Integrating Schools in a Changing Society: New Policies and Legal Options for a Multiracial Generation

3. Integration after Parents Involved: What Does Research Suggest about Available Options?

53 ERICA FRANKENBERG Integration after Parents Involved What Does Research Suggest about Available Options? In the aftermath of separate, lengthy opinions by five members of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Louisville and Seattle voluntary school integration cases, educators in local districts have pondered whether their desegregation policies are legal and what their options are for maintaining racial diversity. In its 4-1-4 decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), the Court struck down the use of race as employed in the voluntary school desegregation plans in these districts. However, the Court also allowed for the use of race in some circumstances and affirmed maintaining diverse schools—as well as preventing racial isolation—as compelling state interests. This essay reviews research and examples of options intended to achieve or maintain racial diversity in K–12 public schools. It is not an exhaustive review of different policies or evidence but instead provides a starting point for sorting through an array of options following this complex legal decision.The essay first reviews the demographics of today’s student population. A discussion of the rationale for integration policies comes next because research has long noted the continuous need to educate the community about the rationale for such policies.1 The bulk of the essay explores a variety of student assignment policies—both interdistrict and intradistrict—and considers what research says with respect to their effectiveness in creating racially integrated schools. The essay then examines whether housing integration efforts and other kinds of policies might enhance the effectiveness of traditional student assignment policies in creating racially diverse learning environments. Although charter schools are a growing part of the educational landscape, this essay largely focuses on policies implemented by traditional school districts . Evidence suggests that in many places charter schools have high racial concentrations,2 and they have arisen after the most intense policy focus on integration, making successful models of integration relatively rare. 54 ERICA FRANKENBERG Demographics The demographics of the country today are rapidly changing. Nowhere is this clearer than in the public schools. In particular, the increasingly multiracial nature of school enrollment limits the usefulness of much of the early research on student assignment plans. This is because in the late 1960s, when the nation’s first desegregation plans began, public school enrollment was still 80 percent white.3 Desegregation efforts were most widespread in the South, where most districts included a mix of black and white students and were organized along county, rather than municipal, lines, thereby encompassing a diverse city and its often predominantly white suburbs. Today, fewer than three out of every five public school students are white.4 Latino students outnumber black students nationally, including in major urban and suburban districts. Most of the largest urban districts enroll very few white students, and rates of student poverty also are also high. Meanwhile , the patterns of racial segregation and concentrated poverty in these urban areas are being replicated in some parts of suburbia, while other suburban areas are experiencing substantial minority growth for the first time.5 School segregation is not only multiracial but also multidimensional in that it affects various groups differently depending on location. Segregation exists within school districts and between school district boundary lines—between a city and its suburbs and now between certain “mixed” suburbs and other mostly white suburbs. Racial segregation is closelycorrelated with segregation by poverty and language. Influenced by these demographic changes and changing judicial standards, segregation has been on the rise for black and Latino students since the late 1980s after a period of declining black-white segregation from the late 1960s through the 1980s. White students remain the most isolated of all groups, but their schools are slowly growing more diverse with increasing demographic change. Further, although the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision concerned within-district integration plans, some analyses suggest that segregation between districts is an even greater source of segregation across metropolitan areas than is segregation within a district.6 INTEGRATION AFTER PARENTS INVOLVED 55 Rationale Public education is critical for developing citizens and productive workers. Historically, public schools prepared future citizens for democratic participation ; they are perhaps the last truly shared institutions of which everyone can be a part. In our increasingly diverse, interconnected nation and globalized economy, it is more important than ever that students not only gain important skills to compete in a...