For those who've been reading my stuff about the benefits of school integration and remain unconvinced -- yes, I've read your comments and emails -- you should really check out Emily Bazelon's Times Magazine feature about the shift from racial to socioeconomic integration across the country. Bazelon cites the same research I've relied upon -- Amy Stuart Wells' findings (PDF) that low-income black children who grow up attending schools with significant numbers of middle class white kids are more likely to land higher-paying jobs after high school than their segregated peers -- in part because of increased exposure to the "white" social and professional mores employers are looking for. Bazelon writes:
There are, of course, determined urban educators who have proved that select schools filled with poor and minority students can thrive -- in the right circumstances, with the right teachers and programs. But consistently good education at schools with such student bodies remains the rare exception. The powerful effect of the socioeconomic makeup of a student body on academic achievement has become “one of the most consistent findings in research on education,” Gary Orfield, a U.C.L.A. education professor, and Susan Eaton, a research director at Harvard Law, wrote in their 1996 book, “Dismantling Desegregation.”
It's important not to overstate our case, though. In my hometown of Ossining, NY, whose almost-textbook racial and socioeconomic integration I've written about, the numbers show that while integration has many tangible social benefits for children, academic benefits are more difficult to come by. In Ossining, about half of all black and Latino boys drop out of high school. (Those numbers are typical across the country.) Meanwhile, the parents of upper-middle class "gifted and talented" kids worry their children aren't being challenged unless they are in tracked classes, which reduce significantly the benefits of a school being integrated in the first place.
Shifting from racial to socioeconomic integration plans won't erase these tensions, which are, in large part, class-based. And of course there's the difficulty of urban school districts that are too geographically large and socioeconomically homogeneous to truly integrate unless, as Bazelon writes, they either attract more middle class, white parents to the public system or regionalize with surrounding suburbs. Once again, it's pretty satisfying to see one's own "radical" public policy solutions seriously considered by the paper of record. There are no easy answers here, but it's very much worth it, as the legal consensus around integration shifts, to consider these issues.
--Dana Goldstein
