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Making Desegregation Work: Extracurricular Activities Robert L. Crain Robert L. Crain, Senior Social Scientist, the Rand Corporation, and Principal Research Scientist, Center for Social Organization of Schools, Johns Hopkins University. Southern desegregated high schools with high levels of black or white student ex- tracurricular participation have students who report more interracial contact, higher self-esteem, more positive attitudes toward school, more parent visits to schools, and more personal contact with teachers. The results are derived from regression equations based on responses from 10,000 students in 200 schools, controlling on student and school background factors. The author recommends that secondary schools place high priority on encouraging extracurricular participation and argues that this enhances the school's ability to teach because it increases student attachment to the school, reduces student alienation, provides alternative channels for students to develop self-esteem, and increases the opportunity for positive interracial contact. Desegregation poses a unique set of challenges for educators. All too often, however, questions about how desegregation can best meet students' various needs become obscured in the service of more narrow and immediate concerns. At the district level, desegregation policy often revolves around the logistics of pupil reassignment with an eye toward the minimization of white flight. When these initial (and important) issues have been addressed, district desegregation policy disappears. At the school level, teachers and adminis- trators first (and rightfully) concentrate on ensuring the smooth operation of the school. Once the procedural problems have been dealt with, however, it is back to '"ousiness," which in most schools means academic achievement. Many teachers and principals realize that there is more to rffnning a de- segregated school than just teaching academic materials;but, unfortunately, when they turn to the literature for help, they do not find very much useful advice. One reason is that research has focused almost exclusively on aca- demic achievement. But if the ultimate goal of schooling is to prepare stu- dents for responsible participation in the larger society, researchers cannot continue to act as if achievement test performance were the sole criterion of "success." This is especially true when the school is desegregated, for it is then that most students first encounter people of other races and back- grounds. It is important that these first experiences be good ones. When the school functions as a community and recognizes that students must have a variety of important experiences, in class and out, the lesson of citizenship in the larger society is more likely to be well taught and well learned. The other reason why the "how-to-improve-schools" literature is not bet- ter is that producing evidence to show that a particular school program really The Urban Review VoL 13, No. 2, 1981 © 1981 Agathon Press, Inc. 0042-0972/81/020121-07501.50 121

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Making Desegregation Work: Extracurricular Activities

R o b e r t L. Crain

Robert L. Crain, Senior Social Scientist, the Rand Corporation, and Principal Research Scientist, Center for Social Organization of Schools, Johns Hopkins University.

Southern desegregated high schools with high levels of black or white student ex- tracurricular participation have students who report more interracial contact, higher self-esteem, more positive attitudes toward school, more parent visits to schools, and more personal contact with teachers. The results are derived from regression equations based on responses from 10,000 students in 200 schools, controlling on student and school background factors. The author recommends that secondary schools place high priority on encouraging extracurricular participation and argues that this enhances the school's ability to teach because it increases student attachment to the school, reduces student alienation, provides alternative channels for students to develop self-esteem, and increases the opportunity for positive interracial contact.

Desegregation poses a unique set of challenges for educators. All too often, however, questions about how desegregation can best meet students' various needs become obscured in the service of more narrow and immediate concerns. At the district level, desegregation policy often revolves around the logistics of pupil reassignment with an eye toward the minimization of white flight. When these initial (and important) issues have been addressed, district desegregation policy disappears. At the school level, teachers and adminis- trators first (and rightfully) concentrate on ensuring the smooth operation of the school. Once the procedural problems have been dealt with, however, it is back to '"ousiness," which in most schools means academic achievement.

Many teachers and principals realize that there is more to rffnning a de- segregated school than just teaching academic materials;but, unfortunately, when they turn to the literature for help, they do not find very much useful advice. One reason is that research has focused almost exclusively on aca- demic achievement. But if the ultimate goal of schooling is to prepare stu- dents for responsible participation in the larger society, researchers cannot continue to act as if achievement test performance were the sole criterion of "success." This is especially true when the school is desegregated, for it is then that most students first encounter people of other races and back- grounds. It is important that these first experiences be good ones. When the school functions as a community and recognizes that students must have a variety of important experiences, in class and out, the lesson of citizenship in the larger society is more likely to be well taught and well learned.

