The Next Kind of Integration
By EMILY BAZELON
New York Times Magazine
Published: July 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/magazine/20integration-t.html?th&emc=th

In June of last year, a conservative majority of the
Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, declared the
racial-integration efforts of two school districts
unconstitutional. Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could no
longer assign students to schools based on their race,
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his lead opinion in
Meredith v. Jefferson County School Board (and its
companion case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v.
Seattle School District No. 1). Justice Stephen Breyer
sounded a sad and grim note of dissent. Pointing out
that the court was rejecting student-assignment plans
that the districts had designed to stave off de facto
resegregation, Breyer wrote that "to invalidate the
plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown."
By invoking Brown v. Board of Education, the court's
landmark 1954 civil rights ruling, Breyer accused the
majority of abandoning a touchstone in the country's
efforts to overcome racial division. "This is a decision
that the court and the nation will come to regret," he
concluded.

Breyer's warning, along with even more dire predictions
from civil rights groups, helped place the court's
ruling at the center of the liberal indictment of the
Roberts court. In Louisville, too, the court's verdict
met with resentment. Last fall, I asked Pat Todd, the
assignment director for the school district of Jefferson
County, which encompasses Louisville and its suburbs,
whether any good could come of the ruling. She shook her
head so hard that strands of blond hair loosened from
her bun. "No," she said with uncharacteristic
exasperation, "we're already doing what we should be."

Todd was referring to Louisville's success in
distributing black and white students, which it does
more evenly than any district in the country with a
comparable black student population; almost every school
is between 15 and 50 percent African-American. The
district's combination of school choice, busing and
magnet programs has brought general, if not uniform,
acceptance - rather than white flight and disaffection,
the legacy of desegregation in cities like Boston and
Kansas City, Mo. The student population, which now
numbers nearly 100,000, has held steady at about 35
percent black and 55 percent white, along with a small
and growing number of Hispanics and Asians.

With its decision in Meredith, the court was forcing
Louisville to rethink the way it would assign
elementary-school students and, in the process, to
confront some tricky questions. Is the purpose of
integration simply to mix students of different colors
for the sake of equity or to foster greater familiarity
and comfort among the races? Should integration
necessarily translate into concrete gains like greater
achievement for all students? If so, is mixing students
by race the most effective mechanism for attaining it?

In Louisville, the achievement gap between whites and
blacks is 20 percentage points at many grade levels. For
Todd and her team, whatever their reservations about the
decision in Meredith, coming up with an alternative
assignment plan was an opportunity to think about a new
kind of integration and what it might accomplish. In
Louisville, integration would no longer focus solely on
race but also on the barriers of class, of advantage and
disadvantage. Other cities have been thinking along
these lines. In the wake of the Supreme Court's
decision, four other districts - Des Moines, Burlington,
Vt., Omaha and Beaumont, Tex. - announced a switch to
class-based integration. Seattle, too, is discussing
setting aside 5 to 15 percent of the spots (a relatively
small percentage) in desired high schools for low-income
students. Some of the plans go into effect this fall;
others, including Louisville's, begin a year from
September.

The chief justice didn't address the idea of class-based
integration in his opinion. But Justice Anthony Kennedy
did, in a separate concurrence. And because Kennedy cast
the fifth vote for the majority, his view controls the
law. Though he agreed with Roberts that public school
districts should not make school assignments based on
the race of individual students, he added that the
court's ruling "should not prevent school districts from
continuing the important work of bringing together
students of different racial, ethnic and economic
backgrounds."

How were schools to do this? Around the country, school-
district lawyers studied Kennedy's opinion and came to a
rough consensus. In its amicus brief before the court,
the Bush administration cited socioeconomic integration
as a "race neutral" alternative to race-based assignment
plans. Kennedy picked up on this, and no other justice
wrote to contradict him. As a result, the school-
district lawyers concluded that districts could assign
an individual child to a school based on any kind of
socioeconomic measure they chose - income, assets,
parental education attainment. Districts could also be
"race conscious," according to Kennedy, when they drew
school boundaries, chose sites for new schools and
directed money to particular programs. But in these
situations, they would usually be limited to taking into
account the racial composition of a neighborhood rather
than the race of an individual student.

