The Race to Respond to School Segregation
If you are a black or Latino child attending an American public school today, chances are greater than 50 percent that the vast majority of your classmates are minorities too.
In response to concerns over the ongoing spread of segregation in schools, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education released new K-12 and higher education guidelines to explain how race may legally be taken into account when making decisions about student assignments and admissions.
In a nutshell, the K-12 guidelines describe how districts can voluntarily use “race-neutral” approaches such as socioeconomic statistics, parental education levels, and neighborhood housing information to draw attendance zones and make admissions decisions.
If that approach fails, districts can apply “generalized race-based approaches” that consider racial compositions of neighborhoods when drawing school boundaries as long as individual students aren’t treated differently because of their race.
Finally, as a last resort, districts can look at the race of individual students if it’s done in a way that is “narrowly tailored to meet a compelling interest,” including achieving diversity or avoiding racial isolation.
John C. Brittain is a tenured professor at the University of the District of Columbia’s School of Law and an active leader in the National Coalition on School Diversity who participated in several landmark school desegregation cases. In a recent interview with TakePart, Brittain praised the federal guidelines, calling them “a positive step forward in reversing the old Bush policy that both misinterpreted the Parents Involved in Community Schools case, and was grossly misleading to education authorities and to school integration advocates.
“I think the policy provides clarity on how school authorities and school integration advocates may permissively use race to achieve the benefits of school integration,” he said.
Despite getting the green light from the Obama administration, race-conscious student assignment plans remain controversial. For instance, nine African-American students sued a Pennsylvania school district for considering neighborhood racial demographics when reassigning kids to different high schools. The students’ families alleged that the district’s plans violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause. Their argument didn’t hold up in court and the district won the case.
According to Brittain, those who criticize race-conscious assignment policies on constitutional grounds “inaccurately interpret the Supreme Court decision that is the driving source of authority on this question.”
“I think the social science literature has well-documented the advantages of school integration in education,” he added. “Racial and ethnic diversity benefits both children of color as well as non-minorities particularly in their aspirations, in minimizing negative biases and prejudices, and promoting comfort in interactivity among groups of people for different races as they go on from school into their professional life. Those who ignore data and research are turning a blind eye to empirical information.”
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: RACE OR CLASS?
Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation who’s been called “the nation’s chief proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions.”
Kahlenberg shared with TakePart that although race-based affirmative action programs remain controversial at the college level, class-based initiatives are an easier-to-swallow alternative for promoting diversity on campus.
“Polls find that Americans oppose racial preferences by roughly 2:1, but favor preferences for low-income students of all races by 2:1,” he noted.
Those who ignore data and research are turning a blind eye to empirical information.
When asked to explain why, Kahlenberg suggested that “the stronger support for class-based affirmative action may be related to the social science research finding that today socioeconomic obstacles are seven times as significant as racial obstacles.”
He applauded the new federal guidelines on race-conscious college admissions, the first four of which emphasize using race-neutral approaches such as considering socioeconomic disadvantage.
“Having a racial mix of students is highly desirable,” he concluded, “but having an economic mix offers additional educational benefits as well.”
INTEGRATION IN ACTION
DSST Public Schools is a growing network of charter schools currently serving over 1,500 students in Denver. Known as one of the leading open-enrollment STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) schools in the U.S., DSST Public Schools take pride in their commitment to integration.
To find out how these schools attract and maintain a racially and economically diverse student body, TakePart contacted their CEO Bill Kurtz. He shared that three strategies come into play:
1. ”We create outstanding schools that all parents, regardless of their race, background, or income, look at and say: ‘That’s a great school for my child.’ We have families that are homeless that have kids at our schools, and we have families that pull their kids from the most elite private schools in town to be a part of our schools. We have a proven track record that says all kids, regardless of their race or background, have the opportunity to go to a four-year college.”
2. “We work really hard at making sure that all families have access to understanding the opportunity we present. We want to even the playing field, so we aggressively reach out to those communities.”
3. “We intentionally try to create enrollment preferences to ensure on some level that we get economic diversity. We can’t control for race, but we can control for economic diversity, and that unfortunately generally leads to ethnic diversity. ”
According to Kurtz, integrated schools are a win-win for all students, who not only receive excellent academic preparation for college, but acquire superior leadership and socialization skills as well.
In his words: “Kids are going to schools that are increasingly segregated where most of the students look like themselves, yet the society and country around them continues to become more and more diverse. That is hugely problematic. Schools are one of the most formative institutions in our society. The fabric of our country and economic growth will depend upon working in diverse situations. It’s critically important in this country that we figure out a way to create institutions that integrate people in communities and in schools such that the power of diversity can be unleashed as opposed to being a fragmenting force that so often it is.”
Despite the well-documented benefits of integrating schools, America has a long way to go before the goal of ending segregation and racial isolation can be reached.
As Dr. Brittain concluded: “Fifty-eight years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, school integration is just as important today as it was then in our ever-increasing diverse society. But the opponents of school integration are also just as strong now as they were then.”
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