‘Threatening the Future’: The High Stakes of Deepening School Segregation

I never read or hear anything about Asians. They're the long-lost forgotten...

I think that the articles glides over the most difficult issue; that is, in the short term people with resources, advantages and benefits may have to give some of them up so that people without will have more and a better (although by no means a guaranteed) shot at success. But I also don't see many competitive upper middle income parents saying "yes" I will send my kids to a poor struggling inner city school (to possibly improve it) and so that poorer kids can have more seats at a more highly competitive school. Self interest understandably defeats a broader societal interest almost every time.

This whole issue is somewhat alien to me. I was raised and schooled in the Los Angeles City School District. My schools were always integrated from elementary school to high school. Some of the schools were predominately African-American if they were in a neighborhood like Compton or Watts but the coastal towns neighborhoods were melting pots.

"The percentage of intensely segregated schools, defined as those where less than 10 percent of the student body is white, tripled between 1988 and 2016, from 6 to 18 percent." The factoid above is presenting as something sinister what's a simple statistical correlation: as the percent of school children who are non-Hispanic white rapidly declines, the percent of schools with a low enrollment of whites is naturally going to increase. Also, why is a school that's 31% black, 31% Latino, 31% Asian and 7% white defined as "intensely segregated"? Whites are now less than 50% of school children, so they are just one of many minorities. If trends continue, eventually there will be more Latino children than white children in the schools.

Schools should focus on education. Not progressive causes.

The Times needs to look behind this phenomenon which is largely due to self segregation. One of the big decisions that a family makes in the US is where to buy a home or where to live. The factors that go into a housing decision include A) Commute time to place of work B) Price/Rent/Affordability of the neighborhood C) General safety of the area D) Performance of the schools if you have school going children. If you analyze poorly performing school districts according to publicly available statistics, these are the same districts that have a lot of single parent families, a majority of the school going children are in the free meal program, there is a lot of Public Housing or landlords willing to accept Section 8 housing vouchers and the crime rates are high. So what really ends up happening is that families that live in these school districts do so because they have no other options. What looks like race based segregation to the Times is actually class based segregation on where people can afford to live. So the next question that the social engineers are going to ask is why the state cannot help these poor people move to high performing school districts. The high performing school districts are high performing because largely middle class families live there, they will not allow construction of public housing in their area, their landlords (very few) will not accept public assistance vouchers and the crime rates are low.

Interesting and important research. I'm mulling, however, over the article's title. At the risk of being obtuse, what exactly are the "high stakes" of deeply segregated schools? I can name many, but the authors don't. I don't think it's enough to point out increasing segregation - many have no problem with segregated schools...as evidenced by "white flight" from certain types of public schools.

The story raises some interesting statistics especially in suburban schools. But overall, measuring segregation by whether fewer than 10% of the students are white is an outmoded paradigm in much of the nation. In California, only 23% of students are non-Hispanic white. So a 13 percentage point difference is not all that much. In the enormous, sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, slightly less than 10% of all 600,000 students are non-Hispanic white. What does segregation mean in such a setting?

One factor that hasn’t been mentioned is the lack of competent teachers who are equipped to teach students with vastly different levels of preparedness and home support. I’m not saying that teachers aren’t trying—most are. But studies have shown that schools of education lack the knowledge and theory to provide positive results compared to other professional schools, such as those of medicine, engineering, law, etc. Such teaching methods would be based on a solid theory of behavior and backed up by effectiveness data. There are approaches that meet these criteria with solid data, for example the Direct Instruction (DI) approach developed by Sig Engelmann and Wesley Becker and being used in the IDEA schools program in Texas, and elsewhere. Many of the classes have a majority of economically poor English learners but are successful in preparing their students for major universities. DI relies on a systematic curriculum design, delivered by implementation of a prescribed behavioral script. On the premise that all students can learn and all teachers successfully teach if given effective training in specific techniques, teachers may be evaluated based on measurable student learning. Teachers who realize they need a specific skill set to do their work effectively can teach all children effectively.

Urban schools will not improve until the urban culture of the neighborhood the students come from improves. A student may spend 6 hours in school but spends 18 in her neighborhood. Where does more "learning" come from?

As a forty year teacher, coach, principal and superintendent in several northeast school districts I feel like I have some knowledge about the state of public school education. I agree that integration through bussing has for the most part been an abject failure. Integration advocates should have demanded facility and funding equality for every student in a district. Then, on a regular schedule they should have rotated administrative and teaching staff among the schools. This would have assured that all students had access to good educators on a consistent basis. This plan may not have been perfect, but in totality would have resulted in better outcomes and less social disruption than did bussing.

