What Is The Future of School Integration?

Breaking up concentrated poverty – the “ever-present attendant” of racial segregation – should be the next focus of attempts to integrate schools, should the Supreme Court not allow integration programs based on race, according to panelists at a Center for American Progress event that took place on May 10. The panel discussion, entitled “The Future of School Integration,” focused on the future of integration efforts in light of the Supreme Court’s imminent ruling on voluntary integration programs in Seattle, Washington and Jefferson County (Louisville), Kentucky. Three of the four panelists agreed that efforts to promote racial integration in public schools are as vital now as ever, and the possibility that the Supreme Court might throw up another obstacle to school integration means that we must think of new ways to promote educational equity for the students who our society leaves behind.

The panel featured Harvard Law School’s Susan Eaton, John Brittain of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess.

The Impact of Integration

The panel started with Susan Eaton, Research Director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, who shared with the audience some excerpts from her recent book, The Children in Room E-4, which looked at the effects of de facto racial segregation in schools in Hartford, Connecticut and the educational inequities that exist in the nation’s wealthiest state. Eaton provided several reasons why desegregating schools should continue to be a top priority for policymakers. First, she said, “racial segregation has an ever-present attendant,” the problem of concentrated poverty, which is the source of many of the problems facing urban schools. Teachers – no matter how skilled – cannot be expected to fully educate an entire classroom of children when the vast majority of the children are dealing with problems arising from poverty and hunger, psychological and emotional trauma, communities ravaged by crime and drugs, and highly mobile families that cause children to constantly move in and our of schools during the year.

Despite the importance of these economic factors, Eaton explained, racial desegregation is valuable in its own right. There is a consensus among social scientists that there is a real educational benefit of diverse learning environments, and that growing isolation of poor and minority families in urban centers challenges our deeply-held vision of the United States as a land of diversity and of economic opportunity. The theme of isolation was Eaton’s most powerful argument. She shared a story from her book about a child who asked what the suburbs were and why teachers thought that children from Hartford were dumber than children from the suburbs. Eaton’s prose deftly captured the mood in the classroom as the teacher tried to provide an explanation to a classroom of children who understood that society treated them as second-class citizens.

School Integration "on Life Support"

Following Eaton was John Brittain, Chief Counsel and Senior Deputy Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and co-lead counsel in the Connecticut segregation lawsuit Sheff v. O’Neill. Brittain described the success of the Sheff lawsuit, decided in 1996, in which the state supreme court had ruled that even de facto segregation violated the Connecticut constitution. Despite the Sheff ruling, lack of political will has hampered efforts to integrate schools in places like Hartford, which is populated predominantly by low-income and minority families. Brittain lamented that the U.S. Supreme Court has given signs that it might throw up additional obstacles in the way of the already difficult process of integration. If the vision of school integration put forth in Brown was a patient in a hospital, he said, “I’d put it in the intensive care unit on life support.”

While Brittain, said that “poverty is a more significant cause of educational disparities than race,” he stressed the importance of the psychological picture Eaton had paintned. “The benefits of integration are not so much in test scores, but in aspirations,” he said, explaining that poor and minority children in integrated schools have higher goals and greater long-term success.

“A New Way on School Integration”

Richard Kahlenberg, a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, presented what he called “a new way on school integration,” integration based on family income. Forty school districts across the country, prominently Wake County, North Carolina, use a socio-economic integration plan. Kahlenberg explained that, due to the overlap between race and class in many urban areas, income-based integration will have the side effect of significant racial integration. In Wake County, he said, switching from a race-based to an income-based integration plan caused only a slight decrease in the number of students attending schools with significant racial integration

Kahlenberg preemptively responded to charges that socio-economic integration would be merely a “clumsy proxy” for race-conscious integration by explaining that socio-economic integration has benefits of its own. Both Eaton and Brittain agreed that concentrated poverty played a major role in student achievement. Furthermore, in cities such as Charlotte, in which integration plans grouped low-income blacks with higher-income whites, black student achievement increased significantly, whereas in cities such as Boston, where integration plans grouped low-income blacks with low-income whites, black student achievement did not significantly increase. Given that socio-economic integration has benefits independent of racial integration, Kahlenberg had no doubt that a socio-economic integration plan would survive legal challenges, even if racial ones do not.

Changing the Suburban Mindset

The dissenting voice on the panel was provided by Frederick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Hess was “skeptical” of school integration efforts, accusing the other three panelists of assuming that there were no downsides to integration. Proponents of school integration, he said, are so swayed by their moral opposition to segregated schools that they “get caught up in a moral fervor and assume that remedies that flow from that fervor are desirable.” Hess argued that integration efforts have the potential to lower the performance or efficiency of high-performing schools and may lead an unintended backlash. Suburban parents, he said, tend to see local schools as part of the “package of goods” they get when they buy property, and would react strongly against integration efforts.

John Brittain, in response, admitted that Hess had “hit the bulls-eye sociologically on the thoughts of suburbanites,” but explained that we must change that. Kahlenberg also agreed, and said that the problem could be partly alleviated by creating economic incentives – such as incentives that would create more mixed-income neighborhoods – that would result in more integrated schools. Brittain especially agreed with this last point, saying that integrated housing patterns could go a long way in solving educational inequities.

Reacting to Growing Diversity

The final discussion of the panel was about how changing demographics would affect the issue of school integration, as suburbs close to cities are starting to become more diverse, racially and economically. Susan Eaton believed that these close-in suburbs, specifically mentioning places such as Waltham, Massachusetts, hold great hope for integration. If good policies are instituted, local officials can ensure that neighborhoods and schools can become integrated as towns become increasingly diverse; integrated schools in suburbs such as these could stand as models of successful integration for other communities. Kahlenberg agreed, saying that creating integrated schools in these areas of growing diversity would be logistically easier than in more segregated cities.

Whatever the Supreme Court rules this session, the three pro-integration panelists agreed that school integration should remain a top priority among policy-makers. The benefits of integrated schools – both on the narrow measure of student achievement and the much broader measures of social and democratic cohesion – present such compelling social interests that we cannot afford to give up the fight.

Prepared by Matthew Samberg, May 15, 2007