In terms of the court's jurisprudence, this is a major
change. Race has been the organizing principle of
integration since Brown v. Board of Education. At the
time of the court's ruling in Meredith, hundreds of
districts were pursuing some sort of racial integration,
with or without a court order, while only a few dozen at
most were trying any form of socioeconomic integration.
Over the years, racial integration has proved to have
tangible benefits. Amy Stuart Wells, an education
professor at Columbia Teachers College, has found that
going to school with substantial numbers of white
students helped black students to form cross-racial
friendships and, by giving them access to white social
networks, eventually to find work in jobs higher up the
economic ladder.

However important these gains are, they are long-term
and cannot be easily or quickly assessed. And
increasingly, schools are held to a standard of
immediately measurable outcomes. The No Child Left
Behind Act, signed into law in 2002, demands student
test scores that climb ever upward, with a mandate for
all students to be proficient in reading and math by
2014. Test scores may not be the best way to assess the
quality of a teacher or a school, but the pressure to
improve scores, whatever its shortcomings, is itself on
the rise. And if high test scores are the goal, it turns
out, class-based integration may be the more effective
tool.

Researchers have been demonstrating this result since
1966, when Congress asked James S. Coleman, a Johns
Hopkins sociologist, to deliver a report on why the
achievement of black students lagged far behind that of
white ones. The expected answer was that more than a
decade after Brown, black kids were still often going to
inferior schools with small budgets. But Coleman found
that the varying amount of money spent on schools didn't
account for the achievement gap. Instead, the greater
poverty of black families did. When high concentrations
of poor kids went to school together, Coleman reported,
all the students at the school tended to learn less.

How much less was later quantified. The Harvard
sociologist Christopher Jencks reanalyzed Coleman's data
in the 1970s and concluded that poor black sixth-graders
in majority middle-class schools were 20 months ahead of
poor black sixth-graders in majority low-income schools.
The statistics for poor white students were similar. In
the last 40 years, Coleman's findings, known informally
as the Coleman Report, have been confirmed again and
again. Most recently, in a 2006 study, Douglas Harris,
an economist at the University of Wisconsin, found that
when more than half the students were low-income, only
1.1 percent of schools consistently performed at a
"high" level (defined as two years of scores in the top
third of the U.S. Department of Education's national
achievement database in two grades and in two subjects:
English and math). By contrast, 24.2 percent of schools
that are majority middle-class met Harris's standard.

There are, of course, determined urban educators who
have proved that select schools filled with poor and
minority students can thrive - in the right
circumstances, with the right teachers and programs. But
consistently good education at schools with such student
bodies remains the rare exception. The powerful effect
of the socioeconomic makeup of a student body on
academic achievement has become "one of the most
consistent findings in research on education," Gary
Orfield, a U.C.L.A. education professor, and Susan
Eaton, a research director at Harvard Law, wrote in
their 1996 book, "Dismantling Desegregation."

Most researchers think that this result is brought about
by the advantages that middle-class students bring with
them. Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation lays
them out in his 2001 book, "All Together Now": more
high-level classes, more parent volunteers and peers who
on average have twice the vocabulary and half the
behavioral problems of poor students. And, especially,
more good teachers. Harris, the economist, says that
poor minority students still don't have comparable
access to effective teachers, measured by preparation
and experience. The question, then, is whether a plan
that integrates a district by class as well as by race
will help win for all its schools the kind of teaching
that tends to be linked to achievement. "The evidence
indicates that it would," Harris says.

Ronald Ferguson, an economist at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard, is less persuaded. His research
highlights the nagging persistence of a racial
achievement gap in well-off suburbs. "What happens with
the achievement gap in a place like Louisville," he
says, "will depend on how vigilant their leaders are to
make sure high-quality instruction is delivered across
the board." Such teaching is more likely in a school
with a critical mass of middle-class parents, he
concedes. But he stresses that to reap the benefits,
poor kids have to be evenly distributed among classrooms
and not just grouped together in the lowest tracks. "To
the degree a district takes the kids who struggle the
most academically and spreads them across different
classrooms, they're making teachers' work more doable,"
he says. "And that may be the biggest effect."

