The U.S. Education Secretary John King is frustrated by what he describes as the “ahistorical nature” of conversations today about how to integrate schools. Speaking at a Century Foundation panel on Tuesday to highlight two recent reports by the left-leaning think tank, King said that the need for “urgency” when it comes to making classrooms more socioeconomically and racially diverse is sometimes thwarted by communities who see the current lack of real integration as a fact over which they have no control. That, he argued, is simply not true.
Take school-zoning laws in Brooklyn. While pockets of the borough have become more integrated in recent years, some schools, King said, remain “decisively” more segregated in part because of the way the lines for school attendance are drawn. That’s in part because the community chose to allow a zoning line that “moves like a snake,” he argued. King is pushing cities and districts to make deliberate choices that yield better outcomes. Districts looking to integrate could, he posited, instead take two segregated elementary schools (say, one serving affluent white families and another serving low-income families of color) and instead create two integrated campuses, one for kindergarten through second grade, and another for the third through fifth grades.
[For more of this story, written by Emily Deruy, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...esegregation/479013/]
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