Busing fight highlights struggles with diversity
By Dakarai I. Aarons/Education Week
More than a half-century after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered schools desegregated, districts are still grappling with how best to create the kind of demographically diverse public schools that many experts believe improve outcomes for disadvantaged students. The recent decision by a North Carolina district to move from a nationally recognized student-assignment policy that promoted socioeconomic diversity to one centered around community-based schools has alarmed advocates of greater integration in the schools. Yet school district leaders elsewhere, including in San Francisco and Kentucky, continue to work on crafting student-assignment plans that allow them to make demographic diversity a priority. They are doing so against a legal backdrop that changed dramatically three years ago, when the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that made it harder for school leaders to base student-assignment decisions explicitly on race. (more...)