Economic Integration in Dallas

Even as the white supremacists who now occupy Washington try to turn back the clock to the Jim Crow Era, new efforts to integrate schools are underway in Dallas:

Rather than admit students by grades, test scores or auditions, which tends to turn schools into enclaves of affluence, these schools admit them by lottery, with no admissions standards. They are organized around popular themes like single-sex education, science, the arts, bilingual classes and professional internships.

Most strikingly for a district where 90 percent of students are low-income, the district is setting aside seats in several of the new schools for students who do not qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, even if they live in suburbs outside the district. Those coming from other districts do not have to pay tuition, and though Dallas will not receive school property taxes from their families, it will get funding from the state for each traveling student.

By relying on income instead of race, Dallas is following guidelines from the Supreme Court, which in 2007 declared it unconstitutional to consider race as a factor when assigning students to schools.

“The federal government, both the executive branch and the legislative branch, have virtually abandoned school integration”

 While the Oligarchs' point system for Race to the Top applications included bribery for states adopting data surveillance, pay for test scores, teacher evaluation plans based on tests, and segregative charter schools, there were no incentives or bonus points for ending, or even challenging, the resegregation of American schools, which began in earnest during the Reagan era.

From this illuminating piece of journalism in Miller-McCune, we are reminded again of the quickly-cementing image of an Administration emasculated by its fear and cowardice to address the social and economic issues that must be put on the table if the Republic is to survive.  If it is not fear and cowardice, then it is complicity, which recommends Obama-Duncan to even a hotter circle of Hell:

. . . . School districts have been moving away from integrated classrooms that could yield these benefits for several reasons, Siegel-Hawley says. A series of Supreme Court decisions since the 1990s, culminating with a key 2007 ruling, have disarmed integration initatives and left districts confused about their remaining options. The basic residential segregation that feeds segregated schools (and, more broadly, segregated school districts) persists. And the rise of school choice also contributes (a challenge Siegel-Hawley’s colleague recently discussed with Miller-McCune.com).

John Brittain, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia and the former chief counsel of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, cites one other factor.

“The federal government, both the executive branch and the legislative branch, have virtually abandoned school integration,” he said.

He’s one of many advocates who have been disappointed by the Obama administration’s slow response to the topic. Civil rights leaders have been waiting for guidance from the Department of Education interpreting the 2007 Supreme Court ruling, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. The department is still posting on its website an old Bush-era memo that Brittain says ignores integration guidance proposed by the case’s deciding vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy.

“It left schools thinking that in the worst sense,” Brittain said, “school integration had pretty much come to an end unless it was a court-ordered school case.”

Parents Involved limited districts’ ability to consider the individual race of a student when making school assignment decisions. But Kennedy outlined another path — through strategic site selection, districts could build new schools or draw attendance zones with the demographics of a neighborhood in mind.

“These are mechanisms that are race-conscious because they’re taking race into account,” Brittain said. “But they do not lead to different treatment of students based upon a classification that tells each student he or she is to be defined by race in terms of where they go to school.”

The Obama administration has suggested to civil rights leaders that the new guidance is on the way.
“But it’s still taken them too long, even if they’ve got a plan,” Brittain said. “It shouldn’t take 22 months, going on two years, to do this.”

Other integration advocates have urged officials to publicly make the case that desegregation still matters — especially in an age when the nation’s broader demographics (and future work force) are shifting so rapidly.

“They’re trying so hard to get it so right,” Brittain said of the current administration, “that they end up doing so little, and it takes them so long.”

Wake County in Crisis Due to Segregationist School Board Majority

The story, Wake County goes to hell, by Bob Geary at IndyWeek.com:

Del Burns' abrupt resignation as Wake County's superintendent of schools made things clear, if they weren't already: The county is in crisis. The Wake school system, lauded as among the best in the nation and an engine for the county's growth, is in mortal danger from the newly elected school board majority and its right-wing backers.

And just in case Wake's more centrist and progressive leaders on the board were thinking that Burns could hold the fort without them (and if that's not what they were thinking, why were they so quiet when all hell was breaking loose?), they were wrong. He couldn't. The new majority wasn't listening to anything he said. But they weren't firing him either.

No, the five in the majority, led by Board Chairman Ron Margiotta, were content to use Burns as a prop—a Potemkin frontman—in a power play disguised as a deliberative review, with his input, of school assignment policies.

