded schools. And the impact of being exposed to integrated schools throughout the school age years is like gaining seven years of life. It's like the level of health deterioration is on par with being seven years younger. Okay? So I guess to put a capstone on some of this, let's just think about state spending. So right now, let me just see, the judicial landmarks of the court ordered school desegregation cases also provided some of the foundation for the litigation around school funding reforms and the constitutionality of solely relying on the local property type finance system where your school level system of funding would be solely a function of property tax well. And because of the levels of segregation and our historical heavy reliance on local property tax based upon schools, it's historically led to significant per pupil spending differences. And it's really the state school finance reform cases that played a central role in narrowing those gaps. So we marry the analysis around school desegregation to those of school funding reforms and see similar significant impacts. So let me just give you a quick summary just so that you can see the relevance of today. Today about 75% of school spending disparities occur between states. Now, like maybe three decades ago, it was actually the reverse because much more of the school spending differences occurred within states because of the significance of relying on a local property tax base. School funding reforms were the most important kind of funding foundational change for these changing the school spending. And what we show is that significantly affected these same sets of outcomes. So what I want to kind of tie together with this is think about the states that spend the most in per pupil spending in real dollars even after taking into cost of living differences. Who do you think they are? Brian, don't say. Massachusetts is number one. Where else? No, unfortunately. Sorry. I can't concur with that. So New Jersey. So what we do is if you look at spending disparities between rich and poor districts, this is by state, 2002. Pennsylvania is the worst in this. That is, their lower income districts spend a third less than their more affluent districts. And they generally are serving kids that have much greater need, much higher concentrations of poverty, more special needs, more limited English language proficient speakers. The cost of educating those children is much higher, but they get a third less resources per pupil. Now, we look at California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey as case studies in part because it allows us to look at children that are otherwise similar but are in very different equity in school resource systems. And what we find is the gaps that I showed you in student achievement, they're growing and accelerating in Pennsylvania and they're narrowing in New Jersey. That's not a coincidence. That's related to the school spending. Let me give you another just quick point on this. We said that Michigan, no, I'm Michigan, but we said that Massachusetts and New Jersey are one and two in per pupil spending. You know what they're lasting? Criminal justice expenditures. You know what you want to be lasting? Criminal justice expenditures. Now, what I'm saying about that, there's not a coincidence that the states that are investing more in pre-K and K-12 spending are seeing future costs in criminal involvement reduced. We're showing causal evidence to make that connection that the places that have very low spending are people spending on schools. Oklahoma and in some states throughout the south. We're seeing huge impacts later on for that neglect that's manifesting in dislocations with regard to incarceration. Are we okay? Now, the arguments about that are all in the book. I admit this is more big picture than all of the science behind it. But what I'm saying is that we use the timing of, say, New Jersey. New Jersey is a place where for every dollar spent on high income districts, low income districts receive $6.61 by 2011 due to the Abbott rulings. Places like Pennsylvania, you know, the state is not really narrowing, playing a significant role in narrowing those gaps. We use those differences to isolate the impacts. The last thing I'm going to just close on that has to do before I kind of turn to some of the more contemporary issues around resegregation is the impacts of pre-K spending. What you want to remember is that with regard to brain development, there's like a million new neural connections that happen between zero and three. The neural science research is showing are hugely sensitive to environmental stressors. That when children lack nurturing and kind of fostering interpersonal connections in those years, that that neglect causes the connections in the brain to not develop in the same rate. And that the latent impacts of those while they're not measurable in the traditional quantitative data, they show up in the footprint that actually shows up when we're looking at some of those achievement gaps that we see in the elementary school years. Headstart was designed to not just be a kind of investment in school readiness, but an investment in the ability to acquire future knowledge. And so what we're trying to do is recognize that Headstart in that era predated some of the Medicaid rollout. So these were actually some of the first time that these low-income children had access to pediatric care. And we document how the health component of the pre-K expansions really interacted in synergistic ways with the