文档介绍：PAYING FOR PROGRESS: CONDITIONAL GRANTS AND
THE DESEGREGATION OF SOUTHERN SCHOOLS∗
ELIZABETH CASCIO
NORA GORDON
ETHAN LEWIS
SARAH REBER
This paper examines how a large conditional grants program influenced school
desegregation in the American South. Exploiting newly collected archival data and
quasi-experimental variation in potential per-pupil federal grants, we show that
school districts with more at risk in 1966 were more likely to desegregate just
enough to receive their funds. Although the program did not raise the exposure of
blacks to whites like later court orders, districts with larger grants at risk in 1966
were less likely to be under court order through 1970, suggesting that tying federal
funds to nondiscrimination reduced the burden of desegregation on federal courts.
I. INTRODUCTION
Because the . Constitution reserves powers not explicitly
delegated to the federal government to the states, conditional
grants are key levers for federal policymakers seeking to affect
a broad range of state and local policies. States must implement
federally approved speed limits and drinking ages to receive high-
way funding; universities must provide gender parity in athletic
offerings to receive research funding; and states can lose funding
if they do ply with the Clean Air Act. More recently, states
and school districts have risked losing federal grants for failure
ply with the accountability requirements of the No Child
Left Behind Act. In this paper, we examine whether the threat
∗For their ments and questions, we are grateful to seminar
participants at Duke, etown, Northwestern, Stanford, UBC, UCD, UCI,
UCSD, UCR, the All-UC Labor Workshop, the University of Virginia, the NBER
Economics of Education and Development of the American Economy program
meetings, and the annual meetings of the AEA, SSHA, and SOLE. We would espe-
cially like to thank Patty Anderson, Sandra Black, Leah Platt Boustan, Ken Chay,
Julie Cullen, Jon Gur