School segregation has been associated with improved long term outcomes for black students. Less is known about the long-term impact on white students who attended desegregated schools. An unknown: Did compulsory desegregation programs shape the political ideology of white students as adults?
Jörg Spenkuch, associate professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at the Kellogg School, is interested in this question and how it might help clarify more broadly: What determines our political inclinations and to what extent they are determined by experiences where do we have when you are young?
To explore these ideas, Spenkuch collaborated with Ethan Kaplanat the University of Maryland, and Cody Tuttle, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton. In new research, they explore whether white students who were court-ordered to attend predominantly black schools in the 1970s in Louisville, Kentucky, appear to have been politically shaped by the experience.
The researchers believe this is the first paper to examine whether mandatory desegregation programs leave an imprint on the political views of white students 40 years after the event.
And it seems they do indeed. Researchers find that white males assigned to attend predominantly black schools in Louisville were more likely to register as Democrats and support liberal causes four decades later than white males who were not.
“For policymakers currently considering whether to dismantle existing school desegregation programs or implement new ones, what is important to understand is: What is the net effect of these programs?” says Spenkuch.
An order to desegregate Louisville
When, in December 1974, a federal court ruled that the public schools in Louisville should be desegregated, it was a surprise—and a hotly contested one. The city and Jefferson County in which it is located operated separate, unequal, and highly segregated school districts. Within Louisville itself, about 80 percent of white students attended schools that were at least 90 percent white, and 76 percent of black students attended schools that were at least 90 percent black. Jefferson County schools were almost all white.
A July 1975 appeals court ruling ruled that full desegregation in Louisville and Jefferson County should be instituted at the start of the next school year—which was less than two months away.
The judge worked with experts from the Kentucky Human Rights Commission and staff members from both school districts to quickly put together a viable busing plan. The resulting plan stipulated that children would be bused according to their first letter of last name, grade level and race.
Tuttle, who is from Louisville himself, has previously examined the economic impact of Louisville’s same desegregation program on both black and white students; In that paper, he found that black students who were bused to predominantly white schools seemed to see financial gains later in life, while at the same time there was no change in the earnings of white students who attended predominantly black schools.
At the time, however, this plan sparked violent white backlash. on one of the first days of the school year, Chicago Tribune A mob of 10,000 white students at a suburban high school reportedly set buses on fire and threw rocks as black students tried to board them.
Clearly, the court-ordered desegregation plan was met with outrage by many whites. But what were some of the long-term effects on the attitudes of white students?
Electoral Yearbooks and Registers
To investigate this, the researchers began by pulling names from the 1974-1975 yearbooks of fifteen of the high schools that were part of the mandatory desegregation plan.
They hired Aristotle Inc., a company that maintains databases of registered voters and political donors, to mine information about people’s party registration, attendance history and donations to various political groups.
The researchers’ sample included 8,900 white men, now in their late 50s and early 60s. Aristotle found at least one voter registration record that matched the name and assumed the birth year of about 70 percent of those men—roughly in line with national voter registration rates.
Women were not included in the analysis because at the time they were likely to change their surnames upon marriage, making it impossible to link yearbook names and voter registration records for the majority of them.
It is important to note that the 1974–75 yearbook, from which the researchers drew their sample, documented the last school year before the desegregation plan was announced. Spenkuts says a portion of the white students in those yearbooks who were later bused likely moved away from the district’s public schools to remain in a majority-white environment at a private school or another district.
The researchers did this for a reason, Spenkuch explains. At this point in their research, their goal was to document the net impact of the desegregation plan on all white students, regardless of whether they had ever been bused or not.
“You can think of sitting on the bus and attending a predominantly Black school as the direct result of the program – call it the exposure effect,” Spenkuch explains. “But there could also be an indirect effect, meaning your parents take you out of public school and you have a different set of experiences. If you’re interested in the overall effect of the ride, then we want to capture both of those effects.”
Because of that, the researchers say their results probably represent a “lower bound” on the direct impact of white students actually getting on a bus, as required by the order.
The Lasting Footprint of the Bus
For the white males the study focuses on, receiving a bus assignment to a predominantly black school increases the likelihood of registering as a Democrat 40 years later by more than two percentage points—and decreases the likelihood of registering as a Republican by about same amount.
“I was surprised by how big the effect was on party registration,” says Spenkuch. “This is definitely a non-trivial result.”
Moreover, the effect on party commitments is stronger among white males who were assigned to attend predominantly black schools for two years, rather than one. (The court-authorized plan arbitrarily assigned some students to one year and some to two years of busing.)
The researchers also found that those chosen to attend predominantly black schools are significantly less likely to have donated money to organizations or political candidates who oppose same-sex marriage or abortion.
In other words, it appears that receiving a busing assignment to predominantly black schools had the effect of making the white males in the sample less politically conservative than their counterparts who did not receive a busing assignment.
A broader look at racial attitudes
Spenkuch and his colleagues plan to continue this research. In future phases of their research, they plan to determine who eventually graduated from which high schools and thus see who followed their mission. This would allow them to isolate the impact on white students who actually attended schools that were not segregated.
Pending funding, they also hope to survey thousands of men in their sample to gather more detailed data and, ideally, come up with more nuanced insights.
For example, they would like to know more about whether busing affected students’ attitudes toward race or specific social policies.
The ultimate goal of the research is to discern whether Louisville’s school desegregation program weakened racial prejudice and stereotyping among white students.
The answer to that question isn’t obvious, Spenkuch explains: On the one hand, it’s possible that learning alongside black students had this effect on many white students. On the other hand, it is plausible, especially given the scale of white protests, that a strong reaction to enforced desegregation caused some white individuals or communities to retreat into segregated bubbles where racial prejudice was even more pronounced.
“My point is that part of our job as social scientists is to explore the pros and cons of these policies,” says Spenkuch. “Then it will be up to policymakers and the general public to decide how to weigh them.”
