New Hope for School Integration

From All Walks of Life: New Hope for School Integration is a powerful article on school integration and diversity by Richard Kahlenberg. If you are interested in Inclusion, then I think you'll find this enlightening.

Here are a few highlights:

• Racial integration is a very important aim, but if one's goal is boosting academic achievement what really matters is economic integration.

• Finland - often held out as an education success story - had the lowest degree of socioeconomic segregation of 57 countries participating in PISA.

• The only educational intervention known to have a greater return on investment than socioeconomic integration is very high-quality early childhood education.

• The KIPP model, which relies heavily on self-selection and attrition, reinforces the idea that the peer environment may matter a great deal.

• Many families now believe - as do virtually all leading colleges and universities - racial, ethnic, and income diversity enriches the classroom.

• In high poverty- schools, a child is surrounded by classmates who are more likely to act out, more likely to move during the school year, and less likely to have large vocabularies.

• The major problem with American schools is not teachers or their unions, but poverty and economic segregation.