Most Americans Want To See More School Integration As Trump Destroys Existing Efforts
American schools are divided by the haves and the have-nots. Many Americans want this to change.
Over 63 years after Brown v. Board of Education made state-sanctioned school segregation illegal and set off a wave of controversial efforts to diversify districts, many schools have settled back into old patterns. Although the law no longer endorses it, schools are still divided along fault lines of race and class.
And a majority of Americans today want this to change, at least in theory.
A new study from the liberal think tank Center for American Progress analyzes the extent to which poor students are isolated in high-poverty schools, and whether parents think anything should be done about it. As it turns out, 70 percent of Americans support the economic integration of schools, even as the Trump administration just ended one of the federal government’s few programs promoting such efforts.
The group conducted a nationally representative poll of Americans on the topic of school integration, specifically focusing on socioeconomic integration instead of race. After a 2007 Supreme Court case questioned the constitutionality of using race as the single factor to integrate schools, a growing ― albeit still tiny ― number of districts have been working to integrate along economic lines. About 100 districts across the country are making concerted efforts to diversify schools economically, a number that is up from 40 districts in 2007.
This poll, according to CAP researchers, is one of the first to look at how Americans feel about these efforts.
At a moment in history when the current president of the United States was elected after running an acrimonious campaign built around marginalizing certain minority groups, the stakes for creating a more harmoniously integrated society are high, according to CAP researchers. But the stakes are also high on a more granular level. Decades of research show that the American public school system in many ways reflects a two-tiered system, where poor and wealthy students occupy separate and vastly unequal spheres.
Nearly half of the country’s low-income students ― 40 percent ― attend schools characterized by high rates of concentrated poverty. These schools typically employ less experienced teachers and receive less funding. Students who attend poor schools graduate from high school at a rate of 68 percent, compared to students who attend Most Americans Want To See More School Integration As Trump Destroys Existing Efforts | HuffPost:
