The Future Of School Integration

Almost fifty years ago the Coleman Report, widely regarded as the most important educational study of the twentieth century, found that the most powerful predictor of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of a child's family. The second most important predictor is the socioeconomic status of the classmates in his or her school. Until very recently, the importance of this second finding has been consciously ignored by policymakers, and the national education debate has centered on trying to "fix" high-poverty schools by pouring greater resources into them, paying educators more to teach in them, or turning them into charter schools. At the local level, however, eighty school districts educating four million students now consciously seek to integrate schools by socioeconomic status. The Future of School Integration looks at how socioeconomic school integration has been pursued as a strategy to reduce the proportion of high-poverty schools and therefore to improve the performance of students overall. It examines whether students learn more in socioeconomically integrated schools--and pre-K programs--than in high-poverty institutions and explores the costs and benefits of integration programs. The book also investigates whether such integration is logistically and politically feasible, looking at the promises and pitfalls of both intradistrict and interdistrict integration programs. Finally, it examines the relevance of socioeconomic integration strategies being pursued by states and localities to the ongoing policy debates in Washington over efforts to turn around the nation's lowest-performing schools and to improve the quality of charter schools. Contributors include Stephanie Aberger (Expeditionary Learning), Marco Basile (Harvard University), Jennifer Jellison Holme (University of Texas-Austin), Ann Mantil (Harvard), Anne G. Perkins, Jeanne L. Reid (Teachers College), Meredith P. Richards (University of Texas-Austin), Heather Schwartz (RAND), Kori J. Stroub (University of Texas-Austin), and Sheneka M. Williams (University of Georgia).

An acclaimed economist reveals that school integration efforts in the 1970s and 1980s were overwhelmingly successful -- and argues that we must renew our commitment to integration for the sake of all Americans We are frequently told that school integration was a social experiment doomed from the start. But as Rucker C. Johnson demonstrates in Children of the Dream, it was, in fact, a spectacular achievement. Drawing on longitudinal studies going back to the 1960s, he shows that students who attended integrated and well-funded schools were more successful in life than those who did not -- and this held true for children of all races. Yet as a society we have given up on integration. Since the high point of integration in 1988, we have regressed and segregation again prevails. Contending that integrated, well-funded schools are the primary engine of social mobility, Children of the Dream offers a radical new take on social policy. It is essential reading in our divided times.

The Pulitzer Prize winner presents a treasure chest of archival photographs that depict the historical events surrounding school desegregation.

More than 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision declared segregated schooling inherently unequal, this timely book sheds light on how and why U.S. schools are experiencing increasing segregation along racial, socioeconomic, and linguistic lines. It offers policy and programmatic alternatives for advancing equity and describes the implications for students and more broadly for the nation. The authors look at the structural and legal roots of inequity in the United States educational system and examine opportunities to support integration efforts across the educational pipeline (pre-k to higher education). School Integration Matters examines: The need to increase school integration to advance equity.The roots of persisting inequity in U.S. schools.Current practices that adversely affect historically marginalized groups.K–12 integration and bilingual education policy.The challenges and opportunities to advancing integration within higher education.Future directions and policy recommendations for pursuing integration for equity. “This is the book that reignites the civil rights movement for the 21st century, written and edited by a powerful new generation of civil rights scholars.” —Patricia Gandara, co-director, The Civil Rights Project, UCLA “This is visionary scholarship at its best and it moves far beyond the policy vacuum and the black-white paradigm to suggest workable solutions for a multiracial future. Educators and policy makers need this book.” —Gary Orfield, Co-Director, Civil Rights Project, UCLA Contributors: Martha Cecilia Bottia, Courtney D. Cogburn, Erica Frankenberg, Liliana M. Garces, Rachel Garver, Cynthia Gordon da Cruz, Mariela Gutierrez, Megan Hopkins, Michael Hilton, Daniel Kiel, Richard Lambert, Savannah Larimore, Rebecca Lowenhaupt, Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, P. Zitlali Morales, Lindsay Pérez Huber, Aria Razfar, Jeanne L. Reid, Matthew Patrick Shaw, Philip Tegeler, Hoang Vu Tran, Tina Trujillo, Brenda Pulido Villanueva

This book discusses desegregation as a community decision, focusing on case studies from the 1960s. Crain uses comparative techniques based on fifteen northern and southern cities. The author seeks a "total" explanation for the decision to desegregate by determining its proximate causes and locating the roots of the decision in the economic, social, and political structure of the community. This work represents the first attempt to conduct a genuinely scientific analysis of the political process by which school systems were desegregated in this period.Robert L. Crain documents the way in which eight non-southern, big-city school systems met community demands to reduce segregation. Reactions varied from immediate compliance to months and years of stubborn resistance, some cities maintaining good relations with civil rights leaders and others becoming battlegrounds. Differences in these reactions are explained and focus is brought to desegregation in the South New Orleans in particular. The situation there is contrasted with six peacefully desegregated southern cities as well as the attitude of its powerful economic elite. The concluding part of the book is a general consideration of the civil rights movement in the cities studied, and the author considers the implications of his findings, both for the future of school desegregation and for studies of community politics.Employing comparative techniques and concentrating upon the outputs of political systems, this is a highly innovative contribution to the study of community power structures and their relationship to educational systems. It remains an effective supplement to courses in sociology, political science, and education, as well as an important source of data for everyone concerned with the history of efforts for national integration.

Reducing residential segregation is the best way to reduce racial inequality in the United States. African American employment rates, earnings, test scores, even longevity all improve sharply as residential integration increases. Yet far too many participants in our policy and political conversations have come to believe that the battle to integrate America’s cities cannot be won. Richard Sander, Yana Kucheva, and Jonathan Zasloff write that the pessimism surrounding desegregation in housing arises from an inadequate understanding of how segregation has evolved and how policy interventions have already set many metropolitan areas on the path to integration. Scholars have debated for decades whether America’s fair housing laws are effective. Moving toward Integration provides the most definitive account to date of how those laws were shaped and implemented and why they had a much larger impact in some parts of the country than others. It uses fresh evidence and better analytic tools to show when factors like exclusionary zoning and income differences between blacks and whites pose substantial obstacles to broad integration, and when they do not. Through its interdisciplinary approach and use of rich new data sources, Moving toward Integration offers the first comprehensive analysis of American housing segregation. It explains why racial segregation has been resilient even in an increasingly diverse and tolerant society, and it demonstrates how public policy can align with demographic trends to achieve broad housing integration within a generation.

Despite its image as an epicenter of progressive social policy, New York City continues to have one of the nation's most segregated school systems. Tracing the quest for integration in education from the mid-1950s to the present, The Battle Nearer to Home follows the tireless efforts by educational activists to dismantle the deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities that segregation reinforces. The fight for integration has shifted significantly over time, not least in terms of the way "integration" is conceived, from transfers of students and redrawing school attendance zones, to more recent demands of community control of segregated schools. In all cases, the Board eventually pulled the plug in the face of resistance from more powerful stakeholders, and, starting in the 1970s, integration receded as a possible solution to educational inequality. In excavating the history of New York City school integration politics, in the halls of power and on the ground, Christopher Bonastia unearths the enduring white resistance to integration and the severe costs paid by Black and Latino students. This last decade has seen activists renew the fight for integration, but the war is still far from won.