School Integration: Revisit a Good Idea

David L. Kirp (“Making Schools Work,” Sunday Review, May 20) is right that school integration has done more to improve the life chances of poor and minority children than other known interventions. He is wrong to suggest that there’s no longer any way to achieve integration and to pit it against recent school reforms that also improve life chances.

A cornerstone of the new reforms is to replace failing schools with higher performing ones. If the new schools are integrated, as a number of civil rights and new-school groups have recently proposed, we can get the best of both worlds.

JAMES S. LIEBMAN
New York, May 21, 2012

The writer, a professor at Columbia Law School, is a former chief accountability officer for the New York City Department of Education.

To the Editor:

David L. Kirp addresses the one sure-fire policy to reduce the racial achievement gap: school integration.

The Obama administration has recognized the wisdom of promoting integration in guidelines on the voluntary use of race to achieve diversity and avoid racial isolation in elementary and secondary schools. These guidelines emphasize the civic, moral and personal benefits of integration.

According to the guidelines, “racially diverse schools provide incalculable educational and civic benefits by promoting cross-racial understanding, breaking down racial and other stereotypes, and eliminating bias and prejudice.”

These civic purposes of education have all but disappeared in contemporary education reform. But even the majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s disastrous Parents Involved decision of 2007 recognized that “this nation has a moral and ethical obligation to fulfill its historic commitment to creating an integrated society that ensures equal opportunity for all of its children.”

LAWRENCE BLUM
Cambridge, Mass., May 20, 2012

The writer, a professor of liberal arts and education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is the author of the forthcoming book “High Schools, Race and America’s Future: What Students Can Teach Us About Morality, Diversity and Community.”

To the Editor:

While integration benefits children from ethnic minority backgrounds, attending ethnically diverse schools is also important for children from white ethnic majority backgrounds, as this experience contributes positively to their social cognitive development.

As I testified as an expert witness in a federal school desegregation case, developmental psychology research shows that white children who attend ethnically diverse schools have fewer negative stereotypes about African-American children, have more cross-race friendships, use more fairness reasoning when evaluating peer encounters, and display less negative bias about the potential for friendship than do white children attending all-white schools.   Diversity alone is not enough; certain conditions must be met that include equitable and cooperative school environments.

By adulthood, stereotypes are entrenched. The time to intervene is childhood, and what better and more natural way to do it than to attend schools with children from different racial and ethnic backgrounds?

MELANIE KILLEN
College Park, Md., May 20, 2012

The writer is a professor of human development at the University of Maryland, College Park.

To the Editor:

From a jail cell nearly 50 years ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “Segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”

Let us not make the mistake that the Warren court did in appealing to the better nature of those in power and describe only the harm segregation does to the black child. Instead, let us appeal to self-interest. The next time you wonder at why our youth are entitled, indifferent and apathetic, consider the very bedrock of citizenship — our public schools — and the false sense of superiority they offer.

JOY RAVONA
New York, May 20, 2012

To the Editor:

As a junior in a racially diverse private high school, I can attest to the type of integration to which David L. Kirp refers. While I agree that integration is a necessity for blacks, whites, Latinos and all minorities, there is a difference between educational and social integration.

In my school, there has been great controversy over a lack of social diversity. Sure, different races are in classes together, but in the cafeteria it’s like a different era. There isn’t racial conflict or harassment. No one is avoiding another person because of his or her race. Still, there’s an unspoken rule that almost always social circles are divided by color.

I agree with Mr. Kirp that Brown v. Board of Education must remain an integral tenet in our judicial practices. But I think a social movement advocating further acceptance and integration is absolutely essential.

RACHEL DeCHIARA
South Orange, N.J., May 20, 2012