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.

Expanding Student Opportunities: Prime 6 Program Review, Clark County School District, Las Vegas, Nevada

The following report shows the trends in enrollment, the patterns of choice by students of different races and income, enrollment patterns of the various schools, and test scores of students enrolled in different schools in Clark County's Prime 6 program. The report shows relationships that are troubling and offers recommendations for improvement.

Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge

The election of Barack Obama is a breakthrough that would have been unimaginable a half century ago and a triumph of the long movement for racial justice. But a new report from the Civil Rights Project, Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge, points out that it would be wrong to assume that our nation has now realized Dr. King's dream and created a society where race no longer matters. In fact, the report concludes the opposite: the U.S. continues to move backward toward increasing minority segregation in highly unequal schools; the job situation remains especially bleak for American blacks, and Latinos have a college completion rate that is shockingly low. At the same time, very little is being done to address large scale challenges such as continuing discrimination in the housing and home finance markets, among other differences across racial lines.

Twenty-First Century Color Lines: Multiracial Change in Contemporary America

Twenty-First Century Color Lines offers a wide variety of new perspectives about moving from the traditional racial issues of the U.S. toward an understanding of a vastly more complex multiracial setting.

The Forgotten Choice? Rethinking Magnet Schools in a Changing Landscape

Historically, magnet schools have been an important part of school districts' efforts to improve equity and quality in our nation's schools and enroll twice as many students as charter schools. But as charters – created without fundamental civil rights considerations - have become a central focus of school choice proponents, federal funds for magnet schools have been frozen. A new report, The Forgotten Choice? Rethinking Magnet Schools in a Changing Landscape, looks at the policy effects of neglecting magnet schools.

Still Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration

Honoring the nation's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, The CRP/PDC and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) release Still Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration; A Manual for Parents, Educators and Advocates. This Second Edition of The Manual provides valuable guidance and information about how communities and school districts can promote racial diversity and address racial isolation in schools nationwide

Are Teachers Prepared for Racially Changing Schools?

Honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., this new study, part of the Initiative on School Integration, recently created by the CRP/PDC after the Supreme Court’s June 2007 decisions limited voluntary integration in our nation's schools. This report reveals the challenges for teachers and school leaders as they face many different kinds of situations with regard to race, ethnicity and class.

The Last Have Become First: Rural and Small Town America Lead the Way on Desegregation

Back in the early l960s when there were civil rights struggles across the South in large cities, small towns and rural areas, it would have been shocking to suggest that rural areas would become beacons of interracial education while the great urban centers of the Northeast would have vastly more segregated schools, often only a few percentage points from total apartheid. Southern leaders at the time such as Alabama Governor George Wallace and Mississippi Senator John Stennis often predicted that that the North would never desegregate, attacking what he called Northern hypocrisy. The statistics we present in this report shows that such a pattern has clearly developed, though caused in a way they never suspected--driven by a Supreme Court that first limited and then rolled back desegregation efforts to the point where desegregated schools tend to be in areas without large areas of residential segregation. Policies and legal requirements for desegregation in urban schools have now been largely nullified by court decisions but those that desegregated the rural and small town South remain in effect.