That's what Burns meant when he resigned in protest Feb. 15 and said, in one of a series of interviews he gave two days later, "I will not allow myself to be a pawn in political gamesmanship." The new majority's policies, Burns warned, if allowed to take effect, would balkanize Wake's schools, chopping the unified system into separate "have" and "have-not" subdistricts—some 20 in all. High-poverty areas, or zones, would have high-poverty schools, despite extensive research about how that hurts the children forced to attend them.

"I could not in good conscience implement the majority's policies," he said.

Burns' resignation, effective June 30, was a clarion call for citizens to rally to the schools' defense. But rather than give the majority members pause, his resignation both infuriated them and caused them to throw off all pretense of moving carefully on assignment policies. They talked about immediately firing Burns for insubordination. And they rushed onto the agenda for their March 2 meeting a resolution calling for the subdistricts—termed "community assignment zones"—to be drawn up in time to start using them in the 2011-12 school year.

Meanwhile, the Democratic majority on the Wake County Board of Commissioners reacted with—well, the impotence of the commissioners just made the crisis worse. Finally, Wake Democratic Chairman Jack Nichols moved to fill the county's leadership vacuum with a new candidate: Jack Nichols.

The majority's plan to eliminate diversity as a factor in student assignments and adopt a strictly "neighborhood" (or "community") schools approach would overturn a political consensus that's existed in Wake since the county's and Raleigh's schools were merged with the onset of integration in 1976.

After the merger, says John Gilbert, a retired N.C. State University professor who served on the school board for 16 years, Democratic and Republican members worked together to balance the two factors. They agreed, Gilbert says, that diverse student populations were critically important, and no school should be overwhelmed with low-income students. But neither should students be forced to travel long distances on a school bus.

An award-winning program of magnet schools, started in the '80s, helped meet both goals, Gilbert says, by inducing students to travel voluntarily from suburban households to Raleigh's inner-city magnets.

That mix of policies allowed Wake, in Gilbert's time, to avoid having schools with more than 40 percent of students eligible for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program. As the number of low-income students (especially Latino students) has increased from 20 percent countywide to 31 percent, and the county's suburban sprawl has exacerbated residential segregation by incomes, that target has slipped.

According to county figures, there are currently nine elementary schools where more than 60 percent of students are free- and reduced-lunch eligible. But the other 150 schools have fewer eligible students, and no school rates as overwhelmed by low-income kids.

Gilbert, a Democrat, ticks off a list of moderate Republicans who served with him on the board: Judy Hoffman, Roxie Cash, Henry Knight, Charlotte Martin, and Bill Fletcher, a staunch conservative who nonetheless backed diversity to the hilt. "There was never, never a partisan vote," Gilbert says.

The consensus, Gilbert adds, was shared by Raleigh's business leaders, because they viewed good schools as vital to the city's economy. They helped defend it against the rise, in the mid-'90s, of sharp-edged conservative politics in Raleigh and around the nation. (Think Newt Gingrich.)

Led by Tom Fetzer, a Jesse Helms protégé who was elected Raleigh mayor in 1993, the GOP's right wing began fielding candidate slates in the school board elections, Gilbert says. They ran, Helms-style, against "forced busing," code for integration efforts that discomfited whites. Their goal was to wrest Republican-friendly districts from moderates like Hoffman and Cash. They never won.

Indeed, the consensus was intact a year ago, according to Bill McNeal and Tom Oxholm.

Their book, A School District's Journey to Excellence: Lessons from Business and Education, is a text for school officials and board members. Published early in 2009, it recounts how Wake's schools, though not perfect, "gained national recognition for the quality of their educational program."

McNeal, the African-American insider, was superintendent of Wake schools before Burns. Based on Wake's achievements, McNeal was named "National Superintendent of the Year" by the American Association of School Administrators in 2004.

Oxholm, the white Republican accountant, served on the school board from 1999 to 2003. His first brush with the schools, though, came after the '94 GOP landslide put a conservative bloc in control of the Wake Commissioners board. Oxholm was part of a group sent by the commissioners to expose the schools "as wasteful with taxpayers' dollars."

Far from finding waste, Oxholm determined that the Wake schools were efficiently managed and, given the county's wealth and low taxes, a bargain. In fact, he and McNeal wrote, the biggest problem with the schools was chronic underfunding by the commissioners, Democrats and Republicans alike, especially for the new schools needed to keep pace with Wake's exploding population.

In his foreword, former Gov. Jim Hunt declares, "The Wake County Public School System is among the best in the nation because of great leadership by some courageous school board leaders and educators ... and great support from community and business people in the county."