The other reason why the "how-to-improve-schools" literature is not bet- ter is that producing evidence to show that a particular school program really

The Urban Review VoL 13, No. 2, 1981 © 1981 Agathon Press, Inc. 0042-0972/81/020121-07501.50

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will do what it is supposed to do is difficult. Education researchers can in- vent new programs, but the task of putting them into practice in several schools and evaluating them is difficult and expensive, and even then the idea may fail when other schools try to use it under nonexperimental conditions. To f'md out what will work in the real world, a more cautious, but safer, practice is to look at schools to see what techniques they are using that are effective. But this is also difficult. How do you decide if a technique is effective? Not by asking the principal who introduced it; every good principal is a "booster" for his or her own programs. You can go to very effective schools (once you decide how to identify effective schools), but then how do you decide which of the many things being done there are the ones that make the school effective? Worse yet, exceptional schools often have exceptional staff. Would a technique which succeeded in this school work in another whose staff is not exceptional-in other words, is the idea "transportable?"

The only answer is to go to a large number of schools-enough so that if you see the same practice appearing in a number of effective schools (and not showing up in ineffective schools) you can have confidence that the prac- tice works under a variety of conditions. You can do this by visiting the schools and talking to staff and students. Forehand and Ragosta (1976), of Educational Testing Service, did this to prepare their widely used Handbook o f Integrated Schooling. In the study I am about to describe, we did not visit schools personally; instead we sent teams of survey interviewers who gave questionnaires to principals, teachers, and students in 200 desegregated high schools.

The study was an evaluation of the Emergency School Assistance Program (ESAP, forerunner of ESAA) in a random sample of 200 high schools. In each school, staff from the National Opinion Research Center interviewed the prin- cipal, gave out questionnaires to 10 teachers and 55 tenth-grade students in each school, and tested the students. ~

We assumed that effective schools, were not simply schools with high test scores. Items from student questionnaires were used to construct a number of other measures of school effectiveness, such as the amount of interracial con- tact, student self-esteem, delinquency, and the degree to which students liked school. Because we suspected that some schools might be good for students of only one race, we constructed separate black and white student outcomes.

Next we began the task of searching for effective programs. We did this by constructing regression equations for each measure of school success, using school racial composition, black and white student SES, school size, region (deep South vs. upper South), and the educational level and urbanism of the community. We then added, one at a time, more than 100 school practices or school resources-ranging from the overall per capita expenditure to the presence of a minority studies program. Not surprisingly, most of these school practices, programs, and resources did not work; they did not consis- tently show positive regression coefficients with school success. For example, we did not find that schools with special remedial programs had better race relations or achievement. We did, however, identify a small number of fac-

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tors which were consistently related to school success. We studied each of these and selected an even smaller set where we felt a good case could be made that a school characteristic was a cause of better student attitudes, be- havior, or performance. We concluded that these were school practices which other schools would be wise to copy.

The rather eclectic set of policies and practices we found point to one general conclusion: A good school is a community to which students want to belong and from which they can get help in meeting their need for per- sonal identity.

This conclusion makes sense when we consider the problems a desegre- gated high school must deal with. These schools are expected to accommo- date students of differing races and backgrounds, the majority of whom have had no previous exposure to each other. The picture is further complicated by the fact that many of the students have well-established negative racial attitudes.

One problem with desegregation is racial animosity, and another is that the school environment is poorly suited to bringing groups together. Only t 8 percent of whites and 27 percent of blacks said that one of their three best friends at school was of the opposite race. Only 25 percent of white stu- dents had ever called a black student on the telephone. The limited contact between black and white high school students leads to stereotyping and charges of racism. Asked to describe the black students in their school, 37 percent of whites said they were "'dumb" and 54 percent that they were not "ambitious," while 63 percent of blacks said whites got special advan- tages in the school. Only 42 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks ",aid they would choose to go to integrated schools.

In addition, desegregated schools have all the problems that other high schools have-the most important being an estranged clientele. High school thrusts adolescents, struggling to deal with their own identity, into a situa- tion where there is little room to display individuality or expressive behavior and where official status is accorded to only a few students, based chiefly on academic success.

