How can the federal government best induce local school districts to change their policies? The answer depends critically upon how school districts respond to federal grants and mandates. The proposed research examines school district responses to two major federal policies, the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. The CRA mandated integration of school districts and gave the federal government new judicial enforcement power. The largest component of ESEA was Title I: its goal was to increase instructional spending at schools serving disadvantaged students through targeted grants, doubling federal education spending in its first year. Together, these two policies also had the potential to reduce segregation by denying grants to segregated districts. Specifically, the PIs will (1) examine the importance of grants in absolute terms and relative to judicial power in promoting local integration, and (2) identify the extent to which Title I served to increase spending, as opposed to substituting for state or local revenue sources.
Intellectual Merit The PI's work on the first question will be the most comprehensive study to date to examine desegregation as a function of the potential loss of Federal funding. The question is not an obvious one, as many districts did pass up substantial grant revenue for years rather than integrate their schools. The study of the second question draws on a substantial public finance literature on the effects of grants from one jurisdiction to another -- the so-called "flypaper effect", but improves upon the methods used in the bulk of such investigations by isolating exogenous variation in grants. Furthermore, using data surrounding Title I's initial implementation allows examination of responses to an entire, substantial program, rather than to marginal changes in pre-existing programs, as in the bulk of the literature. The methodological approaches to both questions exploit variation in potential, not actual, Title I grants across school districts and over time. While Title I grants were tied to child poverty counts, and therefore were not exogenous in the cross section, three distinct Title I funding regimes during the 1960s and early 1970s led to abrupt changes in the Title I grant to which a district was entitled, allowing us to isolate variation in grant amounts due to policy changes rather than to other underlying determinants, such as a school district's poverty rate and racial composition, of both grant amounts and the relevant segregation and spending outcomes.
Broader Impacts The expanded federal role in elementary and secondary education due to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 makes the question of how federal policies change school district practice especially salient. The current push to justify spending with improved outcomes emphasizes the need to distinguish between the expected effects of changes in revenue from changes in actual educational services on achievement. The data collection and dissemination will be another important contribution of this project. The PI's have uncovered new district- and school-level data on school desegregation and school finances from historical archives. The PI's will make much of these data electronically available to other researchers once the project is complete.