positive impacts we're talking about for the K-12 spending improvements. So this is 1965. We're going to use that same idea of the fact that the rollout of Headstart and the rollout of school funding reforms and the rollout of school integration happened at different times with different intensity across place to then have this natural experiment of looking at differences for otherwise similar children that were differentially exposed say at four years old whether there was a Headstart program in their school of upbringing. Red represents the 300 poorest counties in the country because they actually received some concentration of attention given their, notice how the concentration of high poverty is almost all in the South in this era. This is 1960. Where you see a blue is where there's a first Headstart Center. What I want you to see is how rapidly Headstart and pre-K programs were rolled out in the United States. Okay, now because I'm in Russia you saw it fast. But the majority had their first Headstart Center established between 1965 and 1970. And so what we're able to do is then look at the fact that that rollout had 98,000 eye defects treated, 900,000 cases of dental problems, five capitals per child and 740,000 without polio vaccination to receive vaccines, a million given measles vaccinations. Now, I mean some of you who are physicians in the room and Boyd, Dr. Boyd, you know, appreciate that without these health investments, you know, people don't have the same capacities to learn. What we're able to show is that by looking at the same children across areas, we find basically that the same amount of K-12 spending, when it's preceded by high quality pre-K access, it doubles the efficacy of the same K-12 spending increase. So you could have the same 10% increase in school spending, but if it was preceded by children having access to a high quality pre-K center when they were four, that the return on the public investment in K-12 dollars doubles with regard to the improvement in high school graduation rates, college growing rates, adult earnings, and even the reductions in incarceration. Okay, so because I'm just out of time, what I'm just really trying to underscore is with a 10% increase in K-12 spending, average K-12 spending versus 10% decrease in K-12 spending, how the impacts depend critically on whether you have head start versus you don't have head start. And these are four outcomes that relate to the likelihood of graduating from high school. So we're seeing like a 15 percentage point increase of graduating from high school if there's a 10% increase in K-12 spending if you have head start access. But if you had the head start access but you subsequently went into a poorly funded K-12 school, that idea of fade out is not necessarily reflective of the pre-K environment not being good, but rather that the long run efficacy of the early life intervention is critically hinging on whether quality investments in the K-12 schools can continue to develop those skills. When they're going to underfunded schools, it's not surprising that those investments fade out more rapidly. And we see the same thing on the school spending on wages, high school graduation, incarceration. But I hate to leave you on a sad note, but the sad note is we haven't really appreciated the impacts of those longer term impacts. We focus too heavily on short run test scores and too heavily on ways in which segregation can sometimes mitigate the efficacy of those programs and policies. I was telling you about the resegregation of schools is directly related to these releases of the court order that accelerated and also gained ammunition with the 2000 parents involved case that involved Seattle and Louisville. You may know that Justice Roberts in his ruling basically the decision was that race could not be used as a sole factor in student school assignments, which in Justice Roberts' ruling basically equated racism, segregation, with efforts to address racism integration. So the idea of race not being able to be used as a factor is something that now encumbers some of the effort. It's probably the single most legal barrier that has to be overcome with contemporary integration efforts that I'll just make mention of. Another kind of component that has to be appreciated is that even as early as third grade, take a black and white child that have the same test score, same level of achievement, say they're both high achievers. A black child has a third less likelihood of being placed in the gifted program as a third grader. When interventions have been done, this is Dave Carr, this is research from Vanderbilt, have shown that when black teachers are the ones that have been in charge of the placement that those levels have actually been significantly narrowed, which underscores the idea of implicit bias in the ways in which we make the underestimating the potential of minority kids in general. So when we talk about desegregated schools, it's not enough to have desegregated schools if we have segregated classrooms within. The offerings of AP coursework, the offerings of gifted and talented college preparatory coursework, that has to be part of what we're calling integration. Otherwise, this is not something that is going to be a cure-all in any stretch of the imagination. Finally, let me just show you, leading up to the lifting of court orders, this upward trajectory in high school graduation rates is what we were seeing before court orders were lifted in terms of desegregation. And after the court orders were released, we really