The inequality within our public schools mirrors the inequality in our society. All public schools should be funded adequately, not based on local property taxes, and note I said adequately not equally, since a school serving children with special needs or poorer children will need more funding than a school of high socioeconomic children with no special needs. The problem is that Americans consistently reject equity. If we were to reform our education system with equity in mind, we could get somewhere, but of course, that involves addressing poverty too, something Americans believe to be a personality flaw. Our schools are a reflection of our segregated society where a CEO makes 1,000 times more money than a regular employee.

Educational outcomes are dependent upon the student. Half of all students will always been in the bottom half. Half of students will always be in the top half. We will never achieve equality in outcomes. What about equality in opportunity? Well we cannot, ever, know which kids didn't have the opportunity and which did but chose not to take it. We are giving our kids the perfect excuse for their failures: we didn't give them enough money. Has anyone ever considered that maybe the students have a responsibility to work hard and to take advantage, fully, of what we are already providing? Public schools are turning into warehouses / day-care facilities. No education is taking place in a lot of the 'schools' and it isn't because of a lack of money. It is from a lack of discipline in the 'students' many of which are kids who don't care about education and never will- with proud parents who don't care about education and never will. But they do care about money. No more money.

I watched a Youtube video about NYC per pupil spending, its 24K per student, while Stuyversant HS ( the best public HS in NY) , averaged only 19K. Its not the school, its the students. No parents would want to put their kids in a disruptive environment where no on can learn, I bet most of us would put our kids into a high performing school if its predominantly Black/White/Asian/Hispanic..or whoever.

This article reveals some of the weaknesses of social engineering solutions to problems imposed by so-called "experts" who offer little more than talking head opinions which are then resisted both actively and passively by much of the populace. I do not know the answer to this problem but then again neither do the experts, highly paid consultants nor the administrators. There is ultimately little evidence that "integration" adds much, one way or another to education. But evidence never has had much effect on decision making.

Nobody is standing blocking the schoolhouse door like the 1950's South. Disparities are about whether students have dysfunctional family lives, and where education falls in the priority listings of their families. Where you have a high density of dysfunctional homes or families who place a low priority on school, community schools will do poorly. Few schools will invest in offering a load of AP classes if the typical zoned student is behind grade level. Families who feel strongly about education will do whatever it takes to move or otherwise get their child out of a school where dysfunction predominates. While this may correlate with race, race is not the determinant factor here. Political band-aids to throw kids together for good optics are not the solution.

In reading the comments below, I am surprised by the lack of forward thinking in the comments. The long term economic impact of not educating in integrated schools is the continuation of i biases and racism, which later plays out in the workplace. Unless kids are exposed to "different" early on, they will not see a need to be as they get older.

Too many socio-economic factors at play including increased immigration. I'm sorry for the kids who are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to their education and it sounds like it's students of all colors, not just one group. Another mess in this country.

If school integration is truly a goal, then we need to deal with the real bogeyman here, which is class. When we start addressing the inequality that drives all this racist animosity, then we’ll start seeing some progress.

Putting kids on a school bus for two hours is an absolutely ridiculous solution. So if people naturally tend to settle in neighborhoods that match their ethnicity and neighborhood schools are an essential part of healthy learning due to various factors, why not concentrate on making certain that all students have a safe, secure, and exceptional infrastructure in which to attend?

I enjoyed reading this article. The majority of any race in a school, can be culturally harmful. However, if that is ever the case, then parental involvement via the PTA is crucial and essential. In the end, this is about socio-economic concerns. More importantly, as the report points out, children of color do better in near equally diverse (race and income) schools. This is not an easy subject....Thank you for publishing this article...hopefully more talk about this subject will generate better ideas to educate our childern

This segregation is caused by more by economics than by race.

The focus should be quality education for all.

Studies show that an on grade level students in an environment without a sufficient cohort of students on grade level and ready to learn does worse than a student less well prepared in an environment with on grade level and ready to learn students. The issue is economic/socio-cultural, not racial. For good reason, parents do not want their children in environments where they do not have the best chance of success. This is not racism. Parents looking at a school or neighborhood typically are more concerned about whether the parents are green ($), not whether they are black, white, or whatever...

it may sound like a topic for a high school debate, but the issue can be stated simply: "Should 'Diversity' Itself Be a Goal of Our Educational System?"

