A New Wave of School Integration

Districts and Charters Pursuing Socioeconomic Diversity

By Halley Potter and Kimberly Quick, with Elizabeth Davies

This report first appeared on The Century Foundation’s website.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Students in racially and socioeconomically integrated schools experience academic, cognitive, and social benefits that are not available to students in racially isolated, high-poverty environments. A large body of research going back five decades underscores the improved experiences that integrated schools provide. And yet, more than sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, American public schools are still highly segregated by both race and class. In fact, by most measures of integration, our public schools are worse off, since they are now even more racially segregated than they were in the 1970s, and economic segregation in schools has risen dramatically over the past two decades.

Some schools and communities, however, are bucking the national trend and working to provide the benefits of diverse schools to more students.

In this report, we highlight the work that school districts and charter schools across the country are doing to promote socioeconomic and racial integration by considering socioeconomic factors in student assignment policies.

Key findings of this report include:

• Our research has identified a total of 91 districts and charter networks across the country that use socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment. When The Century Foundation (TCF) first began supporting research on socioeconomic school integration in 1996, it could find only two districts that employed a conscious plan using socioeconomic factors to pursue integration. In 2007, when TCF began compiling a list of class-conscious districts, researchers identified roughly 40 districts that used student socioeconomic status in assignment procedures. Nine years later, TCF has found that figure has more than doubled, to 91, including 83 school districts and 8 charter schools or networks.
• The 91 school districts and charter schools with socioeconomic integration policies enroll over 4 million students. Roughly 8 percent of all public school students currently attend school districts or charter schools that use socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment.
• The school districts and charter networks identified as employing socioeconomic integration are located in 32 different states. The states with the greatest number of districts and charters on the list are California, Florida, Iowa, New York, Minnesota, and North Carolina.
• The majority of districts and charters on the list have racially and socioeconomically diverse enrollments. All but 10 districts and charter schools on the list have no single racial or ethnic group comprising 70 percent or more of the student body. All but 17 of the districts and charters have rates of free or reduced price lunch eligibility that are less than 70 percent.
• The majority of the integration strategies observed fall into five main categories: attendance zone boundaries, district-wide choice policies, magnet school admissions, charter school admissions, and transfer policies. Some districts use a combination of methods. The most common strategy for promoting socioeconomic integration used by districts and charters on our list is redrawing school attendance boundaries, observed in 38 school districts; 25 districts include magnet schools that consider socioeconomic status in their admissions processes; 17 districts have transfer policies that consider socioeconomic status; 16 districts use some form of district-wide choice policies with explicit consideration of diversity in the design of these programs; and 10 charter networks and school districts have charter school lottery processes that consider socioeconomic status in order to promote diverse enrollment.

The push toward socioeconomic and racial integration is perhaps the most important challenge facing American public schools. Segregation impedes the ability of children to prepare for an increasingly diverse workforce; to function tolerantly and enthusiastically in a globalizing society; to lead, follow, and communicate with a wide variety of consumers, colleagues, and friends. The democratic principles of this nation are impossible to reach without universal access to a diverse, high quality, and engaging education.

The efforts of the districts and charters we identified provide hope in the continuing push for integration, demonstrating a variety of pathways for policymakers, education leaders, and community members to advance equity.

INTRODUCTION

More than sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education,American public schools are still highly segregated by both race and class. The signs of separate and unequal education are visible today in small and large ways. In Washington, D.C., a public school with 11 percent low-income students and one with 99 percent low-income students are located just a mile apart.1 In New York City, a metropolis with 4 million white people, a Latina high school student may have to wait until college to meet her first white classmates.2 In Pinellas County, one of the most affluent communities in Florida, a 2007 ordinance creating “neighborhood schools” dismantled decades of desegregation efforts and created a pocket of high-poverty, racially isolated, under-resourced schools that have become known as “failure factories.”3 Sadly, the examples of this persistent problem go on.

As Americans consider the consequences of an education system that increasingly sorts students by race and class, it is also important to recognize the efforts of school districts and charter schools that are attempting to find another path.

In New York City, for example, parents and advocates at half a dozen elementary schools successfully fought for new admissions lottery procedures to promote diversity.4 In Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a superintendent and a group of Somali refugee parents led the charge to create more equitable school boundaries.5 And in Rhode Island, the mayor of an affluent suburban town spearheaded legislation to create regionally integrated charter schools that would draw students from rich suburbs and struggling cities together in the same classrooms.6 These efforts, along with other examples from across the country, demonstrate that there are a variety of approaches available to policymakers, education leaders, and community members committed to advancing equity and integration.

