Cultivating School Integration through Community Partnerships and Specialty Programs

ABSTRACT

More than sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, racial and economic segregation in American schools is deepening. At the same time, dynamic racial and economic change in cities and suburbs offers new opportunities for intentional school integration. School leaders are an integral part of those opportunities. We draw on the integration theory of choice to explore how leadership can nurture the policies and practices that contribute to diverse, inclusive school communities in four U.S. metropolitan area schools. We purposefully selected the sites with an eye toward variation in grades served (pre-K, elementary, middle and high), locale (e.g., urban, suburban or regional) and commitment to intentionally fostering integration. Based on 22 interviews with a range of school leaders connected to the sites, including principals, directors, assistant principals and superintendents, we find that leaders who implement specialized programming and demonstrate agility with financial and human resources can help support school integration in the face of systemic segregation. We close with recommendations for policy and practice.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We define equity as providing all students the resources they need to succeed. Center for Public Education (January, 2016). Educational Equity: What Does It Mean? How Do We Know When We Reach It?

2. It is important to clarify the terms segregation, desegregation and integration. Segregation not only refers to illegal racial separation, but the policies that engender continued racial isolation. While desegregation refers to the removal of barriers that allow segregation to persist, it is also often used as a proxy for diversity; however, diversity and desegregation are not synonymous (King, 1963; Hannah-Jones, 2017). Integration involves “community wide systemic effort to dismantle this [segregationist] culture” and create a more inclusive school and, in turn, society (Powell, 2005, p. 5). We use integration and intentional diversity interchangeably throughout the article.

3. Race is a social construction and we acknowledge that the racial/ethnic terms and categories used in this article grow out of that construction.

4. Scholars have also pointed out that the research on school desegregation is too often centered on White policy self-interest, with a focus on achievement (often presented as racial data without context), instead of the role of race within the system itself (Horsford, 2019). Further, it often discounts “Black voices and experiences” (Horsford, 2019, p. 268).

5. We use the term Hispanic as a gender inclusive label to denote those with Latin American ancestry, rather than Latinx, a label only 3% of Hispanics use in the United States (Noe-Bustamente, Mora & Hugo Lopez, 2020).

6. Interview protocols for different stakeholder groups were developed from study of social-psychological, sociological, legal, political science, and education policy literature related to school desegregation. Earlier versions of protocol questions for leaders, stakeholders, or teachers have been piloted and used in several national studies of magnet schools that one member of the research team was involved in as a research associate with the UCLA Civil Rights Project (Orfield et al., 2015). The family protocol was informed by prior studies of school gentrification (e.g., Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara, Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Jennifer Burns Stillman, Gentrification and Schools (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2012; Linn Posey-Maddox, When Middle Class Parents Choose Urban Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

7. One member of the research team also took nearly verbatim notes during each interview and added field and memo notes immediately after they concluded. We also conducted a second round of interviews with school leaders, focused on clarifying key themes and findings that emerged during the first round.