Written in 2009, Hunt's words read today like they're from another era—or at least from a different battleground.

Everything changed with the October 2009 elections, which swept the new majority into power based not on the unraveling of the consensus but rather on the votes of a tiny sliver—about 4.5 percent—of the county's electorate. In five of the county's nine school board districts, including the four districts representing most of Raleigh, there was no election at all.

What the winning side lacked in sheer numbers, however, it made up for in anger and organization—and money. That combination shocked the consensus side, which for most of '09 seemed oblivious to the threat.

"There's a Tea Party flavor to all this," writes Democratic political analyst Gary Pearce, co-author of the Talking About Politics blog in Raleigh.

Indeed, the Wake election was the mirror image of the tea-party campaign mounted nationally last year against President Barack Obama's health care reforms. In both cases, a loud, relatively affluent minority was fighting to protect its rights as it perceived them ("my" health insurance, "my" schools). In both, people vehemently rejected any suggestion that what they have should be shared with others (the uninsured, schools in low-income neighborhoods).

And in both, organizers were supplied and paid for by rich conservatives.

In Wake County, in fact, the same multimillionaire conservative helped fund the anti-health care protests and the campaign to seize the school board: Raleigh businessman and former state Rep. Art Pope.

Pope, personally and through the John William Pope Foundation named for his late father, pours millions into conservative groups, including the John Locke Foundation, Americans for Prosperity and the John W. Pope Civitas Institute, which, according to its most recent federal tax filings, received $1.6 million from the Pope Foundation in 2008—virtually all of its income.

The AFP's Raleigh-based staff led the health care protests. The Civitas Institute, which describes itself as "a research and public policy organization dedicated to providing conservative solutions to North Carolina's pressing issues," perhaps offered advice to the school board candidates. The new majority is expected to vote this week to allow Civitas to provide "training" to the board members.

In the school board campaign, Pope joined forces with fellow right-siders Bob Luddy, a Wake Forest businessman, and former state Rep. Russell Capps, president of the Wake County Taxpayers Association, in support of a new group called the Wake Schools Community Alliance. The WSCA fielded the four candidates who, along with the veteran Margiotta, now comprise the board majority. The Wake County Republican Party, led by Chairman Claude Pope, a distant cousin of Art Pope, backed the WSCA slate as well.

For a variety of reasons, these men are fierce critics of public education in general and the Wake system in particular. Capps, a Christian fundamentalist, doesn't like evolution being taught to students as a widely accepted and evidence-based scientific theory. Art Pope thinks the public schools are an inefficient monopoly, with Wake's 159-school system a prime example. Luddy has used his money to start a charter school in Franklin County and two private schools—both named Thales Academy—in Wake Forest and Apex. On the board of the Apex academy: Ron Margiotta, the head of Wake's public school board.

Luddy summed up his critique in a recent letter to The Cary News. "Public schools are wracked by discipline problems," Luddy wrote, "and many parents want out of them. The time has come to re-evalute our approach to educating our youth, and the solution is not complicated. Parents want choice for their children, based on their own values and beliefs."

Luddy called for a state tax credit of $2,500 per student, with some limits on family income, for children who attend private schools. "Expand[ing] the educational options across the state," he said, "will inspire a healthy competition between schools."

As the crisis in Wake unfolds, supporters of the school system—and the old consensus—are finally showing some life. The newly formed Great Schools in Wake Coalition was launched with the help of WakeUP Wake County and other civic groups. It now counts 29 organizations as members, representing some 10,000 people, according to Yevonne Brannon, its chair.

"We are literally standing up and fighting for the soul of our community," Brannon told an audience of about 75 at a forum in Knightdale last week.

On Saturday, the top issue for a thousand people who marched in the NAACP's annual "HJ on K" event in Raleigh was the schools crisis. "We say 'never again' to resegregation," the Rev. William Barber, state NAACP president, declared.

"You gotta admire this about the ultra-right," Barber added. "They are organized. We need to organize to fifth power."

Even as they do, however, they confront the fact that Wake's systems of government are a vestige of the consensus age and very poorly adapted to the new era of hard-edged, big-money conservative politics.

In the consensus age, it made sense to hold school board elections in the odd-numbered years (and in October), when turnouts would be low. The idea was to let the most knowledgeable, avid supporters of the schools choose the board.

As a check on their enthusiasms, however, the county commissioners were given control of school budgets.