Just bus those few white students in Chicago public schools, around to different predominantly minority schools every day. They will be able to be culturally enriched. Or won’t that work? Maybe the minority students can be bused twenty or thirty miles from their homes and the schools in other cities paid to teach they. Maybe pass a law prohibiting any private or religious schools in Chicago. Surely there’s an easy but overlooked solution.

It is almost like pre-1965 immigration reform Americans are not so happy about the post-1965 changes in demographics. Or that liberals talk one way and act another. Or that relatively well off people end up clustering in areas with fewer relatively poorer people. And relatively well off people tend to cluster with others that look like them. All of which is easy to see, and easy to understand. If we want e pluribus unum, it might be time to reduce immigration (esp. of the poor) and focus on building a nation. It worked in the 1920's-1960's, and can work again. Let the American assimilation machine work.

What is not said in this article is the affect of the rise of charter schools on segregation. While seemingly open to all races, a check of the ethnic mix in many of these schools will show a disparity in racial makeup.

Stop obsessing about diversity, start obsessing about how to give the kids an actual education. If you want greater equality of results then figure out a way to bring the poor students up, don't drag the smart kids down to their level by eliminating gifted programs and AP classes. Stop forcing kids to spend hours in a bus, bring back neighborhood schools. If that means that the school population reflects the population of the neighborhood, then you might actually foster a sense of community and engagement, rather than setting up the school district and its social engineering policies as an enemy. If an all-white or all-asian school can be academically successful, why shouldn't an all-black or all-hispanic school? Diversity is what ideologues focus on when they have no idea on how to improve learning outcomes.

This is an especially important report revealing the trend back towards segregation. Yet it left me wondering how ethnic groups achieved this? Do whites or Latinos control school boards and set policies that bring about segregation, like politicians Gerrymand voting districts? Somehow the courts abetted the re-segregation, but at whose behest? And why hasn't this led to another Brown v BOE? Or, and this is key, do folks simply prefer segregated schools? Parents or the kids themselves, don't like going to mostly white schools.

You cannot mandate where people live. But we have to stop local funding for schools. Immediately. It is completely immoral for certain suburban districts to have amazing school systems and for rural and urban school districts to have such disparities. Funding school equally for all children is a fundamental moral obligation. Before welfare, rent control, really almost anything. We must provide equal opportunity, not equal results. Equal schooling is at the very foundation of that idea.

The issue with school segregation falls squarely on white parents and their fears of their children being a "minority" in their school. White parents have an inherent fear of their child being isolated in their school and will do anything to remove their child and into a majority white school. Here in North Carolina, they are helped by the proliferation of charter schools, which are no more than segregation academies. Vouchers for parents to help send their kids to private schools. White parents have clearly stated they do not want their children to mix with other racial and ethnic groups. The result is a traditional public school system that will be predominantly minority with funding cuts and funding shifted to help white parents flee. We have tried a lot of things but white parents have made it clear that this is what they need and want. As we move to a more plural society where whites in general slip below majority status the question will become where else will they run?

I live in a Democratic controlled state from top to bottom. Good public education has always been a cornerstone of our party. This state should be a showcase on how well we can execute this policy. Instead, it's yet another example of our complete intellectually bankruptcy. We are never going back to the days of our kids traveling an hour back & forth between home & school to meet some bizarre SJW notion of diversity. This point can't be emphasized enough. It doesn't improve the quality of education for our kids. Even in Berkeley, Calif.—bastion of progressive America—when the school district tried to implement a busing plan in the 60's that would take white students into black schools, local white parents launched a recall election to throw out the entire school board. Forced busing although a noble idea was a disaster for public schools. Any parent that could afford to pulled their kids out and put them in neighborhood private schools. Mind you forced busing was what caused the rise of charter schools. All parents...black or white, rich or poor want a quality education for their children. All deserve it. Forced busing isn't the way to achieve this. Truthfully forced busing isn't what black America is or was asking for either. They just want their schools on par with suburban academies & they should be. Bottom line all parents with the means to bail on busing did bail on busing. Shuffling around an ever-diminishing pool of lower income black & white kids isn't the answer.

Segregation today has as much to do with Socio Economic problems as racial divides. If we allow failing schools to exist in low socio economic areas, this will lead to increasing racial disparities, more segregation and a larger fragmentation of our society. Creating greater economic opportunities for families through job creation, access to affordable health care and education up through university will allow families a better chance to break this cycle.

