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.

Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality

The high level of poverty among children, together with many housing policies and practices which excludes poor people from most communities, mean that students in inner city schools face isolation not only from the white community but also from middle class schools. Minority children are far more likely than whites to grow up in persistent poverty. Since few whites have direct experience with concentrated poverty schools, it is very important to examine research about its effects.

Looking To The Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration

With the history, statistics, and research as context, we then turn to the practical question of what you can do to promote integration in the schools in your own community. To give you a sense of how other school systems have effectively tackled the problem, we begin this part of the manual with short descriptions of various hypothetical integrative student assignment strategies. We then review and discuss the legal considerations at work when school districts elect to pursue these kinds of voluntary methods of achieving racial and ethnic diversity. Finally, we conclude with some suggestions for concrete steps that you can take to make a difference by encouraging the public schools in your community to promote racial integration and implement policies and practices that foster positive, integrated learning environments for all students.

Racial Segregation and Educational Outcomes in Metropolitan Boston

Boston’s disastrous failure to achieve peaceful desegregation of its schools three decades ago, particularly the mob violence at South Boston High School, and the transition of the Boston schools to overwhelmingly white enrollment, are commonly seen as areas why the region need not think about patterns of school segregation--nothing can be done about it. This thinking ignores the better experiences of many other cities and also the METCO program that is intact and still in high demand.

Does NCLB Provide Good Choices for Students in Low-Performing Schools?

We examine the number of students who requested transfers and were offered the opportunity to move to a different school; explore the actual schooling options available to students attending schools that were required to offer choice; and analyze the constraints districts faced in complying with the regulations governing the NCLB transfer option

Large Mandates and Limited Resources: State Response to the No Child Left Behind Act and Implications for Accountability

We pay particular attention to the knowledge base and existence of suitable interventions for improving performance in low-performing schools that would allow state administrators to do what the law requires since the history of state failures on a much smaller scale make it difficult to understand how the states could meet these challenges and raise concern about the resulting policies and practices for minority schools and districts.

Appearance and Reality in the Sunshine State: The Talented 20 Program in Florida

After a review of Florida state and institutional data and interviews with staff at five campuses of the Florida State University System and several Florida state agencies, this report describes the history, implementation, and effects of the Talented 20 Program. The report concludes that Talented 20 Plan is, in fact, not race-neutral and is not an effective alternative to race-conscious affirmative action.

A Multiracial Society With Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?

Today, our nation’s public schools are becoming steadily more nonwhite, as the minority student enrollment approaches 40% of all U.S. public school students, almost twice the share of minority school students during the 1960s. Almost half of all public school students in the West and the South are minority students. The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the l950s to the late l980s, has now receded to levels not seen in three decades. Black students are experiencing the most rapid resegregation in the south, triggered by Supreme Court decisions in the 1990’s, and have now lost all progress recorded since the 1960’s.