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History > 2016 > USA > Education (I)
The Secret
to School Integration
FEB. 23, 2016
The New York
Times
The Opinion
Pages
Op-Ed Contributors
By HALLEY
POTTER
and KIMBERLY
QUICK
BY most
measures, America’s public schools are now more racially and socioeconomically
segregated than they have been for decades.
In the Northeast, 51.4 percent of black students attend schools where 90 percent
to 100 percent of their classmates are racial minorities, up from 42.7 percent
in 1968. In the country’s 100 largest school districts, economic segregation
rose roughly 30 percent from 1991 to 2010.
In some ways, it’s as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened. Increasing
residential segregation and a string of unfavorable court cases are partly to
blame. But too many local school officials are loath to admit the role that
their enrollment policies play in perpetuating de facto segregation.
While Mayor Bill de Blasio has supported several recent grass-roots efforts to
integrate individual schools in New York City, district officials have avoided
taking a stand on school integration amid controversy. Carmen Fariña, the
schools chancellor, recently declined to support parent proposals to merge
attendance zones for two highly segregated schools just nine blocks apart on
Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She instead placed the responsibility for
integration on individual parents. “Parents make choices,” she said.
In Seattle, in 2008, the superintendent and school board also cited residential
segregation as the reason for not making integration a priority. “It’s not my
job to desegregate the city,” the chairwoman of the school board explained to
The Seattle Times.
In Florida, the Pinellas County school board voted to tie school zones more
strictly to residential patterns, moving thousands of formerly integrated black
students into underperforming schools. One of the board members called the
problem “a nationwide thing, not just us.”
School leaders need to stop making excuses for segregation. Diverse classrooms
reduce racial bias and promote complex reasoning, problem solving and creativity
for all students. Five decades of research confirm that students in
socioeconomically and racially diverse schools have higher test scores, are more
likely to enroll in college, and are less likely to drop out, on average, than
peers in schools with concentrated poverty. Low-income students’ achievement
improves in integrated schools, and contrary to many parental concerns,
middle-class students’ achievement does not suffer.
The structural and political challenges to integration are substantial, but
viable options are still within reach for nearly any community that makes
integration a priority. Take socioeconomic integration. According to our
research, more than 90 school districts and charter schools in 32 states are
using socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment.
These districts and charters enroll more than four million students. Because
socioeconomic and racial segregation so often overlap — even as black and Latino
families are more likely to live in persistent, unstable poverty — these
strategies are a necessary step toward preventing racial marginalization from
persisting in schoolhouses.
In Champaign, Ill., for example, families rank their top choices from among all
schools in the district, and students are assigned based on an algorithm to
ensure socioeconomic diversity. Under this system, 80 percent to 90 percent of
families typically receive their first choice.
In Rhode Island, a mayor from affluent Cumberland led the passage of legislation
to create regionally integrated charter schools that would draw students from
rich suburbs and struggling cities together in the same classrooms.
In Louisville, Ky., where racial integration plans were struck down by the
Supreme Court in 2007, school officials, parents and students rallied to create
a new integration plan that includes measures like family income and educational
attainment alongside neighborhood-level racial factors to ensure that their
schools did not resegregate.
Political
backlash is inevitable. But when interests collide, courageous leaders must
recognize that integration is worth the work.
In 2010, Somali parents and the superintendent in the majority-white Minneapolis
suburb of Eden Prairie led efforts to redraw elementary school boundaries to
integrate the schools. Despite fierce protests by some white families, the
boundaries were redrawn. Six years later, the elementary schools are not only
more socioeconomically and racially integrated, but they are producing higher
test scores.
School integration has found its way into the presidential campaign. In a speech
this month in Harlem, Hillary Clinton lamented the “dangerous slide towards
resegregation in our schools.” The push for integration is also poised to make
the leap from politics into policy.
The budget request President Obama released this month includes $120 million to
support integration efforts led by districts, more than double current funding.
John King, the acting secretary of education, has deemed school integration a
national priority, calling the opportunity to attend strong, socioeconomically
diverse schools “one of the best things we can do for all children.”
With this work underway, at least partly, in 32 states, there may well be hope
for a new wave of school integration.
Halley Potter
is a fellow and Kimberly Quick is a policy associate at the Century Foundation.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 23, 2016, on page A27 of
the New York edition
with the headline:
The Secret to School Integration.
The Secret to
School Integration,
NYT,
FEB. 23, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/
opinion/the-secret-to-school-integration.html
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