There's been a lot of debate recently about the degree to which the feds can coerce states or school districts to do things they don't want to do (see here, here, and here, for example). Now there's some new empirical evidence that addresses the question. "Paying for Progress: Conditional Grants and the Desegregation of Southern Schools," written by Fordham Scholar Nora Gordon and her colleagues Elizabeth Cascio, Ethan Lewis, and Sarah Reber, goes back to the desegregation battles of the 1960s and finds, in essence, that the threat of withdrawing federal largesse can motivate districts to change policies...Read it here.
