One way to boost achievement among poor kids? Make sure they have classmates who aren’t poor.
Protesters get up and shout ‘hey, hey, ho, ho, resegregation has to go’ after the Wake County, N.C. school board voted in 2010 to end the county’s diversity-based assignment policy. (Photo by Ethan Hyman/News Observer)
Race-based school integration plans helped boost black students’ achievement after Brown v. Board of Education, but those plans fell out of favor in recent decades as districts persuaded courts that they had moved beyond their separate-but-equal past.
The result in many places? A system of resegregated schools.
But in a small number of school districts, officials are trying a different approach, assigning children to school based in part on their family’s income. And when poor kids mix with richer kids in class, they tend to do better academically, especially in math, according to a new study of large North Carolina school districts that was published in the journal Urban Education.
The researchers examined Wake County, the only one of North Carolina’s largest districts that replaced its race-based school assignment plan with an effort to integrate schools by family income. The move caused a furor in Wake County, where voters ousted some school board members because of the plan.
“I was curious as to whether it had much of an effect, since people were so upset about it,” said William A. Darity Jr., a professor at Duke University and co-author of the study. “Our answer is: It doesn’t do as well as the race-based plan in terms of producing higher levels of diversity. But it does appear to have some benefit for student performance.”
Adopted in 2000, the plan said that no more than 40 percent of children in a school should be low-income, as measured by free lunch eligibility, and no more than 25 percent should be performing below grade level on state tests.
The state’s other four largest districts were less aggressive about trying to maintain diversity. Generally, they assigned children to schools based on their One way to boost achievement among poor kids? Make sure they have classmates who aren’t poor. - The Washington Post: