Rucker Johnson This piece was excerpted from a 2021 interview article in For All magazine.
Our existing approaches to what ails the education system often detach pre-K from K-12, health investments from educational investments. Education often intersects with housing but, in policy, they’re often treated separately.
But it’s not just the collection of good policies that matters; it’s the collaboration of policies that makes the difference. The reason is that there are significant syner-gistic effects that are more than the sum of the parts.
For example, it’s been documented that half of the achievement gap that we observe among third graders was apparent at kindergarten entry. What that reflects, in part, is the strong footprint of early childhood experiences. And that’s why access to quality pre-K can play a significant role, particularly in the lives of lower-income children. Without those public investments in early pre-K programs, they would often not have access to environments that promote nurturing interpersonal relationships and school readiness.
What’s important about this is that during the initial rollout of Head Start, the first 15 years, those programs also significantly improved health, child health. This was because immunizations increased, the quality and continuity of pediatric care significantly increased. This predated a lot of the significant public investments in Medicaid expansions. Partly, it’s that healthier children are better learners. Again, there’s that connection between education and health, pre-K and K-12.
What we’re able to do in that research is leverage the per pupil spending in pre-K programs and the timing of that set of increases at the county level, link it to the student level of children we’re following from birth to adulthood, and connect that with the level of school resources in their K-12 years via the court-ordered timing of school funding reforms in their state and district of upbringing.
When we put those pieces together, we found that it was not just that public pre-K spending via Head Start has significant long-term beneficial effects. And it wasn’t only that the K-12 spending has significant positive effects. What we found was that there was a significant synergy; we call it dynamic complementarity.
We found that when children attend poorly funded K-12 environments, the long-term effects of pre-K tend to dissipate. It’s consistent with the fade-out effect that other people have documented. It’s only when the pre-K investments are followed with quality K-12 investments—where they’re going to schools that are well-funded and well- resourced—that we see sustained, positive effects of pre-K spending.
Similarly, the effectiveness of K-12 spending is enhanced significantly when it’s preceded by quality pre-K access. In their K-12 years, children are more prepared to learn and to take advantage of the educational opportunities that occur in those K-12 years. When we do them in concert, the effects are more than the sum of the individual parts.
Tennessee did a major expansion of their public pre-K, but funding for K-12 there is regressive. Many kids who had access to pre-K subsequently went to less-well-funded K-12 schools, and the effectiveness of the pre-K investment did not translate into sustained beneficial effects beyond the elementary school years. Again, that’s evidence of the dynamic complementarity—you need both of those effective bits to succeed.
We shouldn’t throw money at these problems without understanding first that segregated environments make it much more difficult to equalize opportunity. When we have concentrations of poverty, equal spending is not equal if the need is far greater. The cost of providing equal programming differs across schools that have very different concentrations of need.
What we’re finding is that we should be concerned about promoting integration for reasons that go beyond test scores. There are issues around how children learn in integrated environments, about learning across differences, and about the value of diversity in schools. We’re able to show that this has an impact on kids’ long-term attitudes along race, including racial attitudes expressed in adulthood. This is particularly true among non-Hispanic, White children who did not grow up in a diverse school environment, who were highly segregated.
So we’re not just documenting positive effects of school resources and pre-K investments for lower-income and minority children, though those disproportionately have those effects there, but we’re also documenting that more integrated environments have beneficial effects for all kids.
These are things that are not captured by test scores alone, but they have a vast impact on society in the long run. Our schools are like a microcosm of the kind of social ills that we confront many years down the road.
We’re now experiencing the resegregation of our nation’s public schools, where 40 percent of Black students and 42 percent of Latino students attend schools where less than 10 percent of their peers are non-Hispanic White.
By analyzing data on children followed into adulthood, I find that the resegregation of public schools has contributed to the increases in racial bias, racial intolerance, and rising polarization of political views that we observe expressed in adulthood. These effects, rooted in a lack of exposure to racial/ethnic diversity in schools, are most pronounced among White Americans. Not only that, but children in these schools struggle to develop the ability to empathize with others and to appreciate the validity of other cultures. For African Americans, our results show that confinement to segregated, poorly funded schools interferes with children’s life chances.
We’re in an era where the vast share of school segregation is due to housing segregation, including subsidized housing and disproportionately concentrated poverty neighborhoods.
And, today, two-thirds of segregation occurs between school districts, not within them. In the earlier era, a significant part of segregation occurred within district boundary lines. Once the majority of segregation is between districts, it becomes much more imperative to use tools beyond busing to integrate schools. In this respect, housing policy is central.
The United States spends $44 billion a year on affordable housing programs, but that funding tends to be concentrated in high-poverty, low-opportunity neighborhoods, particularly among families with children. That is one of the primary reasons that the two areas that have the biggest impacts on opportunity for children are education and housing. And yet those are the areas in which civil rights has made the least progress, due to segregation.
Sometimes people have the impression that this is about parents’ choices and that policy is not implicated in this. But, actually, this is the direct consequence of explicit policies. There are a large number of gerrymandered school district boundaries. There are ways in which parents with wealth, particularly and unfortunately non-Hispanic White parents with wealth, have used their political influence to create school assignment zones that are more segregated along race and class lines to basically hoard opportunity.
When we’re talking about segregation, it’s not just the separation of school children by race. Integration is not only about the assignments of children to schools by race, but it’s definitely about equitable use of resources; that includes funding, teacher quality, teacher diversity, multicultural curriculum, and curricular quality. I just talked about racialized tracking in the discussion on school finance reform.
We document that the longer students are treated for the symptoms of segregated, poorly funded education via school integration as well as school funding reform, the better the outcomes. The higher the dose of integration and funding reform they receive, the better their long-term outcomes are. We’re documenting that school funding reform alone is insufficient to fulfill the promise of equal educational opportunity. There could certainly not be a cure without it, but it’s not the full cure. It has to be combined with school integration and expansion of access to high-quality pre-K. That three-dimensional synergy is precisely the policy prescription that I believe the nation needs to implement in order to overcome the legacy of segregation. So there’s no single panacea, but when we combine these efforts, we’ve seen children’s life trajectories fundamentally altered in all of the most positive ways.
Rucker Johnson (ruckerj@berkeley.edu) is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an NCSD Research Advisory Panel member.
References
Clement, D. (2021, October 18.) Powering Potential: Rucker Johnson on School Finance Reform, Quality Pre-K, and Integration. For All. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Retrieved from https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2021/rucker-johnson-interview-powering-potential
