Commentary: The shoe, the gourd & integration
Written by Alan Gottlieb on Mar 18th, 2012. | Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Alan Gottlieb is publisher of Education News Colorado. The views expressed below are his alone and do not reflect the positions of EdNews or the Public Education and Business Coalition.
I can think of no better preface to this piece than this wonderful clip from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:
A lively comment stream last week on an Education News Colorado story about Denver’s new SchoolChoice system prompted me to take a journey into the not-too-distant past. From 2001-2007, the second two-thirds of my decade at The Piton Foundation, I focused a lot of attention and a fair number of dollars on promoting socio-economic school integration.
I believed then, as I do today, that integrated schools serve society well in a number of ways. While I subscribe to the softer arguments about promoting diversity and tolerance, what I found most compelling were the data on how low-income students fare better in economically mixed schools.
I won’t rehash the arguments here, but you can look back at some of the research I commissioned while at