In this report, we highlight the work that these ninety-one school districts and charter schools across the country are doing to promote socioeconomic and racial integration by considering socioeconomic factors in student assignment policies.

In this report, we highlight the work that these ninety-one school districts and charter schools across the country are doing to promote socioeconomic and racial integration by considering socioeconomic factors in student assignment policies. The report begins with background on school segregation, and the remedying role that integration strategies based on socioeconomic status can play. Building on research that The Century Foundation (TCF) has released throughout the past decade, the report then presents our latest inventory of school districts and charter schools that are using socioeconomic integration strategies — outlining our methodology, examining the characteristics of the districts and charters included, and explaining the main types of integration methods encountered.

The efforts of these districts and charter schools range in size and strategy, but their stories all provide hope in the continuing push for integration and equity.

SCHOOL SEGREGATION TRENDS — AND THE DAMAGE CAUSED

By most measures, our public schools are more racially segregated now than they were in the 1970s.7 Nationwide, more than one-third of all black and Latino students attend schools that are more than 90 percent non-white. For white students, these statistics are reversed: more than a third attend schools that are 90–100 percent white.8

Part of the reason for this surge in racial segregation is that American communities are increasingly stratified by social class. Research from TCF fellow Paul Jargowsky finds that while the percentage of American neighborhoods suffering from concentrated poverty dropped throughout the 1990s, this trend has reversed, having steadily risen since 2000.9 As a result, America’s public schools have also become more economically stratified. A 2014 study found that economic segregation between school districts rose roughly 20 percent from 1990 to 2010, while segregation between schools within a district also grew roughly 10 percent.10

Increasing socioeconomic and racial stratification of schools is also a result of changing education policies. As busing-based integration efforts largely ended in the early 1980s and courts began to severely limit districts’ ability to use racial and ethnic identifiers to achieve demographic balance, most communities gradually returned to so-called neighborhood schools that tether school attendance zones to real estate. Today, many higher income families who have purchased high-property-value homes in certain districts feel as if their child deserves to attend the school that they shopped for through the housing market, regardless of the implications for children whose families cannot access those spaces.

Socioeconomic and racial segregation have become related and often overlapping phenomena — a trend that the Civil Rights Project calls “double segregation.”11 Schools with mostly black and Latino students also tend to be overwhelmingly low-income.12 At the kindergarten level, for example, a majority of black and Latino students attend schools with more than 75 percent non-white classmates and high average poverty rates. However, most white kindergartners, even those from poor families, attend schools with mostly middle-class, white classmates.13 We see related patterns in housing: poor black and Hispanic families are more likely than poor white families to live in neighborhoods with the most extreme poverty.14

This stark segregation has profound negative implications for student outcomes. A large body of research going back five decades finds that students perform better academically in racially and socioeconomically integrated schools than in segregated ones. Students in integrated schoolshave been shown to have stronger test scores and increased college attendance rates compared to similar peers in more segregated schools.15 In the words of one 2010 review of fifty-nine rigorous studies on the relationship between a school’s socioeconomic and racial makeup and student outcomes in math, the social science evidence on the academic benefits of diverse schools is “consistent and unambiguous.”16 Furthermore, research shows that students in racially diverse schools have improved critical thinking skills and reduced prejudice, and they are more likely to live in integrated neighborhoods and hold jobs in integrated workplaces later in life.17 Students in racially segregated, high-poverty schools, however, face lower average academic achievement and miss out on these important civic benefits.

THE ROLE FOR SOCIOECONOMIC INTEGRATION STRATEGIES

The policy implication of the intertwined racial and economic segregation of public schools is that school integration strategies moving forward should address both racial and socioeconomic aspects of segregation. Historically, school integration efforts have focused on race, but for more than a decade,TCF has examined the role that socioeconomic considerations can play, not only in advancing integration but also in improving achievement.18 This study of school districts and charter networks that use socioeconomic status as one of the levers for achieving school integration is TCF’s most recent — and most ambitious — catalog of the progress being made in this area.

All of the districts and charters included in our study directly consider socioeconomic balance in at least some of their student assignment decisions. Some of the districts and charters studied also directly consider race. And many of the districts and charters have integration goals that include both racial and socioeconomic integration — even when socioeconomic status is the sole factor considered in student assignment.

