School integration is largely thought of as a depressing and failed saga in American history.
According to a GAO report, during the 2020-2021 school year, more than a third of students,
that's 18.5 million kids, attended schools where 75% or more of the population was of a single race or ethnicity.
And it's not even that things are just slowly getting better.
Research by the University of Wisconsin shows that in 1988,
roughly 37% of black students were enrolled in majority white schools.
Fast forward 30 years in 2018, that figure was just 19%.
My name is Drew Slumdemsis.
I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic and this is Good on Paper,
a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.
When I first saw the paper we're going to discuss today, I felt a stab of hope.
Was it possible that the political impacts of busing policies were better than I'd believed?
Ethan Kaplan, an economist at the University of Maryland and his co-authors,
had zeroed in on Jefferson County, Kentucky.
In 1975, a federal court had ordered the public schools there to desegregate.
Now, 50 years later,
Kaplan and his co-authors found
that this experience had affected the politics of children who had been assigned to be bused.
According to this research,
busing significantly increases support for the Democratic Party and causes important and measurable shifts in the ideological outlook of white children who experience the deprivation of inner city schools.