What do we do about the re-segregation of schools?

The New York Times reported the story of how school authorities in Tuscaloosa, Alabama devised a rezoning plan after some white parents complained about overcrowding and disciplinary problems in their schools.

Although the plan was said to be “color-blind”, the net effect is that virtually all of the students required to move this fall are black, and they will be sent to low performing schools with mostly all-black populations.

Critics have said this amounts to resegregation.

The re-zoning has angered many black parents, and they are planning to get their children back into schools in the more affluent and mostly white zones, by using a provision in the No Child Left Behind Act which allows students in failing schools to move to better-performing ones.

It seems like what will happen is that whole groups of black students are going to be transferred out of their schools, only to be transferred back in – a massive waste of time and resources.

This story raises a question for us to think about: What is the educational value of racial and economic integration?

I have come to believe that racial and economic integration in public schools is important for a democracy.

How will young people understand different perspectives if they have never lived with difference?

Especially when we are experiencing ever-greater income disparity, racial and economic integration becomes even more important, as public schools are one of the few institutions that provide opportunities for people from different life worlds to interact in meaningful ways.

Research has also shown that family income and income levels of the schools that students attend are strong predictors of academic success (see the Century Foundation Report).

If part of living in a democracy means that all students should have access to good quality education, it must also mean that all students should have access to the possibilities of success that are found more often in economically-mixed schools than high-poverty schools.

I recall my own experience as a student in my home country of Singapore.

I studied in a primary school which was in one of the country’s oldest public housing estates. Many of the kids I went to school with came from working class families: taxi-drivers, hawkers (street food vendors), construction workers, etc. In my own family, my father was an electrical contractor and my mother was a homemaker.

When the time came for me to choose a secondary school, I had no sense of what was considered a good school or a bad school.

I eventually picked a particular secondary school only because the one older kid I had befriended in primary school happened to come from a middle class background, and had chosen that school.

It was only later that I found out that it was considered prestigious. I had no idea – I simply wanted to go to the school that my good friend had gone to. If not for her, I would never have known to choose that school.

When I went to this “good” school, however, I found that I was only one of two students from my primary school. Everyone else had come from a particular “elite” primary school.

Another key difference was also that although my primary school was racially integrated (with Malays, Indians and Chinese students), my more “prestigious” secondary school was predominantly (I would say, more than 90%) Chinese.

What this experience has taught me is that it is very important for public schools to be mixed in terms of both race and also socio-economic status.

In an integrated school, there is a greater likelihood of students interacting with different experiences, histories, and aspirations. It provides poorer children with a higher chance of academic success, and it doesn’t hurt middle-class children academically at all.

In fact, it provides them with an educational experience that more accurately reflects the complexity of our world, especially one that is more interconnected, global, and marked by difference than ever before.

The Century Foundation, a non-partisan public policy research group recently released a report of 12 school districts, across both “red” and “blue” states, which now practice economic integration of schools. In other words, schools are integrated by family income. The results are quite exciting.

In Wake County in North Carolina, for instance, there have been significant improvements in the academic achievement of poorer students, while the test scores of middle class children have not been hurt in the least.

In my home country of Singapore, the government and various schools are talking about the importance of teaching empathy in a time when social and income disparities are at an all-time high, and in fact, seem to be climbing.

At the same time, schools are also being increasingly segregated on the basis of income.

How can students actually learn “empathy” in segregated environments?

If the government is serious about educating citizens who have empathy for others, then what would be a true educational innovation would be to attempt economic integration.

The question, however, is how we might persuade parents to accept economic integration, when many continue to believe their kids should be separated from others they consider different or inferior.

How do we convince people to move away from their sometimes irrational assumptions about what’s “best” for their children?