But in the new era, these low-turnout elections are ripe for a charged-up, Tea Party takeover. And if, as they promised in their campaign, the new majority intends to run the schools for the same amount of money or less—"starving the beast," in Tea Party parlance—the commissioners' ability to block them is limited.

The commissioners can reserve budget funds for a specific purpose—for aid to high-poverty schools, say—and bar their use for something else the school board might prefer (new courses in the suburbs, for example). But while they can earmark funds, if the school board leaves the money in the bank, there's nothing the commissioners can do about it.

To make matters worse, the current commissioners board is totally dysfunctional. Though nominally controlled by a 4-3 Democratic majority after the party won all three seats in the '08 Obama landslide, it is missing its 84-year old former chairman, Harold Webb, since he suffered a stroke in October. And the three remaining Democrats managed to let Republican Tony Gurley win the chairmanship when Betty Lou Ward made an "unexcused" visit to the bathroom.

Think of it as a metaphor for a party in the dumper. Or a county.

The fact that the gavel is now in Gurley's hands means that Stan Norwalk, the one Democrat who's spoken out repeatedly against the new majority, is routinely silenced—and often ridiculed—for trying to raise school issues at the commissioners' meetings.

It also means that the Republicans will control the budget process this spring. A draft 2010-11 budget shows a cut in school aid.

But even if the Democrats were a powerhouse, the fact that the commissioners are a poorly paid, part-time board (salary: $19,096 a year) is another vestige of the consensus era. The county is run day-to-day by an unelected county manager. The commissioners are like a corporate board, with the power to establish policies and the budget but with few resources at their disposal to influence public opinion. It's assumed they don't need to.

But what worked well enough three decades ago, when Wake's population was half what it is now and its suburbs were farms, doesn't work in a county of 850,000 people who are spread from Apex to Zebulon.

And the Democrats are no powerhouse. To say there is a vacuum of political leadership in Wake County today is only to state the obvious. A strong voice would be needed to reach the voters across the county. The Democrats don't have one—or they didn't until last Friday.

The decision by the party's chairman, Jack Nichols, to run for the commissioner seat now held by Republican Paul Coble offers the chance, at least, of a headliner race between an experienced Democratic leader and the über-conservative former Raleigh mayor.

Nichols, a former commissioner who served in consensus days, jumped in just before the filing deadline, when it appeared that no one would take on Coble. If the Democrats had let Coble be re-elected without opposition, it would've underscored their weakness in the face of the right-wing assault. Nichols decided that couldn't happen.

The best chance to slow down the new majority rests with Nichols and the other Democratic candidates—incumbent Commissioner Lindy Brown, Steve Rao and Don Mial. (The last two are challenging Republicans Gurley and Joe Bryan, respectively.)

If they can turn the election into a referendum on whether the school system should be improved (and how) or torn apart, and win it, they can set the stage for the election of a different school board majority in 2011, using districts based on the new census.

The assault on the school system is far from over. The adoption by the new majority of its "community zones" resolution puts a process in motion, but to execute it without wrecking the schools—by overcrowding some schools and leaving others half-empty—they'll need more money, not less. And more new schools than the voters have so far authorized in bond issues.

That means a Democratic commissioners board could slow them down, if not actually convince them that the old consensus held—and still holds—for a reason. A balanced school system, with neighborhood-friendly assignments and diversity, is still—as Tom Oxholm discovered when he tried to prove it wasn't—the most efficient and best way to serve all the students of Wake County.

"educational equity in a shambles"

Despite the unending lip service offered by NCLB advocates for closing achievement gaps, those gaps remain gaping. And in the process of NCLB's bombing of the public school system, the dying embers of the school integration movement have been snuffed out by a testocratic education policy that uses tests to sort children based on family income, discourages diversity by penalizing schools with weak test performers, and encourages the creation of urban chain gang charter schools such as KIPP that no middle class parent would consider for their own children.

The question now is whether or not the Obama team with call-me-Arne at the helm of ED will continue the Bush neo-eugenic policies that pay tax-dodging corporations and their foundations to create charter schools that segregate and intellectually sterilize those now deemed defective based on their test scores.