Once they started looking for them, Todd and her
colleagues saw the effects of class division and poverty
in the Jefferson County schools. Thorough racial
desegregation had not, it seemed, led to thorough class
desegregation. At 40 of 90 elementary schools in the
district, 75 percent or more of the students came from
low-income homes. And the effects of these high
concentrations of poverty were striking: poor students
in Louisville, black and white, fared worse when they
attended schools filled with other poor kids. In
elementary school, 61 percent of poor students at mostly
low-income schools scored proficient in reading,
compared with 71 percent of poor students at majority-
middle-class schools. For math, the comparative
proficiency rates were 52 percent to 63 percent. Because
black students were disproportionately poor, they were
more likely to attend high-poverty schools, and this was
contributing to the district's pronounced black-white
achievement gap.

Todd and her planners wanted to tackle the problem, she
says, but they were mindful of going too far in their
efforts and losing the support of parents. In other
districts - including Cincinnati, Evanston, Ill., Bibb
County, Ga., and Madison, Wis. - the reaction to the
Supreme Court's ruling had been to move to dismantle
racial-integration programs. Todd and other school
officials didn't want integration redefined to turn into
no integration all. To get a handle on a new plan, Todd
turned to an heir of James Coleman: the researcher John
Powell.

In the 1960s, Powell was one of the only African-
American students in his advanced high-school classes in
Detroit; when he became the class valedictorian, a
teacher told him he wasn't the smartest student. He now
directs the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and
Ethnicity at Ohio State University, and he says he still
thinks that race is a category with singular power. But
he also appreciates the stark effects of segregating
poor kids. "Ever since the Coleman Report, we've seen
that there's a high correlation between good schools and
schools that are integrated socioeconomically as well as
racially," he says. "I think everyone agrees that what
we need are more good schools."

In Louisville, Powell lent his expertise to Todd and her
team. They came up with a computer-generated map that
shows what Powell defines as the district's areas of
"low opportunity." Todd, who is 61 and taught every
grade in the Louisville schools before becoming an
administrator, went over the map with me one day last
December. The map used two different measures of class
to identify Jefferson County's areas of disadvantage:
income level and the educational attainment of adults.
(To gauge disadvantage, districts embarking on class-
based integration often use who among their students
receives free or reduced lunch; Powell, however,
contends that this is a relatively crude measure.) Using
census data, Todd's team identified the zones in the
district in which households fall below the average
income and education levels, with fewer adults who have
finished high school or gone to college or beyond.
Finally, the team added one more factor: a higher-than-
average number of minorities, almost all of them
African-Americans or Hispanics.

The map's class-plus-race formula revealed a major
partition. One region, which Todd's team called
Geographic Area A, is a mermaid-shaped swath of blue,
with its head in Louisville's West End, just south of
the Ohio River, and its tail to the south. The region
encompasses the parts of the district with a higher-
than-average minority population, lower-than-average
median income and lower-than-average adult educational
attainment. In Geographic Area A live about 30 percent
of Jefferson County's students. The rest of the county,
colored yellow, included everyone else - the better off,
better educated and whiter Geographic Area B.

What if the district were to use this map as a guide for
school integration? Instead of maintaining each school
as no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent
black, Todd's team could propose that each school have
no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent of
students from Geographic Area A. By distributing
students from the district's residential zones of
disadvantage, the new plan would integrate the schools
by class. There would no longer be 40 elementary schools
with heavily poor-student populations. There could
potentially be no such schools.

