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…
Things aren’t looking good in Massachusetts’ suburban schools these days. Last month, the Boston Globe released a series of articles on a culture of racism and homophobia on the Danvers High School hockey team. On “hard R Fridays,” students on the all-white team shouted the n-word in team huddles. When one player refused, others welted…
It feels like there’s been an increase recently in the number of pieces that take a nationwide look at some aspect of school segregation. Of course, Ed Build has done several prominent national scans of school district secession and school funding inequity. Sean Reardon and colleagues just came out with an exploration of segregation and…
Part 1 of the roundup, published yesterday, looked at recent school integration debates in Austin, TX and Wake County, NC. This post summarizes similar activity in Sausalito, Oakland, nearby Baltimore, Charleston, SC and Richmond, VA. As I note in the first post, these stories give disproportionate space to pushback from angry opposition, often from white…
It seems like a good time to update my previous post about media coverage of the exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden about school integration/“busing” at the Democratic Primary debate earlier this month. The incredible pace of activity on this has slowed just in time for us to take stock before the next set…
Note: This is the first of a 2-part series. Part 2 can be found here. The school integration community received a jolt last week when “busing” and voluntary school integration unexpectedly took center stage at the Democratic primary. I’m sure that readers of this blog are familiar with the exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe…
It’d be impossible to write a school diversity news roundup for March 2019 without talking about two major stories. On March 12th, we learned about an elaborate bribery scheme that wealthy white parents used as “a side door” into America’s most elite colleges. And, less than a week later, the New York Times wrote a…
In the contemporary movement for school integration, there’s an important core principle: that integration is so much more than desegregation. While battles about race and student enrollment are still extremely critical, the impact of school integration would not nearly be the same if it was limited just to the demographic composition of districts/schools. Many, many…
I want to start with an aspect of school segregation history that is important but may not be well known. Starting in the 1970-71 school year, Longview, TX was under a court desegregation order that included busing more than 600 Black students to formerly all white schools. During the summer before busing was to begin,…
In case you missed it or have been too busy to read about it, this awful administration continued its effort to rollback of civil rights protections for K-12 students (children!) in its reversal of Obama-era guidance on school discipline. Specifically, the “school safety” commission convened after the Parkland shooting issued a report calling for a…
School Diversity Notebook 