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.