Given the presumed boost to test scores resulting from
distributing poor students more widely, you might wonder
why Todd's team retained race as an admissions factor at
all. To answer this, it's worth considering the
country's existing examples of purely class-based
integration. The best known is in Wake County, N.C. With
134,000 students, the Wake County school district ranks
19 among the country's 20 largest, spanning 800 square
miles that include bleak tracts in the city of Raleigh,
mansion-filled suburban cul-de-sacs and rural roads
ending in the fresh earth of a new subdivision. The
student population is about half white, one-quarter
African-American and one-quarter Hispanic, Asian and
multiracial. The district voluntarily pursued race-based
integration in the 1980s and '90s. In 2000, after the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit began to
frown on the use of race in student assignment - a
harbinger of the Supreme Court's stance last year - the
district began assigning kids to schools based on the
income level of the geographic zone they lived in. The
aim was to balance the schools so that no more than 40
percent of the students at each one come from a low-
income area. (This year, the district added another
goal: to have no more than 25 percent of students at any
one school for whom English is a second language.)

Wake County adopted class-based integration with the
hard-nosed goal of raising test scores. The strategy was
simple: no poor schools, no bad schools. And indeed, the
district has posted striking improvements in the test
scores of black and low-income students: in 1995, only
40 percent of the black students in Wake County in the
third through eighth grades scored at grade level in
state reading tests; by last year, the rate had almost
doubled, to 82.5 percent. Statewide scores for black
students also got better over the same time period, but
not by as much. Wake County's numbers improve as
students get older: 92 percent of all eighth graders
read at or above grade level, including about 85 percent
of black students and about 80 percent of low-income
students. (Math scores are lower, following a statewide
trend that reflects a change in the grading scale.) The
district has achieved these results even as the share of
low-income students over all has increased from about 30
percent a decade ago to about 40 percent today.

But the lessons of Wake County, Powell and Todd argue,
don't apply everywhere. "In different districts, you
have different geographic patterns," Powell says. "So
you need different integration models to shop around."
To begin with, Louisville is less affluent - more than
60 percent of its elementary school students receive
free or reduced lunches, compared with Wake County's 40
percent. In Wake County, the vast majority of the poor
students are black and Hispanic, and so mixing kids by
class tightly correlates to mixing them by race. But in
Jefferson County, more than a third of the kids who
receive free or reduced lunches are white. As a result,
redistributing students by class alone might still
isolate them by race.

This is a limitation of class-based integration that
holds true elsewhere. The city of San Francisco, for
instance, has undergone substantial racial resegregation
since retooling its diversity plan to emphasize
socioeconomic factors. Even in Wake County, the fraction
of students in racially segregated schools has climbed a
bit over the last decade, from 25 percent to 32 percent.
A 2006 paper by the education researchers Sean Reardon,
John T. Yun and Michal Kurlaender crunched census data
across the country and concluded that "given the extent
of residential racial segregation in the United States,
it is unlikely that race-neutral income-integration
policies will significantly reduce school racial
segregation, although there is reason to believe that
such policies are likely to have other beneficial
effects on schooling."

Many big cities have a different problem. Simple
demographics dictate that they can't really integrate
their schools at all, by either race or class. Consider
the numbers for Detroit (74 percent low-income students;
91 percent black), Los Angeles (77 percent low-income;
85 percent black and Hispanic), New York City (74
percent; 63 percent), Washington (64 percent; 93
percent), Philadelphia (71 percent; 79 percent), Chicago
(74 percent; 88 percent) and Boston (71 percent; 76
percent). In theory, big cities can diversify their
schools by class and race by persuading many more
middle-class and white parents to choose public school
over private school or by combining forces with the
well-heeled suburbs that surround them. But short of
those developments, big cities are stuck. "The options
have shrunk," says Tom Payzant, a former superintendent
of schools in Boston.

Notably, there are a good many districts that have
evaded this predicament. They are particularly found in
the South, in part because of a historical accident.
Because it was predominantly rural for longer, the South
has more countywide school districts than the North. An
unintended consequence was to ease the way to
integration. Instead of city schools filled with poor
black and Hispanic kids separated from a burgeoning ring
of suburban districts stocked with affluent whites (and
in some places, Asians), one district controls student
assignment for the region.

