KU News Release

KU professor studies desegregation and resegregation in schools

LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas researcher who studies the effects of school desegregation and resegregation on the dropout problem in urban school systems presented his paper at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting Aug. 3 in Boston.

Argun Saatcioglu, assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies and an adjunct assistant professor of sociology, delivered his paper, “The Hidden Value Of School Desegregation: Evidence On Integration’s High School Promoting Power From The Cleveland Municipal School District, 1977-1998,” at a session on “Education Policy and Educational Equity: Intended and Unintended Consequences.”

In his research, Saatcioglu examines the changing contribution of high schools to students’ drop out tendencies in districts that experienced both desegregation and resegregation over the last few decades. He shows that although desegregation could not sufficiently improve student performance, it was able to considerably increase the schools’ contribution to success.

Evaluations of desegregation and resegregation typically focus on changes in student performance, such as test scores or graduation. This makes it difficult to show the true value of integrated education as well as the real harm that resegregation has increasingly had since the early 1990s. Taking a different approach, Saatcioglu addresses desegregation’s “hidden value” in making urban schools a positive force in the lives of disadvantaged students, although student-level outcomes such as test scores may continue to remain low due to social and economic impediments to student performance originating from outside the schools.

By separating the schools’ contribution to student performance from other factors that play a role in performance, Saatcioglu examines changes in schools’ influence over dropout behavior under conditions of segregation, desegregation and resegregation. His analysis, based on data from the Cleveland Municipal School District, suggests that, during the 1980s when the district desegregated, its high schools effectively counteracted dropout tendencies, particularly when students began high school having attended desegregated elementary and middle schools.

These results held similarly to blacks and whites, though whites were relatively less disadvantaged. While ultimate dropout rates at the student level changed only little — due largely to disruptive family and neighborhood contexts, unproductive peer cultures and low income — the high schools at least fought the problem effectively. In other words, desegregation did deliver by improving the schools’ contribution to success.

By contrast, both before desegregation in the 1970s and in the resegregation era in the 1990s, the high schools functioned as a major obstacle to success, severely hurting the average student’s chances of graduation. Essentially, not only did students suffer from nonschool disadvantages, the schools aggravated the problem.

Sociologists and policy researchers have known for a long time that success is affected by a variety of nonschool factors.

“Though we know this,” Saatcioglu said, “we have not properly integrated this insight in our ways of evaluating educational reform.”

Therefore, there is a constant risk of mistaking successful policies for failures, and making the wrong policy choices. Resegregation is a case in point.

“So long as we refuse to include significant remedies to non-school problems in our efforts to improve urban education and to close the achievement gap, we should examine school contribution in addition to student performance as a legitimate criterion for policy outcomes,” he said.”

The findings of the paper have implications not just for desegregation, but other bold policy efforts such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.

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