On Not Letting Facts Interfere With a Good Argument
Dear Diane,
It would be interesting to know what influenced the change of heart among those civil rights organizations, Diane. I've been exploring in my head—while I do my daily laps in the pond—what kind of data might persuade me to reverse my current educational convictions. What could convince me that I'm wrong?
Suppose someone could demonstrate to me that test scores would rise fastest if all schools served only a single "racial/ethnic/gender/economic" group? Suppose test scores suggested that the more segregated our lives were, the better our children's test scores?
I doubt this would be the case (see Anthony Bryk's Chicago study), but this is a thought experiment. Closing the test-score gap was not, actually, the central Supreme Court argument in the Brown v. Board of Educationdecision of 1954. But suppose one reheard the case—would we still reach the same