Even in school districts with a mix of students of
different races and income levels, however, there is no
one-size-fits-all approach to socioeconomic integration,
as underscored by the differences between Wake County
and Jefferson County. Wake County's demographics entail
that mixing kids by class, on its own, produces a fair
degree of racial integration. Jefferson County's
demographics don't necessarily work this way. And so
civil rights lawyers suggest that districts configured
like Jefferson County should continue to pursue racial
diversity directly. They point to cities like Berkeley,
Calif., which has an assignment plan that primarily
relies on socioeconomics, but like Geography Area A also
factors in the racial composition of a neighborhood to
guard against resegregation along racial lines. "It's
not either-or," says Anurima Bhargava, an education
lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

In addition, there's a tacit liberal constitutional
agenda at work in hybrid class-race approaches to
integration: better to test Kennedy's opinion, with its
support for the drawing of "race conscious" school
boundaries, than to retreat further than is in fact
required. "For Kennedy, there are ways of taking race
into account," John Powell says. "It's just the method
that's in question. How do you do it? We need to find
out what's still permitted." He also points out that
African-Americans are more likely than whites to be poor
over generations - a bigger hurdle than a short stint in
a low-income bracket.

The continuing attention to race aligns with the
internal politics of Louisville and its suburbs. Many of
today's parents grew up there and tend to remember and
care about overcoming their county's Jim Crow legacy. In
1975, when a federal judge first ordered the city and
its suburbs to desegregate, the Ku Klux Klan
demonstrated, and the next day about 150 white
protestors attacked eight school buses filled with black
students. "We had tough times here when the buses
burned," says Ann Elmore, a black member of the
Jefferson County School Board. "We can still include
race as a factor in our plan, and let me say I think
it's important that we do."

Elsewhere in the United States, it is too soon to tell
how the politics of class-based integration (Wake
County) or class-plus-race (Jefferson County) will play
out. Richard Kahlenberg makes the case for shifting
integration policies primarily or solely to being class-
based over the next decade or two. What's fair, he asks,
about giving a spot in a coveted magnet program to the
son of a South Asian college professor or an African-
American politician over the daughter of a white
waitress? Over time, such injustices threaten to sour
white parents on the whole diversity enterprise, whereas
giving poor kids a boost, whatever their color, is far
less controversial. Polls at the time of the Supreme
Court's 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, which
concerned affirmative action at public universities,
showed public support running 2 to 1 for giving poorer
kids a leg up in going to college, as opposed to 2 to 1
against race-based preferences. In her majority opinion
in the case, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor famously said
she thought that racial preferences would continue only
for another 25 years. Barack Obama has said, looking
ahead to his daughters' college applications, that they
don't deserve an admissions break - an acknowledgment
that the mix of race, affirmative action and privilege
is a complicated one.

To catch on nationwide, however, class-based integration
would have to generate momentum that it has so far
lacked. In his State of the Union address in January,
President Bush urged action "to help liberate poor
children trapped in failing public schools." And yet a
provision in the No Child Left Behind Act that
theoretically allows students to transfer depends on the
availability of open spaces elsewhere and has barely
been utilized. The administration may have advocated
class-based integration to the Supreme Court, but Bush
officials haven't used their signature education law to
make it happen.

If Congress were to revise No Child Left Behind to
encourage more transfers of poor students to middle-
class schools, would poor students drag down their
better-off peers? In the end, the prospects of class-
based integration will probably rise or fall on the
answer to this question. Socioeconomic integration may
be good for the have-nots, but if the haves think their
kids are paying too great a price, they will kill it off
at the polls. Richard Kahlenberg argues that the key is
to ensure there is a solidly middle-class majority at as
many schools as possible. That majority will then set
the tone, he argues. Kahlenberg says that more research
is needed to pin down the percentage of middle-class
kids that a school needs to have to serve all its
students well. Maybe a school can go as high as 50
percent low-income without losing ground. Or maybe it's
telling that in Wake County, a proposal to increase the
ceiling for low-income students from 40 percent to 50
percent died a swift death last fall after concerted
protest.

Whatever the exact answer, there is some support for the
view that schools can handle a substantial fraction of
poor students without sacrificing performance. In Wake
County, test scores of middle-class students have risen
since instituting income-based integration.
Additionally, Kahlenberg points out that middle-class
students are generally less influenced by a school's
environment because they tend to learn more at home, and
that the achievement of white students has not declined
in specific schools that experienced racial (and thus
some class) desegregation.