Ending de jure racial segregation, which Brown did, was important and the right thing to do. But using a goal of achieving a desired racial mixture in all schools as the driver of all educational policy is wasteful, counterproductive and just plain wrong. Examples abound. The admission test for the "specialized" high schools has helped to create some of the best public high schools in the country, but de Blasio and others want to scrap it because it currently produces a student body that is largely Asian American (50 years ago it produced a student body that was largely White and Jewish). Creating systems for the assignment of students to schools that ignore the neighborhood school concept creates confusion and controversy and substantial cost for transporting students to distant schools instead of letting them walk to their local schools. And parents who are dissatisfied with the results will flee, either to private schools or to public school systems with demographics more to their liking. Isn't the 60+ years since Brown long enough to realize that these efforts simply don't work and that we should focus instead on improving all schools, including those that end up with difficult student populations.

In the 1960s I did some of the earliest school integration research on busing black children from urban public schools to elite white suburban schools. While the stresses on the black kids (travel time, hostility, overt racism, increased academic competition) were substantial, much worse was the fact that the urban schools had not remotely prepared their students to compete at the same grade levels as their suburban peers. Integration is a worthy goal; however, there are several issues related to urban schools: 1. There is an unspoken assumption that mixing black kids with white kids will somehow improve the black kids, an assumption many blacks find insulting or demeaning. 2. Mixing students of very different academic abilities will force some teachers in the high-performing schools to teach down to the lowest common denominators, which will short-change the high performers. 3. Given the large performance gaps between high- and low-performing schools, the former will need to provide substantial counseling and tutoring services to help the incoming students try to catch up with the higher-performing students. 4. The parents of many students forced to attend low-performing schools will consider switching to private schools or relocating to the suburbs, thus reducing even further the number of white students in the school system. The solution to these problems is to focus on improving ALL urban schools.

Citing national averages on this issue are meaningless. The demographics of rural Alabama are completely different than Los Angeles. Discussion about segregation is usually framed around blacks and whites, which may make sense for the former but seem completely alien to the latter where in many places the predominant groups are Asians and Hispanics. We need analysis of these problems at the local level because a school policy to address segregation that makes sense in, say, Chicago may prove disastrous when applied to Honolulu.

This segregation seems more economic than racial. Wealthy parents want better schools for their children just like non wealthy parents. They simply have the means to force the issue more effectively. Why call it “fleeing” or “white flight” to get your children out of bad school districts? That’s exactly what I would do for my children no matter my race or religion. Just because wealth is correlated with race does not mean that race is driving the segregation. Wealth is positively correlated with a lot of positive variables. Why confound everything by labeling things racist or race-related without direct proof?

The answer is so simple. Raise the quality of education in all schools in all neighborhoods by actually providing sufficient funding, and then implement the programs schools need. Acknowledge needs are different in every neighborhood and that some neighborhoods, and the families and children in them, need social welfare help to succeed - as proven by success of Lebron James' schools the NYT recently reported on. Support children in the ways they need most (and sometimes that means supporting and providing programs for the families they come from, e.g., food pantries, warm clothes and shoes, ESL and GED). Make the focus of our national school system, urban and other, about educating children and elevating them to be their best self. There's too much politics, self interest and special interest in American education. The education related unions, teachers and other, are not bad. But they need to focus on the welfare of their members on a trajectory that also places high value on educating children and elevating children. Politician's pursuit of union-breaking to reduce education cost, has only pulled attention of all adults in the room away from educating children, demoralized teachers and other adults in our school - and not saved money. Special interests, like great majority of charter school operators, should be checked - at least held accountable to deliver quality education standards as in New Orleans. Just make education about educating children.

Desegregating urban schools presents huge challenges. For example, in fall 2018 the NYC school system had 1,135,334 students, only 15% (170,300) of whom were white. NYC has 1,840 public schools (including charters), with an average of 617 students per school. Therefore the closest NYC can come to integrating its schools would be to place an equal number of white students in each of the City's schools, which would mean an average of 93 white students and 524 non-white students per school (15% white). NYC’s mayor believes that mixing white students with minority students is the only way to improve educational for all students, but I don't think mixing 93 white students with 524 non-white students per school is enough to accomplish that goal. (And isn't it insulting to minority students to suggest that they need exposure to white students to improve or succeed in school?) Unfortunately, if the mayor further attempts to force integration by busing or by re-zoning school districts or by lowering admission standards for specialized schools, further white flight to the suburbs or private schools is inevitable. There are simply not enough white students to spread around NYC public schools; and this shortage of white students exists in all major US cities. The solution to the problem of variable student outcomes and opportunities is to acknowledge that residential and economic segregation exists and focus efforts and funds on improving education at ALL urban public schools.