Brown vs. Board of Education Lives

Yesterday, The New York Times Magazine published a very important story on a new way in which school districts are trying to revive the promise of Brown v. Board of Education.   The article focuses on how Louisville, Kentucky’s school district – whose race-based integration plan was struck down last year by the U.S. Supreme Court – has responded with a more viable plan the integrates schools primarily by economic class rather than race. 

The piece, written by Emily Bazelon, notes that Louisville’s new plan looks at parental income and education as well as race in deciding student placements.  As I’ve written elsewhere, such a focus is likely to be more legally viable, since it uses race as one of many factors and it doesn’t categorize individual students by skin color.  (Instead, the plan looks at the income, education and race of students' parents at a neighborhood level.)

Moreover, as an educational manner, the new plan directly addresses what research finds to be a central impediment to closing the achievement gap: the concentration of low income students of whatever race in high poverty schools.  Under the old plan, some Louisville schools were nicely balanced by race but were all poor.  These schools promoted the social benefits of racial integration but lacked the academic benefits of economic integration.  The new plan’s primary focus on income and education seeks to avoid that problem.

The New York Times Magazine article also examines Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina’s innovative economic school integration plan, which caps low income enrollment at 40% in any given school, and gives no consideration to race.  As Bazelon notes, the plan has been highly successful in raising student achievement and in indirectly promoting racial integration as a byproduct.  (For more on Wake County’s success, click here.)  As the author rightly notes, the sole reliance on economic status may not always produce a racial integration dividend as robust as in Wake County.  Where it doesn’t, it is entirely appropriate for districts to consider race in order to produce the important benefits of racial diversity – promoting racial tolerance and social cohesion.  Using race as a last resort, rather than the first, is far more likely to pass legal muster.

Last year, The Century Foundation identified some 40 school districts that look at socioeconomic status as a factor in deciding what schools students will attend.   Since then, the number has grown to include not only Louisville, but also Des Moines, IO; Burlington, VT; Beaumont, TX; Lafayette, LA; Napa Valley, CA; and Fairfax County, VA.   

Bazelon’s article makes a compelling case that socioeconomic school integration represents the wave of the future.  While the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision curtailing racial integration plans was unfortunate, it may, ironically, push districts to do something that they should have been doing all along: address head on the educational divide between low income and middle class schools.