From that Ed Next poll, this caught my eye:

Race- and Income-based School Integration

Education Next/PEPG survey results show that 63 percent of the public are opposed to assigning students to schools based on racial background in order to promote school diversity, a practice banned by the Supreme Court in 2007.

• Only 16 percent say that districts “definitely” or “probably” should be allowed to take students’ racial background into account; 21 percent of the public are unsure.
• Among African Americans, only 30 percent think districts should be allowed to take race into account.
• Surprisingly, on the question of assigning students to schools based on family income—a strategy now being considered by many districts as an alternative to race-based policies—the opposition is even greater. Only 13 percent support the idea; 62 percent are opposed and the remainder uncertain.

Interesting to note that liberals Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias have both blogged recently about how socioeconomic and racial integration (the 2008 kind of integration, which seeks to overcome housing patterns; not the 1950s kind, which sought to overcome de jure separation of black and white) won’t work. (Drum is here; Yglesias is here and here.) Richard Kahlenberg doesn’t like this anti-integration trend: “No one should minimize the obstacles to achieving fully integrated schools, but particularly from our liberal friends, we could use a little more ‘yes, we can.’”

“Yes, we can” is great, unless we can’t. I wrote about integration in this week’s Gadfly. Drum and Yglesias are right—these ideas about socially and racially diversifying schools are logistically impossible in most urban areas and logistically arduous in others. Furthermore, they probably can’t help students learn more. Parents (black, white, you name it) are pretty united in the conviction that children should either be assigned to close-to-home schools or parents should have more varied public-school choice options. The push for socially engineered ratios of white to black, poor to middle-class in schools manages to detract from parents’ wishes and to distract from a focus on academic achievement and improving the schools that currently exist.

Nice to see that McCain and Obama (or, at least, their representation) don’t support radical school-diversity initiatives... at least as of this week.

If you live in Seattle and you just can’t seem to slake your thirst for discussions about school diversity, I’ll be on the David Boze talk-radio show today, chatting about the direction that some districts (including, perhaps, Seattle) are taking their school-assignment plans. Much auditory hand wringing and finger wagging promises to go down.

I wouldn’t link so often to pieces on NRO if a) such pieces weren’t so interesting and b) weren’t so well written. Even that outlet’s more langorous languorous libations manage to refresh. Here’s just such an article, by John Derbyshire, which uses about 800 words more than needed to make its point but which is nonetheless fully enjoyable. 

Derbyshire notes that most Americans, accustomed to observing inequality in most things, bristle when inequality of “smarts” crosses their paths. “The problem with this smartocracy,” he writes, “is, we have this itchy feeling that it’s un-American.” He makes many of the arguments usually associated with Charles Murray, who is not shy about pointing out that people with low I.Q.s are, generally, not going to do well in school and that not much can be done about it. (Murray makes precisely this argument in his forthcoming book, Real Education.)

Yes and no, of course. While it doesn’t hurt to acknowledge that a bell curve exists in academic achievement, as in most things, it’s tough to prove that the entire curve can’t be moved—i.e., that “average” can’t become better.

But Derbyshire is right that scads of people don’t like to acknowledge that some folks are smart, some aren’t, and that’s how it is. A perfect example is the widespread opposition to separating students by their abilities and teaching to those abilities. Instead of undertaking that sensible approach, we are bombarded with misguided ideas such as, for example, having all students enroll in AP classes, a proposition that defies logic. If AP means what it is supposed to me (the word “advanced” is, after all, in its name), then all kids cannot expect to take AP classes and succeed in them.

I read in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday that race+class school-assignment plans will succeed only if students are not just integrated at the school-level but also at the class-level. You see what’s happening here? It’s diversity creep, and it threatens to do a lot of damage (more than it’s already done) by allotting pupils to classes based not on students’ abilities but on their races and classes, all in the name of promoting some type of feel-good amalgam in which, we are told, poor and minority students, awash in the middle-class glow that emanates from their middle-class classmates, will see their academic achievement soar.

What nonsense. What would happen, of course, is either a) the less savvy students—many of whom will be poor and minority students—will not be able to keep up, or b) the class will regress to the lowest common denominator of academic rigor, such that the least-advanced pupil is able to digest the material therein served.

We should be wary of this and beat it back whenever and wherever it chooses to pop up.

My take on yesterday’s New York Times Magazine piece on “integration” is here. (I’m not employing around integration so-called “contemptuous quotes“; I’m merely noting that the terms “integration” and “segregation,” which once were used to denote, respectively, the de jure combination and separation of black and white students, are today used in reference to de facto racial separation caused by housing patterns. But the two different meanings are too often conflated, which is why we must call attention to the way in which they’re used.)

One part of the Times Magazine article that I didn’t have enough space to explore is the idea that new class+race school assignments hold much promise for significantly elevating academic achievement. This contention is, I think, a real stretch, especially when so many other curricular and instructional and management reforms (many of which do not involve complicated schemes) would do so much more to boost student learning. I suspect that not a few diversity proponents have simply realized that fluffier justifications for busing pupils hither and yon do not, for most parents, outweigh the flaws of complicated school assignment plans. Thus the shift toward couching arguments for school diversity in terms of increasing academic performance.

Update: The Wall Street Journal reports on a demographic shift that could potentially bring more diversity to inner-city schools... potentially.

Photo by Flickr user blackheritage.

Race-based school integration is on the way out. But Richard Kahlenberg thinks, and hopes, that economic integration is on the way in. Jefferson County, Kentucky, where the school assignment policy discriminated by race until the Supreme Court put an end to it, has decided that integrating classrooms by income is a legal way to achieve diversity. (Although, Kahlenberg points out, a “white Louisville lawyer” still thinks Jefferson’s new plan could be challenged in court.)

I won’t dive into the specifics of Jefferson’s new system, but anyone who reads the paragraphs in which Kahlenberg describes it will have to stop... and reread... and reread again. Why? Because Jefferson County has needlessly complicated its k-12 structure with statistical muck that serves no identifiable purpose. If only school districts heaped the same effort and resources into recruiting quality teachers that they do into shuffling students around their domains.

Economic integration is a flop. It won’t work; it doesn’t work. (Kahlenberg consistently cites Wake County, North Carolina, as his example of success. If success is pissed-off parents and lawsuits, he’s right.) When I wrote an article about economic integration last year, I called the piece “There They Go Again“—because proponents of income diversity in schools are trying to get there by repeating the same, failed methods that proponents of racial diversity in classrooms used 30 years ago.