Here are clips from the press release on a new study of the resegregation phenomenon in schools by the Civil Rights Project:

Los Angeles—January 14, 2009—As the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday and the Inauguration of this nation's first African American President approach, the nation is in a celebratory mood about progress on race relations. The election of Barack Obama is a breakthrough that would have been unimaginable a half century ago and a triumph of the long movement for racial justice. But a new report from the Civil Rights Project, Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge, points out that it would be wrong to assume that our nation has now realized Dr. King's dream and created a society where race no longer matters. In fact, the report concludes the opposite: the U.S. continues to move backward toward increasing minority segregation in highly unequal schools; the job situation remains especially bleak for American blacks, and Latinos have a college completion rate that is shockingly low. At the same time, very little is being done to address large scale challenges such as continuing discrimination in the housing and home finance markets, among other differences across racial lines.

The report's author, Professor Gary Orfield, commented, "It would be a tragedy if the country assumed from the Obama election that the problems of race have been solved, when many inequalities are actually deepening. The lesson to take from this is that we have elected a brilliant president, who is the product of excellent integrated schools and colleges. We should work hard to extend such opportunities to and develop the talents of the millions of blacks and Latinos who still face isolation and denial of an equal chance. The outgoing administration has left the machinery of civil rights justice and educational equity in a shambles and strong leadership will be needed to restore it." . . . .

. . . . The report concludes that efforts to make separate schools equal, which have been the dominant approach since the federal government abandoned significant positive support for integration almost three decades ago, have failed. This failure includes No Child Left Behind, which was supposed to quickly equalize achievement across racial lines but has fallen far short. Instead, it is sanctioning scores of segregated minority schools without providing them enough help to make a difference. The report notes that too often the high hopes accompanying a racial change in leadershipÑwhen, for example, black or Latino mayors and school superintendents were first appointed--were often disappointed since the underlying racial barriers to opportunity were not addressed. Orfield, the report's author, calls on the incoming Obama Administration to "make the first serious commitment since President Johnson's Administration and build successfully integrated communities and schools wherever there are feasible opportunities." The report includes a discussion of a number of possible tools and techniques with the potential to extend past successes. Finally, the report calls on the new administration and Congress to review the evidence and provide the needed leadership, for example, to support integrated communities and to avoid the large-scale ghettoization of suburbia.

Arizona Reformers Conclude Harder Tests Will Solve Poverty

Whether education policymakers are inspired by delusion or privilege or racism, or any combo thereof, it doesn't make much difference in the ensuing damage to poor children at the receiving end of their policies. We should, but don't, know by now that attempting again and again the tried and untrue, while racing headlong down the path of least resistance, only delays the real changes that are sorely needed to make any significant difference in reducing the learning gaps between poor and non-poor.

Have a look at this clip from today's Arizona Republic to see the sort of policy thought disorder that I'm talking about, here in full bloom:

. . . .National exams still show Arizona's eighth-graders from low-income families lag in reading and math skills compared with low-income children in most other states.

About half of Arizona's 1 million K-12 students are considered low income. Most live in lower-income neighborhoods and attend the same schools.

But about 20 percent of the state's low-income students go to schools where most children come from high-income families, state data showed.

Their academic progress is starkly higher.

Over the past three years, when these low- income children reached third grade, they passed the AIMS exam at a rate 10 percentage points higher than lower-income children in more typical and poorer Arizona schools. The students held that lead through high school.

That difference has recently led to big changes in low-income schools.

Many principals in low-income neighborhood schools across the country are mimicking their wealthier neighbors. They are working to raise the academic expectations for these students among teachers, parents and the entire community.

They are creating more honors and advanced courses and tutoring children so they can succeed in those courses. . . .

Now the utter sadness of this kind of thinking is eclipsed only by its naked stupidity. And yet to believe that poor children only need more demands and harder tests to do well represents a long-standing blindness to the elephant in the room we choose to ignore, particularly among liberals such as Wilkins and Haycock at Ed Trust (and their white male bosses). This kind of crumbling-school-that-can fairytale offers the kind of affordable perfectibility that liberals find least objectionable, a kind of idiot's idealism that leaves its victims zealously unaware of their own foolishness. It is the kind of lazy-brained behavior, too, that conservatives will nod right along with, particularly when it is allowed to blend with their own patented blame-the-victim mentality that is part and parcel of the conservative no-excuses, take-names-and-kick-ass school reform ideology. How do you think we got No Child Left Behind?

Did it ever occur to these Arizona reformers that poor children going to middle class schools might enjoy some other beneficial influences other than getting to share the same tests that kids in the leafy suburbs take? If it did, there is no sign of it.

