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Various sets of actors in an urban desegregated high school are found to use a rhetoric of concern in discussing events in the school and the operation of the school. This rhetoric is based upon the accepted understanding that schools do “what's best for kids.” Since the rhetoric appeals to diverse segments of the Pawnee community, it enables school officials to manage the conflicting demands of maintaining control and gaining the confidence of the community. The rhetoric of concern allows school people to talk about control in ways that build trust. Although this kind of language is useful in gaining a consensus, it is dysfunctional for dealing with the persistent problems of race relations in this desegregated high school.

Researchers in the area of desegregation have become increasingly sophisticated in approaching the study of race relations among students in a multiracial setting. However, this increased sophistication seems to enable us to ask different questions, not necessarily to answer the old ones. Caught in the fundamental rift between research and policy making, educational researchers may appear to be dodging the hard questions. This is especially a problem when we address the issue of the benefits of school desegregation to whites, t In effect, researchers may seem to be avoiding answering certain questions by suggesting others.The core of the problem centers around the issue of '`benefits." We act as if there is general agreement on the extension of this term in our ordinary language, even though a casual analysis of the content implied reveals a considerable variety of meanings. There are at least three distinct questions that can be asked about the operations of a school: What's good for students? What's good for the schools? And what's good?Perhaps the most frequently asked question when an instructional or educational innovation is considered is, What's good for students? For many observers of public education, the individual student represents the "bottom line" in the educational process, and achievement test scores are the single most important indicator of that student's performance in school. When all is said and done, if a program change does not improve achievement, it is of questionable validity. Critics of school desegregation refer to data suggesting that the racial mixing of students in public schools has not measurably improved achievement and, in some cases, has caused achievement to decline. Following a quasi.medical model, these observers argue that the program must be halted before more damage is done. To the extent that an educator is concerned with students as individuals, this argument seems to present a formidable barrier to the implementation and acceptance of school desegregation. However, we believe that examining what seems to be individual-level data puts the question of benefits badly.There seems to us to be two problems in using achievement data to determine whether school desegregation is "good for kids.'" First, as recent research Findings indicate (Madaus, Kellaghan, Rakow, and King, 1979), the particular measure of student achievement adopted as criterion influences the direction of the findings. Specifically, global measures of achievement are poorer measures of impact era particular program than instruments tailoreclThe Urban Review VoL 13, No. 4, 1981

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Current social science methods are inadequate in dealing with nonquantitative findings. It has proved difficult to devise questionnaires and surveys that avoid ambiguity in measuring items dealing with qualitative concerns, i.e. values, attitudes and subjective understandings of experiences. Alternative research methods such as interviews, participant observation and interpretations of descriptive studies provide data on these qualitative concerns, but such data is difficult to compare and collect in a systematic manner. Content analysis, the critical analysis of verbal statements, can be a useful technique in qualitative investigation. In a case study of an Anglican parish near London, September, 1967, content analysis was used to evaluate the attitude of parishioners and those outside the church concerning the reality of the church as a religious community.