When it comes to moving toward school integration, do the facts really matter? Yes and no. (I know, not the answer anyone wants to hear.) As my GS4A colleague Jeff Linn wrote last week, people acquire attitudes over time. Our thinking does evolve based on our own experiences and on how the people closest to …
Lancaster starts talking about school integration Read More »
This video, “A tale of two schools: Race and education on Long Island,” was produced a few years back by the Erase Racism project. It is 26 minutes long, but I encourage you to stay with it to the end. David is a senior at Wyandanch High School, which is poor and lacks resources, not …
Here’s a couple of videos that explain how segregation happen today. The first is from 2014, and explores how the schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, have been resegregated— showing how legislators and judges have permitted the slippage. Meanwhile, students from an earlier generation of integrated schools talk about how their lives have been better for it. …
Integration not likely to happen by good will alone Read More »
In the wake of last week’s police shootings in Baton Rouge and suburban St. Paul and the killing of five Dallas police officers, Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown University sociologist and author, wrote a fiery, angry commentary for the New York Times Sunday Review. White Americans, Dyson wrote, can’t understand why black Americans are so angry …
School integration is about more than grades and graduation rates Read More »
Believe me, I know that school integration is a heavy lift, and often it feels like an impossible lift. I’ve been engaged in conversations around the topic for more than 30 years in Rochester, where conventional wisdom has it that nothing can be done because there is no support for any further programs to address …
At Great Schools for All, we know that socioeconomic diversity is the bedrock of any successful reform of high poverty segregated urban schools. But I am always reminding myself that what we propose is not magic. For decade many urban school districts have played a huge part in the marginalization of racial and ethnic minorities, …
Great schools for all require great public policy Read More »
Today’s blog comes to us thanks to an email blast from retired School Without Walls principal Dan Drmacich, who sent us a May 4 blogpost by New York City education reformer Diane Ravitch, who referenced a response from a South Carolina professor to an April 29 New York Times story. Blogging on blogs. But this …
Focus on the ‘norms’ not the educational outliers Read More »
Unlike every fresh Donal Trump insult, the push to re-integrate American schools has not gone viral. Yet. Most Rochesterians, like most Americans, have no idea that in numerous think tanks, state houses, and at the U.S. Department of Education, integration—along socioeconomic lines—is a very hot topic. Slowly, policy is catching up to the research. At …
The national trend toward integration is gathering momentum Read More »
Instead of our regular blog post, this week, we want to call your attention to a couple of opportunities: You are invited to attend the second annual ROC Teen Summit! The purpose of this event is to feature the perspectives of young adults through 10-15 minute “TED Talk” style presentations that showcase “ideas worth spreading” …
The headline in the February 12 Washington Post shouldn’t surprise anyone who has looked carefully at the consequences of segregating low-income and minority children: “How segregated schools turn school kids into criminals,” it said. The story looks at what happened when a lawsuit in the early 2000s effectively dismantled a highly successful school integration program …
Integration improves more than test scores and graduation rates Read More »