The responses of the students in our survey reflect a widespread cynicism and alienation. Sixty percent of black students and 40 percent of whites saw school rules as unfair. Similarly, 49 percent of blacks and 43 percent of whites said that when they were punished at school it was "'usually for no good reason at all." Many students felt intense pressure from the constant testing and grading. Thirty-two percent of whites and 41 percent of blacks agreed with the statement, "I get so nervous on tests that I can't think straight." The schools were portrayed as bureaucracies which depersonalize students. Thirty-seven percent of white students and 47 percent of black stu- dents said they had never talked to a teacher about things they did outside of school. Finally, many described school as boring and irrelevant. Asked if any of their school work in the last week was interesting, 35 percent of blacks and 53 percent of whites said no. A majority of students could not recall having ever discussed two of the most talked-about news items of the 197 t - I 972 school year-women's liberation and the India-Pakistan war. Finally, 51 per-

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cent of whites and 39 percent of blacks agreed that "a lot of what they teach you in school is not worth learning."

In light of these statistics, it comes as no surprise that many students dis- like high school. Asked if they were usually glad to go to school in the morn- ing, less than half said yes, and 54 percent of whites admitted having stayed home intentionally one day or more the year of our survey.

In this situation, race can become a "scapegoat" issue-an excuse to take out frustrations on other students. A sizable minority of the sampled schools had experienced interracial attacks. Each group tended to blame the other, but both saw blacks as having initiated more of the assaults. There was also considerable verbal tension. Sixty-four percent of black students said that blacks had complained about white racism, and nearly half of all students agreed with the statement, "Tensions have made it hard for everyone."

Given this situation, the school must complement its academic program with a social program. It must build student loyalty to the school, provide opportunities for interracial contact, and give students opportunities to achieve personal success and establish feelings of personal worth. The best tool the school has for dealing with this is extracurricular activities, and this is why one of the most important differences between successful and unsuc- cessful schools is that good schools had higher levels of student participation in extracurricular activities. We asked each student whether he or she was in- volved in school sports and clubs and identified schools which had high white or high black participation rates. There was wide range among the schools; if we rank the schools by level of white student participation, we Fred only 44 percent of the students in the bottom quintfle of schools participating, com- pared to 83 percent in the top quintile. The range for blacks is about the same; the one-fifth of schools with the least black participation have 38 percent of their black students involved; in the top fifth the percentage is 78 percent. The first step in our analysis was to show that these sizable dif- ferences in participation Occurred because some schools provided more op- portunity for participation and not simply because their students were na- tural '~oiners. ''2 The question then becomes, What difference does it make when a school increases its student activities program?

A number of black and white student outcomes are related to the school participation rates for black and white students. We used a regression anal- ysis to construct a hypothetical table comparing schools which were similar except that one had unusually low white participation rates and the other unusually high rates. 3 The results are shown in the first two columns of Table I. The last two columns show the relationship between unusually high or low black student participation rates and black outcomes.

Since extracurricular activities bring together students with common interests, they provide a basis for friendship. We would thus expect high- participation schools to have more interracial friendships, and the first row of the table shows that black and white students in high-participation schools more often say that they have opposite-race friends, that they contact these friends outside of school, and that they work together on their homework. These items were combined to form the interracial contact scales shown on

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Making Desegregation Work

Table 1. Differences Between Schools with Low and High Rates of White Extracurricular Participation

and Low and High Rates of Black Participation..

125

White Black Participation a Participation a

Low High Low High (44%) (83%) (38%) (78%)

Percentage reporting high interracial contact (scale) 33* 38* 46* 53*

Percentage with positive racial attitudes (scale) 35 40 60 63

Percentage having high self- esteem (scale) 53* 66* 49* 55*

Percentage saying they are not happy 24* 18" 39 35

Percentage saying they like school (scale) 44 48 42 50

Percentage feeling school rules are fair (scale) 55* 61" 45* 51"

Percentage whose parents visited school this year 23* 30* 27* 35*

Percentage who talked to a teacher about personal matters 59* 69* 50* 57*

aparticipation rates are in parentheses. Values shown ate percentages. *Difference between high- and low-participation categories significant beyond p = .05.

line 1. In schools where white participation is high, 38 percent of white students report high interracial contact, compared to 33 percent in low- participation schools. A difference of approximately the same magnitude is found when schools are categorized by black participation levels.

