Economic School Integration Update

Yesterday, Matt Yglesias at the Center for American Progress and I sparred about whether socioeconomic school integration could in fact work on a widespread level.  Yglesias supports the idea of integrating schools but thinks there are important demographic limitations to making the idea work. (His post is here; my response is here).

Last night, Yglesias responded to my response by suggesting there wasn’t much of a disagreement, which I find odd.   I read him as suggesting that socioeconomic integration, to be successful, requires that low-income students be given a chance to attend schools that are 20% low-income or below, which is “literally impossible” given that roughly 40% of students are low-income nationwide.  My reading of the evidence is that students will usually benefit from moving from a 50%-100% low-income school to one that is below 50%.

I think that’s a big difference.