Books: School Integration, Revisited

I'm not particularly interested in school integration as an end unto itself (or unreasonably hopeful that we're going to have integrated schools anytime soon), but the potential for school integration to help increase achievement levels is pretty compelling and findings like the ones released by the USDE about disproportionate treatment of black kids in urban school systems makes the topic all the more worth revisiting.

Tomorrow in Washington, a trio of institutions (TCF, Fordham, and Howard University) is hosting an event on the future of integration and the release of new work by the indefatigable Rick Kahlenberg showing that at least 80 school districts serving 4 million kids have adopted measures to promote integration that fall within current law. The event is Wednesday at noon, National Press Club. Contact events@tcf.org to RSVP.

Included among Kahlenberg's example will likely be some of the handful of mixed-income, heterogenous charter schools like DSST, Capitol City, and Community Roots that I've been spending time at since last year.  I visited Larchmont and Citizens of the World last week in LA. It's a complicated, difficult-to-pull-off approach, fraught with practical and political challenges (as well as some obvious advantages over the typical neighborhood school). I'm interested to see what Kahlenberg has to say.

Comments

[Agustavia]

This is a very important and extremely time sensitive area in education. For some reason when it comes to education children we have not quite conquered the idea of how to change disproportionate treatment of black kids in school. Its amazing how hard it is to leave bias out of education.