Extracurricular activities are more likely than classroom activities to meet the conditions which Allport (1954) and others have described as necessary for the establishment of favorable intergroup contact. Classroom activities are normally structured so as to maximize competition among students for limited rewards. Equal status contact is virtually precluded (there are a lim- ited number of A's and only one "best" student), as are cooperative rela- tions (cooperating reduces one's probability of "success"). Given this type of structure, students of different races are unlikely to share perceptions of "common interests and common humanity" (Allport, 1954, p. 267), nor are they likely to form close friendships. Extracurricular activities, on the other hand, do not have such a zero-sum character. There can be as many different kinds of activities as there are student interests, and even when the activity is essentially competitive (e.g., athletics), team members are mutually inter- dependent. Bound by common interests, and cooperating in the pursuit of common goals, students of different races are more likely to become close

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friends than to remain strangers or casual acquaintances. 4 In sum, extracur- ricular activities are based on principles which promote favorable interracial contact.

A commitment to the extracurriculum is also an indication to students that achievement and success are not exclusively classroom activities. With- out these other forms of achievement, the school winds up teaching most students how to fail rather than how to succeed. Extracurricular activities provide a tension release-a way of blowing off steam which may be espe- cially critical for the many students who are not academically gifted. For those who are academically successful, extracurricular involvement provides an additional reason to feel good about oneself and one's school. If the "al- ternative route to success" argument is correct, we would expect to find par- ticipation associated with personal outcomes such as self-esteem and with more favorable (or at least, less negative) attitudes toward school.

Table 1 shows that blacks and whites in high-participation schools have more students who have high self-esteem and fewer who say they are un- happy. Students in high-participation schools tend also to give more favorable responses on school attitude scales (lines 5 and 6). When black participation is high, 50 percent of the black respondents score high on the "like school" scale, an 8 percent increase over schools with low black participation. The same pattern occurs for white students when white participation is high. In high-participation schools, greater proportions of blacks and whites de- scribe school rules as equitable.

Finally, extracurricular activities not only serve to create bonds among students, but also provide attachments between students and teachers and between the school and parents. The stronger the students' attachment to the school, the more willing they are to have their parents visit the school to watch the school "perform" (line 7). This increases chances of staff-parent contact. In addition, high-participation schools provide more opportunities for teachers and students to talk in nonthreatening situations (line 8). This of course provides opportunities for teachers to counsel students.

The differences in the table are usually not large, but from a cost-benefit view they are important. Increasing extracurricular activities does not require a massive investment in additional personnel or in retraining staff. It mainly means putting a higher priority on, and paying more attention to, something the school is already doing. (It also means eliminating segregation in activities -getting rid of sororityqike "service clubs," adding activities which will attract the school's minority group, etc.) Crain, Mahard, and Narot (in press) make a number of specific recommendations about how to do this. But what- ever techniques are used, the most important step is the first one: The school administration must decide that the extracurricular program is not a "frill," but a key element of a successful school.

NOTES

1. The study is described in detail in Crain, Mallard, and Narot (in press). 2. For example, high-participation schools are more likely to be small and rural and to

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have low-income students. These schools are also more likely to hold traditional academic values, which include emphasis on extracurricular activities, and their stu- dents are not especially predisposed to leadership roles.

3. The table summarizes 16 regression equations, but instead of presenting the regres- sion coefficients as is the usual practice, we have used the unstandardized coefficients to estimate, for example, the percentages of white students who have a high amount of contact with blacks in a school which is in the bottom fifth in terms of white participation rate but at the mean on the control variables (black and white SES, percent white, size, eotmty urbanism and educational attainment, region). The esti- mates are simply the expected values computed by substituting these values, We then compare this to the predicted percentage for a school in the top fifth in participation. The dependent variables which are scaled are standardized so that they have means and standard deviations equal to the percentage distr~ution of single items,

4. The reader should notice that in this discussion we are committing the "ecological fallacy" (Robinson, 1950) of inferring an individualqevel correlation from groupqevel data. We have found that schools with more extracurricular activities have more i,_ter- racial contact; but in this paragraph we go a step further and assume that it is the in- dividual students involved in sports and clubs who are more in contact with the oppo- site race; this is not necessarily the case.

R E F E R E N C E S

Al lpor t , G. The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1954. Crain, R. L., Mahard , R. E., & Naro t , R. E. Making Desegregation Work: How

Schools Create Social Climates ( in press). F o r e h a n d , G., &Ragos ta , M. A Handbook for Integrated Schooling. Prince-

t on , N.J.: E d u c a t i o n a l Tes t ing Service, 1976. R o b i n s o n , W. S. Ecological co r re l a t ions and the behav io r o f individuals .

AmericanSociologlcal Review, 1950 , 15, 351-357.