Our reasons for focusing on socioeconomic integration strategies — whether used alone or in combination with racial integration approaches — are educational, legal, and practical. To begin with, socioeconomic integration is important in its own right for promoting educational achievement. In 1966, the federally commissioned Coleman Report found that the social composition of the student body was the most influential school factor for student achievement,19 and dozens of studies since then have yielded similar findings.20 As journalist Carl Chancellor and our colleague Richard Kahlenberg have noted, “African American children benefited from desegregation . . . not because there was a benefit associated with being in classrooms with white students per se, but because white students, on average, came from more economically and educationally advantaged backgrounds.”21

“African American children benefited from desegregation . . . not because there was a benefit associated with being in classrooms with white students per se, but because white students, on average, came from more economically and educationally advantaged backgrounds.”

While the research on the important roles played by students’ own socioeconomic status and by the socioeconomic mix in a school is clear, socioeconomically driven educational inequities continue to grow. In the fifty years since the Coleman Report, the economic achievement gap has grown, even as racial achievement gaps have narrowed. Today, the gap in average test scores between rich and poor students (those in the ninetieth and tenth percentiles by income, respectively) is nearly twice the size of the gap between white and black students.22

Efforts to address racial and socioeconomic segregation using income as a targeting metric also have the advantage of avoiding the recent legal threats to race-based integration plans. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2007 decision inParents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No. 1 limited options for voluntarily considering race in K–12 school integration policies, absent legal desegregation orders. Based on joint guidance from the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education in response to the ruling, school districts may voluntarily adopt race-based integration strategies, using either generalized or individual student data, under certain circumstances. However, school districts are required first to consider whether workable race-neutral approaches exist for achieving their integration goals.23 In some cases, socioeconomic approaches will be sufficient to achieve racial integration benchmarks. Because of the intersections between race and class, socioeconomic integration at the K–12 level may also produce substantial racial integration, depending on the strength of the plan and the characteristics of the district.24 Furthermore, if districts do turn to race-based strategies, they will typically be required to consider socioeconomic factors as well.25

Of course, desegregation battles continue to be fought in the courts, addressing racial segregation head-on. In 2015, for example, families inMinnesota’s Twin Cities filed a new racial segregation suit against the state, twenty years after a similar suit was filed; a federal appeals court pushed for a stronger integration plan in a case dating back to 1965 to desegregate schools in Cleveland, Mississippi; and a new settlement was reached in Connecticut’s major state desegregation case Sheff v. O’Neill, first filed in 1989.26 But, as these recent examples show, the legal path to desegregation is a long one.

If we are to make meaningful strides toward increased school integration — by both race and social class — we need policymakers and communities to adopt voluntary integration plans alongside ongoing desegregation litigation. Thus, we believe that socioeconomic strategies will be important practical solutions for school districts or charter schools considering integration policies now or in the near future.

CREATING AN INVENTORY OF SOCIOECONOMIC INTEGRATION POLICIES

We identified ninety-one school districts and charter schools or networks that have implemented socioeconomic integration strategies. The school districts and charter schools employing these strategies educate roughly 4 million students in all. In this section, we begin by describing our methodology for collecting information on integration strategies used by districts and charters. We then offer an overall portrait of the number, size, location, and demographics of the different districts and charters on the list. Finally, we describe the major types of integration strategies we identified and discuss the different measures of socioeconomic status being used.

Because there is no standard definition of what constitutes a socioeconomic integration policy, nor a centralized source for information on such policies, we describe in depth below our criteria for deciding which districts and charter schools to include, our sources for information on integration policies, and the legal limitations of our work.

CRITERIA FOR INCLUSION

In constructing our list, we chose to focus on districts and charter networks that have established policies or practices accounting for some measure of socioeconomic status in student school assignment. While the intent behind these actions is to create demographically balanced school buildings, our research does not focus on whether balance was truly achieved. That question is an important topic for future research but beyond the scope of this report. Rather, this inventory acknowledges those districts who have taken meaningful steps, of whatever size, toward socioeconomic integration.

For the most part, the integration policies on our list are intradistrict in nature: controlled by a single school district or charter school network, and limited to the geographic and population boundaries of one district. Although intradistrict integration is the most popular mode of operation, many geographic regions find that the strongest barriers to integration by race and class are found between, rather than within, districts. Indeed, nationwide, more than 80 percent of racial segregation in public schools occurs between rather than within school districts.27 In response to this challenge, someinterdistrict integration plans do exist, in which students can cross district linesin order to balance school demography, and we have included these plans when they consider socioeconomic factors.28 Although, by definition, interdistrict agreements involve several participating school districts, our list only includes the major urban district involved in an agreement, as a much smaller number of students in suburban districts are affected.

