My PhD Part 2: Why does school segregation matter?

In my previous post I touched on the negative impact of school segregation on social cohesion. But there are other serious negative impacts on individual students and the community. I want to actually get onto the articles in my thesis so I will keep this post brief. School segregation has been associated with harming self-esteem and identity, multiplying the effects of family disadvantages on learning, and diminishing key life attainments in early adulthood.

Self Esteem

US racial school segregation was ruled to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. The NAACP legal team drew heavily on psychological evidence that found racially separating children into different schools caused harm to the development of African American students. A broad range of social scientific evidence was drawn on including Clark & Clark's Doll Experiment. The doll experiment showed that racial segregation led to African American children identifying white dolls as "good" and black dolls as "bad". 

The US Supreme Court found that even if segregated schools had the same resources and facilities, racial segregation harmed the development of children. 

A question for socioeconomic school segregation research is - Does separating children by class lead to children from lower income families developing a sense of inferior self-identity? 

Academic Achievement

School segregation leads to the concentration of disadvantaged students into schools with high concentrations of peers who are also disadvantaged. In Australia for example, students from low socioeconomic status (SES) families tends to attend schools with a high proportion of peers who are also from low SES families. While it is well know that a student's socioeconomic family background has an impact on their learning, school compositional research shows that the socioeconomic background of a student's peers has an additional impact on their learning, This is called the school compositional effect. This means that segregating disadvantaged students into disadvantaged schools results in multiplying their disadvantage. While this is well known in the US, the Australian policy community is often unaware that the segregated structure of our schooling system contributes to entrenching social inequalities. My PhD supervisors Laura Perry and Andrew McConney were among the first to research school compositional effects in Australia. You can read more about their research here. 

Early Adult Outcomes

The effects of high school socioeconomic composition extend to influencing early adult outcomes. US and Australian research has shown that attending a low SES high school reduces the likelihood of graduating from high school and enrolling in a university degree. Thus, school segregation diminishes the likelihood that socially disadvantaged children will experience social mobility, or achieve a standard of living above that of their parents. The outcome is likely to make society more hierarchical, limiting the development of new talent, ideas and social progress. 

In my next post I will begin to outline the journal articles that form the basis of my thesis. My first journal article began a debate with a leading academic about whether the school compositional effect is real.

My PhD

I recently graduated with a PhD from Murdoch University, and some colleagues have suggested I should share its details through social media. This post is the first of a series about my PhD and will probably develop into a broader program about school segregation.

My PhD title was The Validity of Policy Interventions to Address Australian School Segregation and it is accessible through the university research portal. The thesis is a series of seven journal articles that address whether socioeconomic school segregation has an impact in Australia, its policy drivers, and potential accountability mechanisms to influence the school enrolment practices that drive school segregation.

School segregation is the tendency of students to be enrolled in different types of schools based on social characteristics such as ethnicity or Indigenous status. In Australia (and most places), the dominant form of segregation is socioeconomic. That is, Australian schools tend to separate students based on parental occupation and education.

Why does it matter?

Critics of school segregation in Australia have tended to object to its impact on social cohesion. Public education has been seen as a shared socialisation experience that creates future citizens who feel a sense of belonging and obligation to their community and nation. Public schools are part of the common wealth that binds individual families into functional communities by ensuring each child is equally valued and educated. Thus, public education is more than an economic enterprise of creating workers but also a foundation of a sustainable democratic society.

These ideas were espoused by New South Wales premier Sir Henry Parkes as he campaigned for the establishment of the state's public education system during the colonial period. In particular, he argued that religious and class differences were a threat to the emerging democratic nation. He envisaged children from all religious and class backgrounds sharing the same classrooms.

Contemporary debate about social cohesion often locates social division as an issue within individuals, often seen as a matter of personal beliefs and attitudes that can be manipulated by education and media. But this ignores the social dimension to human behaviours. Social division is largely driven by material, institutional and cultural conditions. The categories we judge each other by are embedded in shared social and cultural practices.

Importantly, school segregation research shows that social divisions are entrenched in childhood in the majority of schooling systems. For example, in the Australian context, government funded private schools market themselves through celebrating social differences. Thus, while social cohesion may be a stated aim of democratic governments, the actual developmental experiences of children and young people deeply engrain division and hierarchy. 

Next Article

In my next article I plan to consider other reasons why school segregation matters.