This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 15th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Once upon a time, it was believed that racial segregation was almost purely a result of private action,

redlining by banks, exclusionary covenants, and the like.

Richard Rothstein in his book The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of how our government segregated

America details this separation at exclusion of

black Americans housing through explicit government policies from

federal to local governments. We spoke last May. What brought you to this

specific topic?

For many years I'd been working on issues of school achievement gaps between African American and white children and writing about the social and economic

conditions that cause low achievement.

Things like poor health, African Americans have asthma at four times the rate of white children.

And if children have asthma, they're more likely to come to school drowsy or perhaps be absent because they've been up all night.

And when you get a child like that, they're going to achieve at a lower level than children

who earn school regularly.

And if you have two groups of children who are equal in every respect,

except one group has a higher absenteeism rate or a higher drowsiness rate than the other group, that first group is going to have lower average achievement.

Okay, so how does housing contribute to that problem?

Well, when you take children like that who have a variety of social and economic conditions

that impede their achievement, whether it's poor health or low parental education or other

conditions, and you concentrate them in single schools.

It becomes virtually impossible to conceive of how those schools could achieve

...