SD Notebook is back in 2024 with a new post by Margaret Thornton about her great new book on an overlooked aspect of contemporary school segregation: classroom ability tracking. We know that segregation has increased rather dramatically since the late ‘80’s. Of the schools that maintain some level of diversity/integration, however, we can’t fully know…
This guest post is written by Bonnie Siegler and Greer Mellon. Bonnie Siegler is a PhD candidate in sociology at Columbia University. Her research examines mechanisms that produce inequality and equality in education. Her current work focuses on how equity and diversity discourses relate to efforts for promoting racial equity and diversity in educational organizations.…
SD Notebook is back from a mid-summer break with a guest post that extends a recent series on the relationship between parental decision-making and school segregation. Guest authored by Allison Roda and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, this post summarizes their new study on how White parents navigate New York City’s complex school choice ecosystem. It includes stunning…
This guest post is written by Bryan Mann, a faculty member in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies department at the University of Kansas. Bryan uses geographic methods and spatial theories to understand educational policies and their effects. You can view his research team’s website at https://geographyedu.org/. The summary below offers a contrast to a…
Courtney Everts Mykytyn, my friend and late founder of Integrated Schools, always talked about the power of “playground” conversations in shaping the school choice decisions that parents make for their children. As a white person in our deeply segregated society, I’ve mostly had these kinds of conversations with other white parents. As you’d imagine, test…
Originally published in the Poverty & Race journal, this post is a summary of a new research brief that I co-wrote with my friend James Noonan. James worked for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA), one of the promising alternatives to test-based school quality measurement that we highlight below. When James started in the faculty…
This post is written by Sarah Asson, Annie Maselli, and Ruth Krebs Buck, graduate students at Penn State University and research assistants on the Longitudinal School Attendance Boundary Survey (LSABS). LSABS is led by Dr. Erica Frankenberg, Penn State Professor of Education and Demography at Penn State, and Dr. Christopher Fowler, Associate Professor of Geography…
It’s bad out there right now. Even if you’ve been following the anti-”CRT” backlash closely, the sheer volume of activity might still be surprising. As reported recently in Ed Week, PEN America did a national scan of the 2022 legislative session so far, looking for bills that restrict K-12 classroom conversations or staff training about…
This post is written by Madeline Good, a former teacher and current doctoral student studying educational policy at the University of Missouri. Her primary research focuses on how policies interact with the sociological, political, and technological contexts of education, especially regarding issues of equity and teacher expertise. A new era of school integration efforts may…
There was major school integration news that you might have missed in the frenzy of these pandemic times: Connecticut’s Sheff v. O’Neill case – originally filed in 1989 – reached what is likely to be its final settlement. This post is about two-way dual language programs, not Sheff, but it’s all connected. First, briefly, for…
School Diversity Notebook 