Vernon Haubrich was a professor of educational policy at the University of Wisconsin and a member of the Institute for Research on Poverty. During the 1960s his research focused on the educational problems of the disadvantaged. In 1967 Haubrich received a $162,148 federal grant from the U.S. Office of Education to examine the effect of desegregation in public elementary schools and to identify the factors which contributed to successful school integration. This research was prompted in part by a 1967 U.S. Office of Education report Equality of Educational Opportunity (the Coleman Report) which stressed the importance of examination of the factors which most influenced school performance in an integrated setting.
To accomplish this goal Haubrich proposed to study more cities than had been investigated for the Coleman report. In addition he proposed to follow his schools over a longer period. After originally selecting ten cities, Haubrich focused on seven communities, three in the north, three in the south, and one in the middle border region. He then identified several categories of integrated elementary schools in each city (one, two, or three years of experience with desegregation) and established as his control those schools in which both groups had gone to school together as a matter of course because of neighborhood proximity. Average schools with students from working class, lower class, and middle class backgrounds were selected for the research. For purposes of the study Haubrich defined successfully integrated schools as those schools in which reading levels or achievement levels remained the same or improved.
Research began in November 1968 with teachers, principals, and other school personnel completing written questionnaires of several kinds. In addition oral interviews were also conducted in order to collect more descriptive data for comparison. To examine how teacher perceptions of the students contributed to student performance, Haubrich collected data on teacher authoritarianism or egalitarianism. In addition students were given the Otis Lemmon test as a measure of IQ as well as being interviewed. Children in three communities were retested to document changes over time.
During the course of the study it was noticed that the younger children did not respond to the written questionnaires concerning multi-racial situations. In 1968 Haubrich's team (Ann Clark of the University's Center on Mental Retardation and Roy Mumme, a professor of education and an artist at the University of Southern Florida-Tampa) devised the Wisconsin Cartoon Test (WISCAR) which depicted Black and White students and teachers in various situations. The children were then questioned about the cartoons. The researchers found that this innovative study technique enabled the young children to better express feelings of racial awareness, social distance, and perception of authority.
In 1972 Haubrich published his final report A Comparative and Development Study of the Effects of Desegregation in Selected Public Schools. Findings with regard to social class, region, and race as factors in student achievement-IQ levels were similar to those of other major studies. The study concluded that a teacher's egalitarian attitude had a strong positive impact on student learning and IQ levels. Conclusions of the WISCAR test supported earlier research on the topic, finding that the race of the teacher and the racial composition of the classroom had a strong effect on children. Analysis of the descriptive data suggested that the attitudes of the school board, superintendents, and principals had a strong effect on the process of desegregation. Somewhat unrelated to its racial purposes the study discovered that teachers could not accurately predict the abilities of their students, although students were relatively accurate in estimating their own abilities.
The desegregation study ended in 1972 when Haubrich was unable to obtain additional funding in order to follow his representative schools over a longer period of time.
