CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

The Long Run Impacts of Court-Ordered Desegregation

April 2022

Working Paper Number:

CES-22-11

Abstract

Court ordered desegregation plans were implemented in hundreds of US school districts nationwide from the 1960s through the 1980s, and were arguably the most substantive national attempt to improve educational access for African American children in modern American history. Using large Census samples that are linked to Social Security records containing county of birth, we implement event studies that estimate the long run effects of exposure to desegregation orders on human capital and labor market outcomes. We find that African Americans who were relatively young when a desegregation order was implemented in their county of birth, and therefore had more exposure to integrated schools, experienced large improvements in adult human capital and labor market outcomes relative to Blacks who were older when a court order was locally implemented. There are no comparable changes in outcomes among whites in counties undergoing an order, or among Blacks who were beyond school ages when a local order was implemented. These effects are strongly concentrated in the South, with largely null findings in other regions. Our data and methodology provide the most comprehensive national assessment to date on the impacts of court ordered desegregation, and strongly indicate that these policies were in fact highly effective at improving the long run socioeconomic outcomes of many Black students.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
black, minority, hispanic, recession, white, segregated, discrimination, segregation, racial, race, enrollment, socioeconomic, disparity, schooling

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech, including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Social Security Administration, National Science Foundation, Ordinary Least Squares, Supreme Court, Social Security, American Community Survey, PSID, Protected Identification Key, NUMIDENT, Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board, Disclosure Review Board, SSA Numident, Federal Statistical Research Data Center

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