New Research: Happiness-oriented parenting & school integration

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…

Data Access and the Study of Educational Equity: Implications from a National School Boundary Data Collection Effort

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…

New Research: School Rezoning Processes & Outcomes

This post is written by Andrene J. Castro & Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, each professors in the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University. Along with Kimberly Bridges, Shenita E. Williams, and Mitchell Perry, they’ve been engaged in a larger project researching school rezoning across Virginia between 2019 and 2021. The summary below offers key findings from…

As new federal funds for school integration efforts become a possibility, we should explore how current integration policies address race and choice in their design

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…

How Teachers & Leaders Facilitate Integration in a Two-Way Dual Language Immersion Program

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…

What do you think of SchoolSparrow? Part 2

In part 1 of this post, I looked at SchoolSparrow.com, an equity-oriented school ratings site that is positioned as an alternative to GreatSchools.org. In the lead up to its national launch, I had an email conversation with the founder, Tom Brown, where I outlined some mixed feelings about the site. As I say in part…

#KnowBetterDoBetter, Part II: A conversation among White parents, advocates, & educators about school integration

This guest post is written by Katie Dulaney, a former middle school teacher in North Carolina. Katie is currently an advanced doctoral candidate in the Department of Education Policy Studies at Penn State University, where she studies how school districts instill and nurture commitments to equity.   This post is part two in a three-part…

Ending Modern Day School Segregation, Part 2 w/ McAuliffe & Youngkin

Glenn Youngkin was in the news a lot last week. It wasn’t great. And, while this post won’t attempt a summary of what he knew and didn’t know, said and didn’t say about the prayerful salute to a Jan 6 flag at one of his rallies, it did feel like a good reason to revisit…

Segregation, protest & a window for change: Model legislation from NCSD

A few weeks before Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, the National Coalition on School Diversity (NCSD) published a list of model state school integration policies. It was important then, but it takes on added significance in light of the protests that have followed Floyd’s murder, the heightened attention to racial justice and segregation, and repeated…

SD Research Roundup: Secession, voluntary integration and school spending, part 2

Recent research has examined contemporary school segregation in a variety of forms, including segregation of students in early childhood education, the relationship between school segregation and residential segregation, and segregation that clusters low-income students in under-resourced schools. In part 1 of this post, I linked to a few of these studies before focusing in more…