The standard work is The Bell Curve. They studied many thousands of Americans of every race and subculture. They found that the only significant predictor of earned income was IQ. Race, location, parental income, and so forth did not matter (on average). College attendance in particular had little affect on income, it just determined whether the career was in an intellectual-style field.
The school bussing and integration programs were tried starting in the 1960s. No benefits ever materialized, such as improved test scores, imprisonment rates, cumulative earned income by age 30, or any other standard psychology metric.
Yet the programs were continued. Clearly the purpose in continuing them had nothing to do with "disadvantaged" students, because nothing changed for them. The only explanation remaining is that the real purpose was what was being done to the non-disadvantaged students. Their schools were being filled with yahoos to knock down their potential for achievement.
You could dismiss my claim as raving racism except for one thing: you know that at the same time they also introduced word-shape memorization reading instead of phonetics, New Math, eliminated practice drills, and so forth. They really did want to knock down intellectual achievement. School integration fits very nicely into those plans.
You wrote "The standard work is The Bell Curve" and that tells us that you haven't been reading on the subject since 1994, because The Bell Curve has long since been supplanted as a source on the subject. (It was decried as stupid by anyone who knew genetics from the moment it was published.) More recent sources on the issues of income, race, IQ, and related issues can be found in the publications of Eric Turkheimer, recent president of the Behavior Genetics Association, most of which he kindly shares as free full text on his faculty website.
Note particularly his recent co-authored publication
Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. American Psychologist, 67, 503-504.
that directly disagrees with The Bell Curve on several points and yet was published in a leading journal for professional psychologists.
Many, many other researchers have gone beyond the amateur level of research published in the popular book The Bell Curve to grapple with the issues that book brought up and refute it. A good bibliopraphy on the general subject can be found in Wikipedia userspace at
The school bussing and integration programs were tried starting in the 1960s. No benefits ever materialized, such as improved test scores, imprisonment rates, cumulative earned income by age 30, or any other standard psychology metric.
Yet the programs were continued. Clearly the purpose in continuing them had nothing to do with "disadvantaged" students, because nothing changed for them. The only explanation remaining is that the real purpose was what was being done to the non-disadvantaged students. Their schools were being filled with yahoos to knock down their potential for achievement.
You could dismiss my claim as raving racism except for one thing: you know that at the same time they also introduced word-shape memorization reading instead of phonetics, New Math, eliminated practice drills, and so forth. They really did want to knock down intellectual achievement. School integration fits very nicely into those plans.