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.

Racial Reckoning and the Role of Schooling: Exploring the Potential of Integrated Classrooms and Liberatory Pedagogies

Schools have long existed as a means of maintaining democracy in the United States and, given the centrality of race relations to the success of democracy, this paper suggests that schools can be called upon to address racism as well. As such, this paper looks to our rapidly diversifying nation and asks: “What would it take to move closer to meaningfully addressing the legacy of racism in the United States, and what role might schools play in this process?”

The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity

This authoritative book examines the long-standing campaign that resulted in today’s school voucher policies.

Understanding Suburban School Segregation: Toward a Renewed Civil Rights Agenda

As shifting populations change suburban school enrollment, education policy trends formerly confined to urban districts have spread to suburban ones. Many suburban school districts have experienced growth in the charter school sector, as well as a rash of school closures. Suburban schools and districts reflect broader societal problems, paradigms, and possibilities. Yet, if our society is to advance equitable opportunity for all, children learning together in suburban schools must be part of the solution. In order to think clearly about what a renewed civil rights agenda entails given our complex and multiracial geography of inequality, we must understand the extent to which suburban school districts are segregated—and why. We also need to think deeply about policy responses to advance integration with equitable status for all children. This paper draws on federal enrollment data from the nation’s largest 25 metros from 2011-2020 to descriptively analyze suburban school enrollment and segregation at the school district-level, seeking to understand different district contexts and their relationship to student segregation.

NYC School Segregation Report Card: Still Last, Action Needed Now

Eight years ago, in 2014, The Civil Rights Project issued a report that raised awareness about the dire state of segregation in New York State and, in particular, New York City schools. That report spurred substantial activism, primarily led by student groups, parents, teachers, and administrators, which has been influential in the current integration efforts underway in NYC. This report serves as an update to the 2014 report, which analyzed data up to 2010. The analysis of recent data in this report reveals trends from 2010-2018 in school segregation at the state, city, borough, and community district level.

Dallas Diversity and Inclusion Study

The Civil Rights Project collaborated with the Southern Methodist University Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center (and with the Dallas Independent School District) to conduct a case study of several of the DISD schools that were created, expanded or restarted under district leadership, with the purpose of overcoming shrinking enrollment in the midst of the area's major housing development. Researchers studies a transformation, an innovation and a dual-language program to understand how these schools operate, how effective they are in attracting a diversity of students and what kinds of challenges the schools face.

Black Segregation Matters: School Resegregation and Black Educational Opportunity

This report shows that the segregation of Black students has increased in almost every region of the nation, and that Black students in many of nation’s largest school districts have little access to or interaction with White, Asian or middle-class students. The report documents substantial Black enrollment in suburban schools, but high levels of segregation in them. Several of the nation’s largest states, including California, New York and Texas, are among the nation’s most segregated in terms of exposure of Black students to their White counterparts. The study details how the national student population is changing and examines the basic patterns of enrollment, segregation and integration across the U.S. The analysis includes enrollment and segregation trends for the past several decades, nationally, by region, community type, and poverty level, and showing the most and least segregated states along multiple measures.

Harming Our Common Future: America's Segregated Schools 65 Years after Brown

The publication of this report marks the 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. There have been many changes since the ruling, but intense levels of segregation—which had decreased markedly after 1954 for black students—are on the rise once again. White and Latino students are the most segregated groups.