More on the Practicalities of School Integration
Kevin Carey has offered up a thoughtful response to my MLK Day post on school segregation, calling integration-focused school reform impractical. Although integration doesn't work in every region--some are just too residentially segregated for it to be possible--there are wide swaths of the country where far more partnerships could exist between high-poverty school districts and geographically contiguous low-poverty ones. Think about the regions surrounding the mid-size northeastern cities, such as Providence, Albany, Hartford, New Haven, Newark, and so on. There is also a lot of racial and socioeconomic diversity within the suburban counties outside major cities, such as Westchester and Nassau counties in New York.
But Kevin also wonders whether inter-district transfer programs in such regions are too politically thorny to scale up: "What if, for example, a large number of minority students enroll in a neighboring district where their parents have no electoral representation? On some level, political accountability, resources, and attendance have to