Integration and Diversity
Research in this section explores the impacts and benefits of racial and ethnic diversity in education, as well as resegregation trends and remedies in our nation's public schools.
Related publication: The Integration Report - a monthly bulletin focusing on school integration throughout the nation
Recent Integration and Diversity Research
- Reviving Magnet Schools: Strengthening a Successful Choice Option
- This policy brief refocuses our attention on the longstanding magnet sector. It is issued during a time of complex political and legal circumstances and seeks to understand how a variety of factors—including the Parents Involved ruling and the transition to a U.S. Department of Education led by the Obama Administration—have influenced federally-funded magnet programs.
- Integrating Schools in a Changing Society: New Policies and Legal Options for a Multiracial Generation
- An up-to-the-moment look at available policy options for promoting school integration.
- Diversity and Educational Gains: a plan for a changing county and its schools
- In response to the Jefferson County, Kentucky, school board’s request, the authors prepared a plan that builds upon and extends the nationally respected Jefferson County Public School accomplishments in operating diverse schools for nearly four decades. The authors reviewed the existing plan, and proposed a new plan to make the district's desegregation plan more effective and efficient, paying particular attention to decreasing excessive transportation times for students.
- Integrating Suburban Schools: How to Benefit from Growing Diversity and Avoid Segregation
- This manual summarizes and consolidates important diversity and civil rights research for schools. It manual provides invaluable guidance for education stakeholders in suburban school districts — including school board members, parents, students, community activists, administrators, policymakers and attorneys — in promoting racially diverse, high-quality schools.
- Divided We Fail: Segregated and Unequal Schools in the Southland
- Southern California schools show profound segregation by race, poverty and language status, all of which are visibly related to disparities in educational opportunity and outcomes. This analysis provides the first comprehensive, region-wide study of enrollment and segregation patterns in the six-county Southern California region. It then addresses the question of why these trends matter: evaluating how segregation is related to graduation rates and college attendance, as well as the distribution of learning opportunities in Southern California.
- Experiencing Integration in Louisville: How Parents and Students See the Gains and Challenges
- In this first part of research assessing the new Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) student assignment plan, researchers surveyed samples of both parents and students across the county. Three years after the Supreme Court’s 2007 PICS decision ended Louisville's former plan, these surveys tried to get a sense of the community's experiences with school integration efforts after JCPS’s new student assignment plan was implemented in 2009.
- The School-to-Prison Pipeline
- In this comprehensive study of the relationship between American law and the school-to-prison pipeline, co-authors Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen, and Damon T. Hewitt analyze the current state of the law for each entry point on the pipeline and propose legal theories and remedies to challenge them. Using specific state-based examples and case studies, the authors assert that law can be an effective weapon in the struggle to reduce the number of children caught in the pipeline, address the devastating consequences of the pipeline on families and communities, and ensure that our public schools and juvenile justice system further the goals for which they were created: to provide meaningful, safe opportunities for all the nation’s children.