Furthermore, very few of the districts in our list apply socioeconomic integration methods to every school in the district. Efforts range in scope and size. We chose to include any districts that account for socioeconomic status in at least a portion of the school assignment and admissions procedures.

We also chose to include only districts or charters where integration strategies are currently affecting student assignment in some way — either through present policies or sufficiently recent rezoning efforts.29 Districts or charters that have had socioeconomic integration plans in the past, but no longer adhere to these policies, are not included.

SOURCES AND VERIFICATION OF INFORMATION

As in previous TCF reports looking at districts that use socioeconomic class to integrate their schools — such as those released in 2007, 2009, and 201230 — we followed a similar process, constructing our lists from a combination of Internet and news searches, leads from integration advocates and other researchers, and past inquiries from districts seeking information to establish or sustain their own programs.

Other than the information TCF previously collected, there is very limited data on school districts that employ socioeconomic integration strategies — or racial integration strategies, for that matter. This gap is likely due to the difficulty in locating good sources. Information on court-ordered and voluntary integration plans — our list contains both — is not stored in a central location. Education journalists Rachel Cohen and Nikole Hannah-Jones both discuss the frustrating process of determining which districts remain under federal desegregation orders. Hannah-Jones estimates that there are roughly 300 school districts with active desegregation orders, yet many school districts “do not know the status of their desegregation orders, have never read them, or erroneously believe that orders have ended.” Hannah-Jones later explains that federal courts and regulatory agencies are sometimes as disorganized as the districts that they oversee, not always aware of the desegregation orders that remain on court dockets and not consistently monitoring or enforcing those districts that should legally remain under supervision.31 Cohen attributes this not only to poor record keeping and “a lack of consistent court oversight,” but to unclear legal understandings of what it means to be “unitary” — the designation currently given to districts once they meet certain desegregation criteria, which only arose in 1991, well after many districts had previously been released from federal desegregation orders without meeting that standard.32

Erica Frankenberg, an assistant professor of education policy at Pennsylvania State University, encountered similar challenges when attempting to construct a list of districts pursuing voluntary integration. Policies pertaining to integration efforts proved difficult to locate; many policies are not accessible online, and districts modify, augment, or rescind policies with some regularity.33

A large component of our own research process involved contacting each of the districts and charter networks for which we had evidence of socioeconomic integration. After asking for review of (and if necessary, corrections or additions to) our information, about 40 percent of the contacted districts responded to our inquiries; several were eager to speak with us in great detail about their policies and our research, while others were more conservative with the information they provided. The overwhelming majority of the school officials with whom we spoke were either superintendents, charter school directors, deputy superintendents, or enrollment managers. In cases where we did not receive a response from contacted officials, we included the districts or charters on the list if we were satisfied with evidence in the public record that they had implemented a socioeconomic integration strategy.

During the research process, our interactions with many district officials revealed that socioeconomic school integration is still often a fragile political issue, limiting administrators’ desire to publicly discuss the existence and success of assignment plans or other programs that promote integration. The term integration itself — once a powerful call for social justice in our school system that was often met by an equally powerful backlash — continues to elicit strong emotions, ones that find their most powerful influence in school board politics. Because school board members are typically elected, they are understandably sensitive to the desires and concerns of voters who benefit from and promote segregated systems. This rather prevalent mindset likely explains why specific information about assignment plans that disrupt this pattern is often inaccessible online or in public record, and why many officials are hesitant about providing details of their plans. Furthermore, some district and charter leaders may believe it is in the best interest of their integration strategies to operate under the radar rather than attract attention that may subject them to renewed scrutiny. We believe, however, that we cannot make progress on integration as a nation without understanding the efforts currently underway and providing that information as a resource to others.

The determination of whether or not a district should be included on the list was made based on information gathered through direct contact with districts and publicly verifiable information. Because of this process required such labor-intensive validation, it is possible that there are districts that consider class factors in student assignment that are not represented on our list. We welcome any new information from anyone reviewing this document.

…continue reading the remainder of the story on The Century Foundation’s website.

This report was written by educational researchers at The Century Foundation.