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.