On Wednesday, September 30, Rucker C. Johnson will speak on “Separate & Unequal: How School Spending & Integration Matter.”  Johnson is Chancellor’s Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, UC-Berkeley, and a former RSF Visiting Scholar.  His recent book is Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works (Basic Book, 2019). 

Johnson argues that inequality in schools leads to many of our most intractable social ills: the mass incarceration of young men of color, disparities in income, life expectancy and related public health metrics.  Children of the Dream argues for public education as the primary engine of upward mobility. Specifically, it examine the success of our three most significant equal-opportunity initiatives: 1) court-mandated integration efforts; 2) school finance reform; and 3) expansions of public pre-K investments. Using nationally-representative data sets of children followed from birth to adulthood across multiple generations, matched with their access to quality schools, we show how these three policies had lasting benefits. The above policies have never been tried in concert for extended periods of time. Extant efforts at solving our educational woes detach health from education and early education from K-12 schooling. Current policy designs are as divided as our segregated classrooms — and must be combatted just as vigorously. We must shift the paradigm from a singular approach chasing after illusory silver bullets to an integrated solution.