The evidence for school integration

Public schools are increasingly segregated by race and income, with New York City public schools among the most segregated in the nation. The U.S. Supreme Court has created obstacles, but schools and communities are moving to change things.

Two new reports from the Century Foundation, a New York-based policy and research think tank, challenge common assumptions about school integration: that it doesn’t benefit white or higher-income students; that nothing can be done because of entrenched housing patterns; and that parents don’t want it anyway.

“A growing body of research suggests that the benefits of K–12 school diversity indeed flow in all directions — to white and middle-class students as well as to minority and low-income pupils,” write Amy Stuart Wells, Lauren Fox and Diana Cordova-Cobo in the first of the two reports, “How Racially Diverse Schools and Classrooms Can Benefit All Students.”

If racial integration didn’t help everyone, Wells and her colleagues ask, why have the Ivy League colleges fought hard to keep race as a factor in admissions? Briefs filed in a 2015 Supreme Court case (Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin) by Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford and Yale universities assert that diverse campuses “increase the complexity with which students — especially white students — approach a given issue.”

Diversity can lead to rougher group interactions, wrote Katherine W. Phillips, a Columbia Business School professor, in the October 2014 Scientific American, but it enhances creativity, encourages the search for new information and leads to better decision-making.

The test-score fixation

The same conviction has been slower to reach the K–12 world, but there is mounting evidence for its importance, Wells and her co-authors write. Educators know that racial achievement gaps in K–12 were at their narrowest during the peak years of school desegregation in the 1980s. Starting in the 1990s, when test-based accountability policies replaced desegregation efforts, the gaps widened again.

Defining achievement by test scores alone frames the integration effort as a sacrifice for white and Asian families and forces teachers in “low-achieving” schools serving children of color to fixate on test scores. This narrows students’ experiences, the Century authors write; “it also perpetuates and even legitimizes a far-from-colorblind process of racial segregation.”

The U.S. Supreme Court all but slammed the door on K–12 integration in 2007, when it shot down the use of race in student assignments in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington. But some school districts have not given up, using income as a rough proxy for race. They see growing income gaps, residential segregation and schools with concentrated poverty as bad for everyone, and they are making efforts to address it.

Hartford, Conn., is using an innovative cross-district magnet program. Hartford magnet schools draw middle-class (and mostly white) suburban students with themed programs or an academic focus, while the surrounding suburbs use magnet schools to attract low-income children (mostly of color) from the city. By 2013, the gaps in reading and math scores between black and white students; Hispanic and white students; and low-income and wealthier students were 10 to 15 percentage points narrower in the cross-magnet schools than in the state overall. By 10th grade, the gap between poor and wealthier students in the magnet programs had shrunk to just 5 points in reading, compared with 28 points in the state overall.

What school communities are doing

Harford’s experiment is part of a surge of integration efforts chronicled in the second Century report, “A New Wave of School Integration,” by Halley Potter and Kimberly Quick. Ninety-one U.S. school districts today deliberately mix affluent and less-advantaged students, up from just two nationwide in 1996, Potter and her co-authors found, accounting for about 8 percent of K–12 public school enrollment.

The new integration strategies include modifying attendance zones; instituting district choice programs; magnet school programs like Hartford’s that extend across districts; charter admissions lotteries that consider socioeconomic status; and student transfers.

In New York City, the Department of Education recently used the attendance-zone approach to help integrate schools on the borders of Brooklyn’s Districts 13 and 15. It has used a mix of choice and other strategies in Districts 1 and 6 in Manhattan and District 17 in Brooklyn.

In November, the DOE allowed seven schools to reserve slots for children from low-income or non-English-speaking families. Educators at the seven schools have welcomed the program as a tool to fight the negative impact of gentrification in their areas.

Educators at some of those schools are already working on the second phase of this effort: replacing a test-focused curriculum with one that draws out a wider array of student strengths and interests. These integration efforts have the support of many millennial parents, who put a high premium on diverse schools, Wells and her colleagues write.

Attitudes have shifted. When a school desegregation plan was first proposed in the 1970s, 98 percent of Louisville, Kentucky, residents opposed it. But after the 2007 Supreme Court ruling, when Louisville found an approach using economic integration, 89 percent of parents supported it.

We are in changing times. Getting along has become not just the right thing to do. It is a matter of economic and cultural survival.

| APRIL 7, 2016 NEW YORK TEACHER