School Desegregation and School Decision-Making

IN MANY WAYS THE school desegregation issue is an ideal -L context in which to examine the general question of how school systems make policy decisions. First, it is an issue of some importance, so that the decision-making process uncovered can be assumed to be a nontrivial one. Second, it is a relatively new issue, so that the system can make decisions without much reference to traditional decision-making rules; this means that the social scientist need not be greatly concerned with the impact of prior historical accidents. Finally, the issue has arisen in nearly every large city with only minor differences among cities in the way in which it has been raised and with such idiosyncratic factors as the taxing power of the system being of minor importance. This means that the setting is almost ideal for comparative analysis. This paper principally discusses some of the conclusions of a comparative study of integration in eight northern large city school systems carried out by the National Opinion Research Center in 1965.1 Data were gathered by teams of graduate students who