Would schools need to track students by ability to
protect middle-class students, who are more often
higher-achieving than their low-income peers? Perhaps
not. In a 2006 longitudinal study of an accelerated
middle-school math program in Nassau County, N.Y., which
grouped students heterogeneously, the authors found that
students at all achievement levels, as well as minority
and low-income students, were more likely than the
students in tracked classes to take advanced math in
high school. In addition, the kids who came into the
program as math whizzes performed as well as other top-
achievers in homogenous classes.

This study underscores Ronald Ferguson's point about the
value of seating students of different backgrounds and
abilities in class together, as opposed to tracking
them. Still, it's worth noting that less than 15 percent
of the students studied in Nassau County were low-
income. So the math study doesn't tell us what happens
to the high-achieving middle-class kids when close to
half of their classmates aren't as well off.

At the end of February, Todd started showing the map of
mermaid-shaped Geographic Area A, which she hoped to use
to implement the new assignment system, to the parents
of Jefferson County. Todd would start her presentation
with quotes from Justice Kennedy and from Justice
Breyer's dissent; she especially wanted to remind her
audiences of the sentiment Breyer expressed by quoting
former Justice Thurgood Marshall: "Unless our children
begin to learn together, there is little hope that our
people will ever learn to live together."

Todd's first stop was at a forum sponsored jointly by
the Urban League and the N.A.A.C.P., groups associated
with Louisville's black establishment. Most of their
members supported the school district, but some clergy
members who worked with the city's black youth spoke
against it. The Rev. John Carter, associate minister at
Green Street Baptist Church, pointed to the district's
black-white achievement gap and called for a return to
neighborhood schools and an earlier era of black self-
reliance.

As more forums followed in high-school auditoriums
across the county, white parents asked a different
question: How would the new assignment plan affect their
kids? Would they be forced to switch schools in second,
third or fourth grade? "We like the diversity," a white
parent named Niki Noe told me the next morning at her
son's elementary school, St. Matthews. "But if we have
to go to Chenoweth" - a school with lower test scores -
"we'll pull out and go to private school."

That's a serious threat to the district's well-being,
but one that Todd anticipated. She designed a
grandfather clause for kids like Noe's, so that the new
assignments would apply almost entirely to new students.
Meanwhile, at every meeting, Todd polled parents on
whether they cared about maintaining diverse schools.
The University of Kentucky also conducted a telephone
survey with 654 parents of elementary schoolers. In
April, Todd called me, elated and relieved, with the
results: 88 percent of parents supported enrollment
guidelines "to ensure that students learn with students
from different races and backgrounds." Todd said she had
dropped Breyer's dissent in Meredith from her
presentation; she was no longer feeling frustrated with
the court. "It's been a personal emotional trek, but I
think we've come out better for it," she said in May.

Carter, the proponent of black-self reliance, was
feeling more at ease, too. He had come to see the virtue
of mixing kids by income level. "Once I did the
research, I was pretty impressed by the economic part of
it," he said. Carter had taken note of the district's
data showing that a switch to neighborhood schools, as
he had first advocated, would mean that median household
income would range from a high of more than $100,000 at
the wealthiest school to about $8,300 at the poorest. A
split between rich students and poor schools, he agreed,
was the wrong path.

It is, of course, the path taken by most of the country.
And yet at the end of May, the Jefferson County School
Board voted unanimously to make Geographic Area A the
basis for integrating elementary schools for the 2009
school year, a new chapter in the district's history. As
the schools shift to the new class-plus-race formula,
the district will closely watch the test scores of black
students and poor students, hoping for an upsurge, and
those of middle-class students, hoping to see
achievement hold steady. And if they do, maybe the
court's decision in Meredith will come to seem less like
a cause for regret and more like an unexpected
opportunity.

Emily Bazelon is a senior editor at Slate who writes
frequently about legal issues. Her last article for the
magazine was about autistic girls.

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