saw a flattening and kind of a flat line on the improvements in graduation rates. Now, I think ultimately we care about these issues not only for the kind of tangible outcomes that we can more easily measure on economic indicators, educational indicators, incarceration and health, but we also care about some of the more intangible aspects about the contact hypothesis, proposals that when people are exposed to diverse groups, that it causes their understanding, their empathy to be, I'll just say it the way Martin King more eloquently phrased it, people fail to get along because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don't know each other. They don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other. Now, what we do to try to test the contact hypothesis is again with the national longitudinal study of adolescent health, adolescent to adult health, we're able to get nasty representative data on adult racial prejudice and racial intolerance measures and measures about the diversity of the neighbors that they're in as adults and the diversity of the schools that they send their children to. And we're able to relate that to their exposure to diverse schools as children. And we're able to leverage this quasi random variation in the timing of court orders and the release of them to be able to isolate how the school exposure to diversity affects their stated preferences on political partisanship and other kind of measures. And what we find is significant relationships where the probability of having no racial diversity in their friendship networks and adulthood, the racial diversity of their adult neighbors, whether they've ever had a same-race partner, whether they have liberal political views, whether, you know, all of those factors are significantly associated with the diversity of the schools in which they attended. So we really are trying to offer that the ways in which these impacts should be considered are not just along the educational margins. And finally, I said this at the beginning, but we follow children not just from birth to adulthood, but across generations. So all of the folks who were in the first integrated cohorts that are, say, in their now 30s, 40s and 50s, they all have their own kids. And many of them are entering young adulthood. We're able to trace the impacts of integration, not just for that generation that attended integrated schools, but whether they were able to pass on their advantages to their children. And we see impacts into the third generation, that we're seeing impacts for black children whose parents were exposed to integrated schools, that their children, that is the children of those children, had much higher rates of going to college and graduating from high school. So I guess I want to close on the idea that taken together, it's not that we were failing to look in the right place for the most effective school reform. It's that we made the faulty assumption that there was only one place to look. And that when we think about what is going to require integration to be successful, it's going to have to be a mirroring of integration with school funding reform, with quality pre-K investments that require buy-in from state, local, federal. And that's a big lift, but all of the most important movements have been such. And I think our children are deserving of that future. Thank you. Hello. I thank Rucker. Yes, there's more. I'm Brian Jacob. I'm a faculty member at the Ford School and have been following Rucker's work for years. And I can tell you behind all of the pretty pictures are lots of very complicated and fancy and rigorous statistics. And all of the findings, or many of the findings he's talked about today, have been published in very prestigious peer-reviewed economics journals. And so if you are interested in that side of the work, there's lots of things you can probably find in the footnotes and the bibliography as well. But what I'm going to, my job here today is just to moderate the Q&A. So let's see, do we have the note cards here? Am I going to do the reading or the students are going to do the reading? Okay. So what? Hi, I'm Brittany Vasquez, a third year PhD student in public policy and sociology. Great. So the first question is kind of asking for more context. So could you talk a little more about why the court orders were reversed? I think that there was a general change in the legal environment that was supporting making it easier for districts to be lifted from what's called unitary status where it used to be to be released from a court order. So before you had to demonstrate that you were making significant efforts to integrate and that after lifting it, it was going to be able to be sustained without the court order mandate. But actually it was a tool that was more designed to say we should have more local control. There's a steep tradition in American education of local control. And I think there was a more political movement around, it wasn't like in the streets, like the civil rights movement may have been, and it wasn't as vocal. But it was no less like effective in the strategy of say redrawing district boundaries and gerrymandered ways that were clearly cut around what we might call railroad tracks of socioeconomic and race lines where who's at the table, who's on the school board, matters. So there's like an economist at Duke for example who's shown using data throughout the state of North Carolina. That when school boards were more heavily dominated by Democrats, that the changing of school district boundaries were