Could it be that the Arizona case offers a research opportunity to further study the potential benefits of socioeconomic integration? Here is a short clip on the benefits of socioeconomic integration from a 2006 report by Richard Kahlenberg at the New Century Foundation (Download the PDF file here). It could be a real eye-opener for those who believe that harder tests trucked into economically-rotted communities will save the day, or even come close to addressing the achievement chasm:

. . . .The first major objective of racial desegregation plans is to reduce the negative effects of segregation on the academic achievement of students. But the legendary Coleman Report of the 1960s found that after the influence of the family, the socioeconomic status of a school is the single most important determinant of a student’s academic success.21 The basic findings of the report—that all children do better in middle-class schools—have been affirmed again and again in the literature.22 In 2005, for example, University of California professor Russell Rumberger and his colleague Gregory J. Palardy found that a school’s socioeconomic status had as much impact on the achievement growth of high school students as a student’s individual economic status.

Throughout history and throughout time, low-income students typically have performed less well academically than middle-class children, but there is a striking exception: low-income students attending middle-class schools perform better, on average, than middle-class students in high-poverty schools. Scores from the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) among fourth graders in math indicate that low-income students in more affluent schools score eight points higher (more than half a grade level) than middle-class students in schools with between 75 and 100 percent of students eligible for free and reduced price lunch.

Moreover, education research has long suggested that the economic mix of a school matters more than the racial mix in determining the academic achievement of students. The Coleman Report found that the “beneficial effect of a study body with a high proportion of white students comes not from racial composition per se but from the better educational background and higher educational aspirations that are, on the average, found among whites.”25 More recent research confirms this notion.26 Indeed, Harvard professor Gary Orfield, a strong proponent of racial desegregation, notes that “educational research suggests that the basic damage inflicted by segregated education comes not from racial concentration but the concentration of children from poor families.”27 In Wake County, administrators and school board members concluded that to raise academic achievement, a student mix by economic status was crucial. “Really, isn’t it about class?” they said. “It’s really not about their skin color.” . . . .

Despite the Segregationist Supreme Court Majority

New issue of The Integration Report from the Civil Rights Project, now at UCLA:

The Integration Report, issue 3
February 11, 2008

The previous issue of The Integration Report focused on the importance of maintaining desegregation plans in light of the June 2007 Seattle/Louisville decision that limited the use of race in student assignment plans. One of the two school districts involved in that case, Jefferson County, KY, released a proposal for a temporary assignment plan last week that seeks to preserve the school system’s racial diversity. Jefferson County, a metropolitan district that includes the city of Louisville, provides a possible model for other districts looking for strategies to sustain racial integration in their schools.

The Jefferson County school district recently outlined system-wide goals that will guide current and future student assignments. These goals include: diversity, quality, choice, predictability, stability, and equity.1 Using geography instead of race, school officials grouped clusters of elementary schools together and established a school-level guideline of between 15 and 50% of students from certain geographic areas. These targeted residential areas serve students with income and parent education levels below the district average, as well as a racial composition of at least 45% of students of color.2 Importantly, the criteria for defining geographic areas broadens the district’s original conception of diversity to include socio-economic status, educational attainment of parents, and the consideration of all racial categories, instead of the former two-race distinction between African American and white students. . . . .

New Research from Civil Rights Project

From the Civil Rights Project:

Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.

Honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., two new studies were released today that are part of the Initiative on School Integration, recently created by the CRP/PDC after the Supreme Court’s June 2007 decisions limited voluntary integration in our nations’ schools. The Last Have Become First: Rural and Small Town America Lead the Way on Desegregation, by Gary Orfield and Erica Frankenberg, is the latest in a series of CRP annual reports on desegregation trends. Are Teachers Prepared for Racially Changing Schools? by Erica Frankenberg and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, reveals the challenges for teachers and school leaders as they face many different kinds of situations with regard to race, ethnicity and class. January 18, 2008

Inaugural Issue of "The Integration Report"

The first issue of The Integration Report, a new biweekly web "toolkit" launched today, links readers to the most up-to-date integration news and illuminates key issues in diversity at our nation's K-12 schools. The Integration Report is part of CRP/PDC's new Initiative on School Integration, made possible with the support of the Open Society Institute. January 15, 2008

Still Looking to the Future - School Integration Manual

Honoring the nation's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, The CRP/PDC and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) release Still Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration; A Manual for Parents, Educators and Advocates. This Second Edition of The Manual provides valuable guidance and information about how communities and school districts can promote racial diversity and address racial isolation in schools nationwide. Download the manual here or request a hard copy from LDF by sending an email to manual@naacpldf.org. January 15, 2008