Integration and Diversity

Research in this section explores the impacts and benefits of racial and ethnic diversity in education, as well as resegregation trends and remedies in our nation's public schools.

The Forgotten Choice? Rethinking Magnet Schools in a Changing Landscape

Historically, magnet schools have been an important part of school districts' efforts to improve equity and quality in our nation's schools and enroll twice as many students as charter schools. But as charters – created without fundamental civil rights considerations - have become a central focus of school choice proponents, federal funds for magnet schools have been frozen. A new report, The Forgotten Choice? Rethinking Magnet Schools in a Changing Landscape, looks at the policy effects of neglecting magnet schools.

Still Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration

Honoring the nation's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, The CRP/PDC and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) release Still Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration; A Manual for Parents, Educators and Advocates. This Second Edition of The Manual provides valuable guidance and information about how communities and school districts can promote racial diversity and address racial isolation in schools nationwide

Are Teachers Prepared for Racially Changing Schools?

Honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., this new study, part of the Initiative on School Integration, recently created by the CRP/PDC after the Supreme Court’s June 2007 decisions limited voluntary integration in our nation's schools. This report reveals the challenges for teachers and school leaders as they face many different kinds of situations with regard to race, ethnicity and class.

The Last Have Become First: Rural and Small Town America Lead the Way on Desegregation

Back in the early l960s when there were civil rights struggles across the South in large cities, small towns and rural areas, it would have been shocking to suggest that rural areas would become beacons of interracial education while the great urban centers of the Northeast would have vastly more segregated schools, often only a few percentage points from total apartheid. Southern leaders at the time such as Alabama Governor George Wallace and Mississippi Senator John Stennis often predicted that that the North would never desegregate, attacking what he called Northern hypocrisy. The statistics we present in this report shows that such a pattern has clearly developed, though caused in a way they never suspected--driven by a Supreme Court that first limited and then rolled back desegregation efforts to the point where desegregated schools tend to be in areas without large areas of residential segregation. Policies and legal requirements for desegregation in urban schools have now been largely nullified by court decisions but those that desegregated the rural and small town South remain in effect.

Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation, and the Need for New Integration Strategies

This report released by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA finds that for the first time in three decades, the South is in danger of losing its leadership as the nation's most integrated schools. The report examines the effects of the dual processes of racial transformation and resegregation on the educational opportunity of students, as well as the relationship between race and poverty and its implications in light of the recent Supreme Court decisions. The report concludes with recommendations for school districts.

The Segregation of American Teachers

Data from a survey of over 1,000 teachers in K-12 public schools across the country show that our teaching force — like public school students — is largely segregated. Teachers of different races are teaching students of very different racial composition, adding an extra dimension to growing student racial segregation.

PICS: Statement of American Social Scientists of Research on School Desegregation Submitted to US Supreme Court

A social science statement has been submitted to the United States Supreme Court with the signatures of 553 social scientists and researchers, urging the Court to permit the continuation of voluntary race-conscious student assignment plans in American public schools.