done in a way to promote inclusion, equity and diversity. And when they would be taken over on average by Republican dominated school boards, that the reverse happened and reverse happened quite rapidly. So I want to just offer that these are not like a coincidence and simply a kind of reflection of parental individual choice. These are very much policy induced and charter school growth has also played a role, though I'm not saying that because I'm inherently against charter schools in principle. But the way in which they have had a segregated influence along these lines cannot be ignored. Does that help? There's more to say, but tell me what your thoughts are. This wasn't my question. Oh, the general audience. Sorry, I'm like looking at you. If I'm not sufficiently answering somebody's assignment, I'm all about the call and response. So you can say, no, that's not what I'm saying. Yeah, we're just reading the questions. Fair enough. So my name is Nick Nager. I'm a master's student here at the Ford School. The first question that I wanted to ask you that we got from the audience, when you talk about debunking myths, how pervasive is the myth that positive impacts for black students who experienced integration doesn't cause negative impacts for white students? Oh, it's huge. I mean, I don't even think statistics are effective for that audience. It's like, I think you have to appeal to relationships. I think even the book itself, like I chose to do a trade book because I realized you can hammer home statistics to a whole bunch of people. It doesn't necessarily by itself provoke change, empathy, or something that would be akin to we have to have an urgent policy agenda around it. Now, again, I'm an economist. This policy analysis is what I do. I teach at a policy school, so I'm always saying evidence matters, do the statistics, all that. I agree with all that. What I'm saying is I think that the effort to communicate that this is not a zero-sum game is not something that is only effective by saying, we need more integrated schools and you should send your kid to the underfunded, overcrowded school that happens to have more minorities. You don't hear me saying that because that's not what I'm doing. I'm saying we have to have equitable resources across schools so that integrated environments can be possible because as long as all the overcrowded underfunded schools are disproportionately minority, like what are we talking about? Like we're not going to be really having a serious effort and engagement with integration. So I'm looking at you like you asked it again. I apologize. But I think that when we talked to school leaders and superintendents who administered integration efforts like Dr. Berman at Louisville. So after Louisville lifted the Parents Involve case, he was looking from guidance from President Obama to try to help with their integration efforts that they were trying to keep. They had probably the best integration plan of anywhere in the country at the time. And he was trying to kind of retain the essence of it and a lot of his job. He's actually was a white, he's white superintendent. He was very candid with us in our interviews about how his biggest communication challenge was to try to convey to middle class whites that their children were not being offered as some kind of, you know, like a lamb or some sacrificial lamb. Like this was like an equity that was building all kids ability to learn. Anyways, yeah. Okay. So the next question asked, so your study focused what we saw on black, white differences, but where are the Latino students in your data, especially with respect to re segregation? Good. So I think I recognize deeply that the future of diversity is certainly not the black, white dichotomy that has historically been the focus. And my emphasis here on the black, white differences and even its emphasis in the book is not as much about lack of awareness of the importance of Latina and other kind of groups, Asian Americans as well, about how their group dynamics affect this whole process. But in the time period that we have large enough sample sizes to make definitive conclusions about impacts, there's less ability to make general conclusions for Latino and Hispanic children for this era. The data that we use for the national study of adult to adolescent health has much more over sampling of Hispanic children for us to say something more about them. We do that in the book, but I would say that certainly I think a big topic for future research that we are trying to do as we speak. I'm coming from California, the most diverse state in the country. And we have a lot of the data on the local control funding formula about Hispanic achievement and how Hispanic achievement gaps have been narrowed. Okay. Bye. I was still like, is that the curtain call that says your time is up? Okay. But so I think while I didn't talk about it today in the book and in the research, we are incorporating how Hispanic achievement gaps have been narrowed significantly by the school funding reforms in California, for example, where we do have enough sample size to clearly document that these impacts are not specific to a group. We see the impacts for the school funding reforms on blacks, whites, Hispanics, and significantly positive ways. Are there states that currently have what you would call a successful model of integrated education? So unfortunately, I have to say a state no. And that's regrettable. I think there are states that have very progressive school funding formulas and significant expanses in