| Gary Huang
Synectics, Inc.
Outcomes of desegregated schooling: Joint effects of school factors and student characteristics
FINAL REPORT:
With a critical review of the literature on long-term effects of school desegregation in the United States, we hypothesized that desegregation would not uniformly affect postsecondary outcomes among minority students. As an institutional condition, however, desegregation could change the outcomes' relations with student background and experience. Instead of asking whether desegregation had an impact net ofindividual background effects, we focused on how individual effects on postsecondary success were influenced by school desegregation.
Drawing longitudinal data from the High School and Beyond (HS&B) and using a two-level hierarchical logistic regression technique, we studied minority students' postsecondary outcomes, including: attending any postsecondary schools, attending 4-year college, and completing college four years after high school, with the following predictors: (1) at student level, minority student socioeconomic status, immigration background, curriculum placement, and the length of desegregation experience; and (2) at the school level, high school desegregation, academic program enrollment rates, and average SES.
We found that minority students from desegregated high schools had slightly lower postsecondary education attendance than their peers from segregated schools. Further, the effect of inferior curricula on attendance was worse in desegregated schools than in predominantly minority schools. Desegregation did not appear to change postsecondary attendance's relations with student background (socioeconomic status and immigration status). The results suggested that quality curriculum was crucial for improving minorities' postsecondary attendance; whereas racial composition in high school was not as important as many assumed. Schools with high rates of academic program enrollment had a higher average of minorities' chances for postsecondary education. In such schools, the positive effect of minority children's long experience in desegregated setting was stronger than in schools with low academic program enrollment. But ironically, high academic enrollment also intensified the negative effect on the chances among the minority students who were placed in inferior curricular programs.
Back to Funded Research Grants Page |