New Hope For School Integration

Posted by on December 17, 2012

What are we waiting for?

In a lengthy article in American Educator, Richard Kahlenberg discusses obstacles he’s faced in promoting socioeconomic school integration over the past 16 years, the overwhelming evidence in support of it as an education policy, and promising signs of its undertaking nationally. At present, policymakers on the left and right find it politically safer to support “separate but equal” institutions for rich and poor, though to date no one has made high-poverty schools work at scale (Kahlenberg addresses the case of KIPP in a sidebar). Decades of research indicate that as the poverty level of a school rises, the average achievement level falls. And the country’s relatively high rates of economic school segregation relative to other countries may explain our lack of cost-effectiveness. Kahlenberg cites a recent rigorous cost-benefit analysis, which found that averaged out over all students, the public benefit per student from socioeconomic integration is more than $20,000, and the combined public and private benefits amount to $33,000 per student, far exceeding the cost of $6,340 per student required to integrate. This public return (a factor of 3.3) and total return (public and private, 5.2) outstrips almost all other investments in education, including private school vouchers, reduced class size, and improvements in teacher quality. Kahlenberg warns that concentrated poverty is growing, and ends by discussing lessons that have emerged around making socioeconomic integration politically sustainable.

Read more: http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/