Interesting Short Article on Parents Involved
Scott Bauries on Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 4:29PM A good deal of scholarship has been published in the legal and educational communities since the Supreme Court decided the Parents Involved case. In that case, the Court struck down the student assignment systems of Seattle, Washington and Louisville, Kentucky on Equal Protection grounds. Justice Kennedy (nearly universally regarded as the "swing" Justice, now that Justice O'Connor is gone) wrote the decision.
Most of the scholarship has either described the case, fit the case into existing jurisprudence, or made normative claims about its correctness or the likely consequences. Recently, though, I came across an interesting piece in the Teachers College Record addressing the case from the perspective of a social science researcher. The author, Professor David Armor of George Mason University, evaluates the portions of Justice Kennedy's opinion in which he accepted the conclusion of the "liberal wing" of the Court that desegregation was a compelling governmental interest, but rejected the justification for this conclusion, which the Justices in the "liberal wing" based on social science evidence indicating positive average effect sizes in test scores resulting from desegregation. Professor Armor makes some important points that practitioners and researchers of constitutional law would do well to understand. The article is here. In particular, I think Professor Armor gets at a thorny concept--statistical effect versus the practical meaning of such an effect--that confuses many legal decision makers.
I think that Professor Armor's points are particularly salient today because legal scholarship, and increasingly legal adjudication, are becoming permeated with social science methodologies and evidence. Few lawyers and judges have the training necessary to understand such evidence and its limitations, and much legal decision making involving such information illustrates this lack of training. I hope that more work like Professor Armor's will help legal decision makers to understand what social science evidence can and cannot show.
Reader Comments (4)
Do you think that law students need to take a research course(s). Certainly I would hope judges have some understanding of statistics and other methodologies when they are deciding cases because they are likely to be frequently provided social science research as evidence. Maybe it is just a course that judges need to take? Maybe a CLE requirement? I certainly don't think we can rely on undergraduate preparation to provide them a real background in social science research.
Imagine what a social science research overview course would do if we made every law student take it? It is sort of hard to even fathom those implications.
I can't find the links right now, but that suggestion has certainly found favor among other legal commentators in the blogosphere. It makes complete sense to me. With the enlarging importance of statistical evidence in litigation, as well as in general due diligence work, it would seem to make sense that all lawyers should have some grounding in it. Maybe not a methodology course, but at least an "appreciation" course, where they can at least learn to read statistical reports and spot the flaws and limitations in them.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing, Justin.
Armor says that the average benefit of desegregation policies / practices ranges from 0.1 to 0.3 SD and says that's fairly small. That may be true but I'm wondering if it misses the larger point, which is this: how big is the average achievement gap b/w Black and White students? If it's .35, for example, don't desegregation policies get us a long way toward closing that gap? If it's .80, then clearly they don't. The 0.1 to 0.3 range has some meaning in itself but is better considered against the larger issue. Unfortunately he left out the other number against which to compare the range that he cites...
Good point, Scott M. I'm sure that Professor Armor left the achievement gap stats out of the commentary because the Court members did not make any such comparison, but of course, we can and should.
My first thoughts: The effect sizes that Professor Armor cites appear to come from comparisons of outcomes among a stratified random sample of segregated and desgregated black students in the same district, controlling for other relevant factors, such as income and education level of parents. These are not value-added scores or longitudinal analyses, but simple, one-time measures of achievement. The conclusion to be drawn is that, on average, black students in desegregated environments fare somewhat better than black students in segregated enviroments. Of course this "average" effect means that some black students fare much, much better in desgregated environments, and that a smaller number fare worse, or even much worse, as Professor Armor points out. This is that thorny issue of statistical effect versus practical meaning to which I referred in the original post.
There is no attempt in most of the studies of which I am aware to determine whether white students do better or worse in segregated or desgregated environments, so it is impossible to see whether the achievement gap widens or closes when a school system desegregates. To measure the closing of a gap, we would have to analyze both demographic groups together in the same study and disaggregate along the way. I am not aware of whether this is done in any of the major studies, but if not, it should be.