pre-K investments like New Jersey. But it's in hugely segregated environments. So if I say like there's a three pronged approach, I can identify states that have done two of the three, but I can identify no states that have been successful at sustaining all three. When I say sustained, meaning if there was no state that ever did it, then I wouldn't have the results I have. So I'm saying there are pockets, but sustaining it, I think there's been a lack of evidence about the efficacy of it. And any time you have a lack of evidence, but you have evidence on the cost side, but a lack of evidence on the benefit side, it doesn't take long for stuff to get cut. That the political process looks for the short run. Where can I identify that I've been successful? And education and health investments aren't of that type where you see the kind of impacts that you would want overnight. Of districts. Yeah, so I'm going to say two things. I'm going to say first, if you think about the Harlem Children's Zone, it is like a lot of the spirit of what I've said, but without the integration. And, okay, super, super, super affluent philanthropists that make that not as replicable. But at the same time, the seed of the promise of it and the idea on a smaller scale, I think is very promising. And it also underscores the idea that we're not making the argument that black kids have to have white kids to learn. That's not what you hope are hearing me say. I am saying rather that when schools are more segregated and concentrated poverty schools exist, the highest quality teachers over time tend to select out of those schools either through burnout or not having the kind of sufficient support. And it leaves in its wake a lot of less advantaged children being taught by the least experienced teachers, who may be very committed but certainly are not getting support in the classroom. Okay, but the original question, which is like, what are, so what's a little, just to be frank about like this book process is, I was planning to close the book on the district that was like the North Star. That the district that was going to be the integration example for the future. And that was going to be the closing chapter. And then I looked around and I looked around and I looked around and we had to close this book at some point because it could not be found. So, I mean, that's the honest truth is that I think Louisville, I think to be honest with you, two thirds of the segregation today exist between districts. It used to mostly be within districts so busing was a more viable like possibility. When it's between district because of middle class flight, white flight, the meaningful integration that can happen within district boundaries is not of the same type. So like that's a critical barrier where we have to rethink even in a regional way. And this is where the role of mixed income housing is an essential path forward. Like you can't, and this is where I would say Minnesota with their removal of single family zoning, which has really been designed historically to exclude lower income group housing. I'm looking at and Paul, Karan has written for decades really on segregation and stuff. But the point is some of the issues that you wrote about way back. Unfortunately, it's been like not so much. And it's actually the consequences of being confined to a poorly functioning schools that have never been greater. So I think right now it really requires the marrying of a housing mixed income housing and you've done a lot of housing work yourself. So I would say offer that. Okay. So this next question is also a clarification question. So you threw up the statistic about students who are in hyper segregated schools being 75% of the same race. So what are you saying is the percentage or critical mass that is needed to be considering a school as integrated? I don't know that there's a number I would commit to, but I think we all know what a diverse environment looks like. And I don't think you need my number to know it. So I'm not going to necessarily say what should be the cut off line. But I would just say people have a traditional view that there's no equilibrium of integration. There's just tipping from all white to all black. And you just found something in the middle through a transition. So I don't have that view. I really think these can be sustainable efforts. And I think look at the higher ed context. We're both at public universities. I'm a product of public university. We're aiming to have a much more diverse graduate environment. So I think the issues about diversity and the importance is not just a K-12 conversation. This is happening at all levels. When the Ford School, I'm looking at Dean Collins and Dean Barr, like what does it mean to have a diverse critical mass at the top policy schools in the country? What does it mean to have a diverse, like these aren't questions just for K-12. I'm only saying when kids only get exposed to diversity by the time they get to Michigan, like that's a problem. When they get only exposed to diversity when they're cheaper police, that's a problem. When you have people in positions of power, it's imperative that we're developing leaders that know how to navigate the space of diversity. And if we're producing leaders that have never been exposed, we aren't really engaging communities of color and can lower income communities in effective ways with relational sensitivity. Like we're really not doing our jobs as the leaders of public policy schools. So I don't think of this as like something that's, you