Shortly after starting my job at the Center for Education and Civil Rights, I learned about a unique art exhibit that was set to be installed at Penn State as part of a national tour. The exhibit is called “Still Separate – Still Unequal,” co-curated with Larry Ossei-Mensah, and it is the second part of…
This is the first part of a two-part series on the Brown@65 conference, hosted by Penn State’s Center for Education and Civil Rights & Africana Research Center. Part two covers the conference keynote from Nikole Hannah-Jones, and it is available here. Today – 65 years after the Brown decision – the school integration movement is…
May 17th will mark 65 years since the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. It’s a key moment in the year for the school integration movement, a time to reflect (often on the pace of resegregation or the unfulfilled promises of Brown) and a time that many groups use for conversation…
Last week, I posted a news roundup from the last month or so that focused on major stories about K-12 and higher ed admissions. As I mentioned there, these big stories likely overshadowed another trend I saw in the news during this time- compelling op-eds from white parents about the value of school integration and…
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…
A few weeks ago, the Learning Policy Institute released a new report on the federal role in school integration. It makes two very important points about the current state of school integration: Re-segregation has accelerated rapidly after districts across the country have been let out from under court desegregation orders (see below), and There’s 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,…
This week, two major reports came out, each of which address what is perhaps the most important question facing contemporary school segregation: what can we do to fix it? I’m talking specifically about: A new report called Making the grade: the path to real integration and equity for NYC public school students from a School…
For the research roundups, I’ve wanted to focus on particular topics so that I can look at similarities/differences across different articles. (See recent posts on charter schools and school discipline.) Along those lines, this post focuses on a major (the major?) topic in contemporary education policy – school choice. Specifically: Can school choice be used…
School Diversity Notebook 