Mixing high-status clients into a service population raises quality of service for everyone.

Evidence

One possibility is that public agencies will simply differentiate among highand low-status clients. But another is that service will improve for all if high-status clients are included in the population mix. As public-health care delivery becomes more and more generalized and less the concern oflow-income populations, it is more likely that clients will be able to have an impact on service quality. Likewise, parents of children in an integrated school can have a greater impact on the quality of service than can parents of a segregated school whose needs can be more easily isolated. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1370

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: ‘Does integration improve bureaucracies for the poor?’ — tracing whether desegregation of service populations raised service quality for low-status clients, using public-health and schooling cases.
• XREF: Parallels Schön and Rein’s framing contests and Mehta’s analysis of how group-targeted programs get isolated and starved.