know, a K-12 question. I think of this as more of what is the role of education as institutions throughout the continuum of pre-K to higher ed. And what is our desperate need because the labor market setting is increasingly saying we need workers who can work with diverse perspectives to promote innovation. So the idea that we can continue to have schools that are homogenous, that have one type and think we're hoarding opportunity and not negatively affecting our children's later life success is a real strong part of the myth that wasn't on the screen, but it's certainly one of them. So if you see step one of fixing this as informing people and increasing understanding, what would you see step two in terms of public policy action? So first, the federal involvement will require a different administration. Because I want the federal involvement, but I'll be honest, maybe I'm on TV, maybe I'm not supposed to say this, but I'm going to say it. I don't think it's a mystery that Betsy DeVos is not going to be engaged with these issues. I don't think that's a mystery. So while I think the federal role is going to have to be essential, because I just told you that when you leave it up to the states, there's going to be some, even with, like, think about the Affordable Care Act. When we had the state options to buy in, which states didn't buy in? What is the racial concentration of disadvantage of those states? They were disproportionately African-American. The states that didn't opt in. So I think we want states to play a leading role, but I think it has to be supported with some federal incentives to make the work of integration not solely born on the backs of African-Americans or lower income families to have to bear the load of that and incentivize things in a way that recognize the value. So I think there's an important federal, state, and local role, but they're different roles and they have to be kind of done, I think, in concert. And I don't think that that part of it is politically going to be something that's on the horizon with this administration. We have time for just a few questions. I'm going to ask one, and if there's someone out there who has one final question they would like to add right down quickly and get it to our student question-askers. Can I just say one thing? Yeah. Because I think that in the process of going very fast, I probably neglected to contextualize the magnitude of the policy impacts I'm talking about. Like, we're finding basically that a 25% increase in per-people spending throughout the school age years, which is a huge increase. But what I'm saying is that estimated impact is sufficient to cause achievement gaps by low income status to no longer exist. So I'm not saying family background isn't still the most important determinant of children's outcomes, it is. But what I'm saying is our most effective policy instrument, public policy instrument, is through schools in collaboration with health and other pre-K investments. And the magnitude of the impact can really level the playing field, the intergenerational playing field. And without it, we're going to just keep repeating these cycles of achievement gaps and it's going to feel like Groundhog Day. You wake up, they're still talking about the same achievement gap of a decade ago. And then we wake up and we're still having the conversations but not having the intentionality of bold policy prescription. Sorry. Okay. Any other, I don't want any other questions? You touched on this briefly, but we'll ask again. Can you talk a little bit about HBCUs versus non-HBCUs and perhaps how that could not dovetail with the idea of integration leading to better outcomes? The specific question written down already verbatim. Any thoughts about why integration mirrors success in K through 12 education while arguably segregation mirrors success in higher ed, i.e. HBCU graduation rates versus non-HBCU graduation rates? Okay. So let me stay up front. I'm proud of Memorial College. I've been proud of Memorial College. And I had a choice, right? So part of this is like I did have a choice to go to Stanford. I did have a choice and I chose to go to Morehouse. So part of what I'm talking about is when we say school choice, we're trying to say what's the nature of the choice facing lower income, disproportionately minority families. If it genuinely is like out of high quality school options, we're having a different conversation. I'm not really talking about what middle class families have access to because parental wealth is what gives you access to the school choice that we say school choice is. So if it's school choice but it's conditioned by resource, that's actually not choice for a large proportion of families. So in the same way I would never say there's not a role for an all women's college or an all men, you know, I went to Morehouse or HBCU. I'm not suggesting that there cannot be a significant role for that. I'm saying we didn't think it was right when it was forced and that's really what we're talking about in the K-12 space. And so I don't necessarily think schools that are all minority have to be like thought of as not good. But I think if all our schools look like that, that's not good. And that's really where we are. I think that is a good place to wrap up this Q&A here. In a minute I want everyone to thank Rucker, but before you do that I want to just remind people that he will be outside signing books and chatting with people if you are interested in staying afterwards. So thank you Rucker for coming to join us. Thank you.