A handful of fresh kumquats with some of them halved
The most basic question of research is “compared to what?” A new diet helps people lose weight, you say? Compared to what? Someone’s usual diet? Other diets that they could possibly adhere to? Pounding Mountain Dew and Cheetos every day?
Think of a scientist who fed children kumquats every day. After six months, he measured them and found that the children had grown. He thus concluded that kumquats help kids grow.
Do you notice the problem? Follow kids for six months and they’re going to grow, kumquats or not. What we want to know is how much they grew compared to what they would have grown not eating kumquats. Maybe kumquats help kids grow, maybe they don’t.
This is how we know if a finding is big or small, meaningful, or just noise.
Two researchers from Ball State violated this basic tenet of science in an inflammatory article in the education magazine Phi Delta Kappan.
They claim that the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program is driving the creation of “segregation academies,” that is, private schools where white people are retreating into their own racial enclaves. If you’ve heard that term before, it is a call back to the schools that white southerners created in the wake of school desegregation to avoid having to send their children to integrated schools, something that no right minded person wants to return to.
As an aside, harkening back to segregation is the reductio ad Hitlerum of the anti-school choice movement. Segregationists used vouchers, therefore those advocating for vouchers are segregationists. Segregationists invoked the market, therefore anyone arguing for vouchers by invoking the market is a segregationist. It doesn’t matter if the purpose of the voucher advocate is to create new integrated schools or if the voucher advocate is himself or herself black, same language, same cause.
That having been said, the real problem with the article is that it selectively avoids ever asking “compared to what?”
The authors make their claim of the Indiana voucher program creating segregation academies by stating that in 2017-18 46% of Indiana voucher schools were at least 80% white.
Now, we can start by saying that calling a school that is 80% white a segregation academy is facially ridiculous and historically illiterate. As the authors state themselves, the defining characteristic of a segregation academy is that they didn’t let in black students—at all. These schools clearly do, so they are not, by the author’s own definition, segregation academies. But let’s not let the whole “words-have-meanings-and-we-have-to-abide-by-them” thing get in our way.
Even granting their definition, as soon as we ask “compared to what?” things start to get sticky.
I went to the Indiana Department of Education’s website and pulled the enrollment data for Indiana’s 1,878 public school buildings. You’ll never guess what I found. Segregation academies galore! In fact, some 966 public schools in Indiana had a student body that was more than 80% white in the 2017-18 school year. That is 51% of all public schools. So there are actually fewer private “segregation academies” (in both number and proportion) than public ones, and I even helped the public schools out by lumping charter schools (which are far less white writ large) in with the public schools.
So is Indiana operating more than 900 segregation academies? Aren’t the authors burying the lede by focusing only on the voucher program?
In 2018-19 traditional public schools in Indiana were 11% Black, 69% White, 12% Hispanic, 8% other racial groups, and 48% low income. Voucher students were 12% Black, 58% White, 21% Hispanic, 9% other racial groups, and 70% low income. Voucher students were more likely to be from a minority group and more likely to be low income than traditional public school students. But in either case, the majority of Indiana students are white and statewide programs are going to be populated by lots of white kids.
(And yes, as the authors point out, as more and more students enroll in the voucher program, more white students are participating. One would think that two researchers would realize that as a sample increases in size it more closely resembles the underlying population. That’s not a scandal, that’s basic statistics.)
None of these schools, public or private, are segregation academies and linking them to those terrible institutions is reprehensible. Indiana has an overwhelmingly white student population, so lots of its schools are going to have mostly white students. The voucher program is targeted to low- and moderate-income families, many of whom are white. They particpate in the program slightly less frequently than they exist in the general population. How do we know this? We ask “compared to what?”
This article is just another attempt by people who don’t like vouchers to throw something against the wall and see if it sticks. It is another attempt to distract readers from the truth. It’s just noise.
