Socioeconomic Integration in the Classroom

Posted by on November 15, 2010

A question of numbers

In a post on her Policy Notebook blog for Education Week, Sara Mead writes that discussions of the Century Foundation’s study on socioeconomic integration leave out “the elephant in the room”: the fact that even in the absence of logistical or geographic barriers, the United States has too many poor and low-income kids to make feasible a 35/65 percent split between low-income and middle class students in every school. “If there were no residential segregation, if poor and low-income students were perfectly geographically dispersed such that their percentage in every district, school, and classroom perfectly matched their percentage in the population at large — the percentage of low-income students in every school, district, and classroom would be too large to produce the benefits of socio-economic integration identified in the Century Foundation’s research.” Moreover, the success of these policies themselves depends on the continuation of the income segregation necessary to create predominantly middle class schools in the first place. In a nation in which 21 percent of children live in poverty and 42 percent live in low-income families, Mead writes that greater economic integration can be, at best, a solution for only a fraction of children.

Read more: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/sarameads_policy_notebook/2010/10/the_limits_of_socioeconomic_integration.html