School Integration’s Comeback
President Obama’s budget includes a new $120 million grant to support school integration.
For decades, researchers have found that integrating schools by race and economic status is one of the most powerful levers available for improving opportunities for kids. And for decades, Democratic and Republican presidents alike have been terrified to take any action, as visions of white backlash to forced racial busing in the 1970s danced in their heads.
That political taboo now seems to have been broken. On Tuesday, the White House announced that the president’s budget includes a new $120 million“Stronger Together” grant program to support local efforts to integrate schools by income. The proposed program would set up a competition to reward school districts or groups of districts that voluntarily take efforts to break up school-poverty concentrations. This is important because low-income students, on average, perform far better in middle-class schools than in schools where most of their classmates are poor.
In one fell swoop, the proposed program would more than double federal funding of efforts to encourage school integration. In the past, federal support for integration has consisted of a single, $100 million program for magnet schools that attract students of different backgrounds through special themes or teaching approaches.
Critics may try to demagogue the new socioeconomic-integration proposal as a return of “forced busing,” but the administration seems to be banking on the idea that new programs—which emphasize choice over compulsion and socioeconomic status over race—may have more political viability today than forced busing for racial desegregation did in the 1970s. Two new papers published by The Century Foundation should give the administration reason for confidence.
First, as my colleagues Halley Potter, Kimberly Quick, and Elizabeth Davies note in “A New Wave of School Integration,” while old efforts to integrate explicitly by School Busing No More: Obama Wants to Promote Integration on the Basis of Income - The Atlantic: