January 29, 2002

The Impact of Racial and Ethnic Diversity
on Educational Outcomes: Cambridge, MA School District

By Michal Kurlaender and John T. Yun

Introduction

Cambridge public schools are extremely diverse and have been significantly integrated for many years. This city with a population of more than 100,000 has only a single high school, so the entire diversity of the city is present in this one school. As the nation’s public school districts are being forced by court decisions to consider the future of integration in their communities, it is appropriate to ask students who have experienced desegregated schooling about its impacts. Although neighboring Boston has abandoned its desegregation efforts under pressure from conservative federal courts, the Cambridge School Committee decided in early 2002 to embrace a new strategy emphasizing socio-economic desegregation in an attempt to preserve racial and ethnic diversity in a time when policies based solely on race may be prohibited or strictly limited.

This is a study of Cambridge high school’s twelfth grade students’ experiences with racial and ethnic diversity. It is part of a series of studies by The Civil Rights Project across the country on what students in diverse and more segregated schools learn both in specific content areas and in preparation for adult life and work. Our findings are based on the Diversity Assessment Questionnaire (DAQ), a survey instrument developed with the help of leading experts on school desegregation research across the country. We administered the DAQ to 379 seniors in Cambridge last school year.¹ We have previously released results from metropolitan Louisville and will be issuing reports on districts across the country in the coming months.

Students responded to the survey anonymously and were assured that their teachers and school officials would not see it, so there was no pressure to give answers officials might want to hear. The Civil Rights Project made the survey available and prepared this study without cost to the Cambridge public and this report is totally independent of district control or direction. We commend the Cambridge school leaders for permitting an independent examination of important and very sensitive issues. The DAQ results indicate many positive attitudes about diverse educational experiences; in addition, these results also pointed to areas of possible future improvement.

The survey was administered to all high school seniors in Cambridge. It was administered during school and all seniors were required to complete it, so we have data that reflects the entire population of students finishing secondary education in the city. The survey includes 70 distinct items, which were created to test several distinct dimensions of experiences and attitudes (four of these dimensions are highlighted in this report).² Since our results on these grouped items were quite consistent, we have strong evidence that the data in this report represents the actual experiences of the responding seniors and that our findings are not simply byproducts of question wording. These responses reflect a broad and consistent pattern of responses.

School level desegregation, of course, does not guarantee the presence of a curriculum that recognizes diversity, fair treatment of all groups of students, or deep and positive interactions between different racial or ethnic groups—all important factors that contribute to positive educational outcomes associated with diversity. It does, however, create a situation within which such interactions may occur, depending on many factors within the school and among the groups of students. Although we have not studied all the factors that can maximize the benefits of diversity, we have examined a number of very important educational outcomes. In this memo we provide basic responses, by race, to a number of questions from the survey.³ Four distinct areas are explored, (1) student learning and peer interaction; (2) citizenship and democratic principles; (3) future educational aspirations and goals; and (4) perceptions of support by the school. These areas are all well established as important goals of education, and build essential skills that students need in order to achieve academic and professional success, and to become responsible citizens. The district and the state government have already published extensive test score data on the high school.

Obviously since Cambridge has only one large high school for the entire city we cannot compare desegregated and segregated high schools within this district. Our studies of six other school districts do show important differences in attitudes as a function of schools’ racial composition. This study should be understood as providing information about the educational experiences of the city’s students in an interracial school and their convictions about the way those experiences have contributed to their education.

Results from the survey suggest positive educational impacts of diversity for students in the district. Overall, substantial majorities of students report a strong level of comfort with members of other racial and ethnic groups. Most importantly, students indicate that their school experiences have increased their level of understanding of diverse points of view, and enhanced their desire to interact with people of different backgrounds in the future. Students report that they have been strongly affected by their school experiences. Given that Cambridge is an area of great ethnic and racial diversity and that the population growth of metro Boston is now being driven by non-white immigration, these are important issues both for the future work experiences of students and for community life. The survey results also indicate some dimensions on which an otherwise strongly positive record might be improved.

We received surveys from 78% of the entire senior class. This excellent response rate means that the responses provide a good representation of the class. The students responding to the survey identified themselves as 31% White, 18% African American, 10% Latino, 14% reported they were "other", and 10% said they were multiracial. Only 4% of the respondents identified themselves as Asian. This group is so small that calculations involving Asian students should be treated with caution since the responses of a handful of students can produce a big change in the percentages.

Table 1: Distribution of Student Respondents to the Survey by Race and Ethnicity

[1] For the purpose of this memo we disaggregate the question responses by race. For this reason students who did not provide an answer to the racial/ethnic identification question (approximately 50 students) were omitted from the tables.
[2] On any given survey question between 11-13% of all students did not respond, these non-responses were not included in the calculations of these tables.
[3] The racial/ethnic categories that we use are all self-identified, that is the students choose how they wish to describe themselves from an established list. Our categories are: African American, Asian, Latino, White, Multi-racial, and Other. The survey specifies that students can indicate two categories. We created the Multi-racial category by collapsing all students who identified themselves as more than one race into the multi-racial category.

To view the COMPLETE REPORT and study conducted by The Civil Rights Project go to:

The Impact of Racial and Ethnic Diversity on Educational Outcomes: Cambridge, MA School District (in PDF Format)