Integrated effort to fight housing, school barriers?

Posted by on October 24, 2010

That elusive ‘geography of opportunity’

In a wide-ranging article that touches on current housing and education policy — and on their intersection — Greg Marx writes on the Remapping Debate website that “school policy and housing policy are intimately linked — especially with respect to integration.” Without other interventions, “segregated neighborhoods will create segregated schools, and segregated schools will perpetuate segregated neighborhoods.” In contrast, the benefits of economic integration have been demonstrated in the new study on the Montgomery County Schools by The Century Foundation. “Just as the existence of white suburban oases facilitated school segregation in the 1960s and ’70s without schools in those oases having to actively turn students away,” writes Marx, “the county’s mix of inclusionary zoning and public housing facilitated the integration of classrooms with no explicit effort on the part of the school district.” Marx then quotes the Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg: “the administration’s efforts take as a given that our schools are going to be segregated, and then do their best at trying to make separate schools equal.” “For all the administration’s talk about comprehensive approaches to urban policy and its invocation of the Civil Rights struggle,” Marx finds that “with respect to racial and economic integration, an uneven picture is emerging.”

Read more: http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/integrated-effort-fight-housing-school-barriers?page=0,2