> how did forced busing lead to inner-city gangs?

White students (the vast majority) targeted the black students, who then formed gangs to protect themselves. There is a good multi-decade ethnography of the effects of various changes in public policy and society on one particular high school here: https://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/067...

The high school is anonymized, but iirc it's somewhere in Syracuse, NY.

Note that (at least afaik) that's not directly where our modern national-scale gangs come from, although White flight and the collapse of cities surely did contribute there also.

> School integration creates gangs?

C.f. http://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/0674...

> Rucker estimates that each additional year of exposure to desegregated schools increased black men’s annual earnings by roughly 5 percent, increased their wages by 2.9 percent, and led to an annual work effort that was 39 hours higher.

Also, what exactly does that mean? E.g. a person going from an all black school to a school that's 90% white is going to have almost nothing in common with someone going from an all black school to a school that's still 90% black. I skimmed over the study, but I'm having trouble understanding how they are controlling for demographics and what they call the 'black-white exposure index'.

"I'm just guessing here, but I think it may be because American school systems are decentralized. They're controlled by the local school board, which consists of car dealers who were high school football players, instead of some national Ministry of Education run by PhDs."

The real difference is that most European and Asian countries use tracking ( http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/080622_paradox.htm ). Forcing all students onto the same curriculum makes no one better off. Less apt kids don't learn the skills that would actually be useful to them. The nerds have their courses dumbed down, and earn the hatred of the kids who receive poor grades.

Local school boards do not actually have that much control. Have you noticed how schools have nearly the same basic structure everywhere? Education PHD's have an enormous influence because they control the education schools. That influence has been almost entirely pernicious. Plus they have a lot of control over curriculum requirements that come down from the state and federal boards of education. Teachers unions have an enormous amount of power and are also a national organization.

One more under-reported factor is the Supreme Court decision in the 1970's that made school discipline much, much harder to enforce. Read "The World We Created at Hamiliton High" ( http://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/0674... ) to see the chaos that ensued as a result this "student rights" decision.