Roughly a mile away, the demographics at Billingsville, another K-5, sat in stark contrast. Located in the Grier Heights neighborhood — an old farming community founded by a former slave — Billingsville was a high-poverty school serving an all-Black student population.

“We operated in silos that I never understood as a principal,” Hash said.

Portable classrooms on Cotswold’s overcrowded campus were evidence of the school’s popularity, while Billingsville occupied a brand new building with room to spare.

In 2018, the two schools became part of a unique experiment that was unlike any student assignment plan families had ever been part of. The schools would merge, but instead of moving into one building, the early grades would occupy Billingsville, and Cotswold would serve grades 3 through 5. 

Almost immediately, under the new arrangement, Billingsville went from having one white student to being 40% white, Hash said. Both schools now offer the rigorous IB program and have a more racially and socioeconomically balanced population. Across both schools, less than half of the students live in poverty, 41% students are Black, about 17% are Hispanic and 34% are white. 

“Our school looks like the world. Our school looks like Charlotte,” Hash said. 

The student assignment method, called a pairing, is not new. In fact, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district employed the same design in the 1970s following a that required the district to desegregate. But the model has been underutilized as an integration strategy, experts say. 

Now, shows that such mergers could reduce racial and ethnic isolation by as much as 60% in 200 large school districts nationwide. At the same time, the method would increase parents’ commute to school by only a few minutes — not a small matter for families managing busy drop-off and pick-up schedules.

“What we’re trying to do … is highlight how student assignment policy changes might help produce environments that can reduce the concentration of different forms of disadvantage,” said Nabeel Gillani, an assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and the lead researcher on the project. “Disadvantage can prevent young people and their families from reaching their potential.”

Under a , schools are no longer permitted to consider race when pursuing integration goals. But blending schools with different socioeconomic profiles can still result in more racially diverse schools. In a moment when leaders of the ruling party in Washington want to “” and argue that “,” Gillani urges districts not to back off efforts to create more integrated schools. He said he hopes that the Trump administration’s warnings against any emphasis on racial diversity “will light a stronger fire under more districts” to consider pairing, “instead of scaring them away.”

Along with the research paper, released Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ Nexus journal, Gillani and doctoral student Madison Landry created an that shows how pairing, and sometimes tripling, would change school demographics in communities across the country. 

For example, in Plano, Texas, 26% of the students at Shepard Elementary are non-white, according to 2022 data, while 83% of students at Sigler, about six minutes away, are non-white. 

Pairing the two schools would more than double the percentage of students of color at Shepard and decrease the percentage at Sigler to 52.9%, bringing both closer to the districtwide figure of 65%.

‘A desired racial balance’

Across the country, data shows that schools have grown increasingly divided by race, ethnicity and family income. A from the U.S. Government Accountability Office showed that more than a third of students attended schools in 2020-21 where 75% or more students were of a single race or ethnicity. , however, shows that students who attend integrated schools have higher test scores and lower dropout rates. 

In 2017, Billingsville earned a D rating from the state. Now the combined Billingsville-Cotswold earns a C, but also met its academic growth target, a measure that captures progress from year to year. 

Such results are one reason why the Biden administration in 2023 took steps to encourage districts to implement strategies like pairing. The U.S. Department of Education awarded $14 million to states, districts and charter networks working to create more integrated schools. 

Gillani has advised one of the recipients, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina, as it develops a redistricting plan. While the plans don’t involve pairing, leaders are still redrawing boundaries with an eye toward reducing socioeconomic isolation across the district. 

Other recipients included a Rhode Island charter network, the Oakland Unified School District in California and the Maryland Department of Education.

A department spokeswoman said she had no information about whether the program would continue, but one advocate for school integration doubts it, considering the administration’s opposition to diversity efforts. 

“I think it’s unlikely that they would run another competition for that grant under this administration,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. 

In fact, the department’s Feb. 14 “” letter warned districts against taking steps to “achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.” 

But “socioeconomic diversity has its own independent value,” said Richard Kahlenberg, director of housing policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “There is a wealth of research to suggest that students benefit from attending a mixed-income school … even if there is zero impact on racial diversity.”

The Supreme Court has also upheld race-neutral policies. Within the past year, the court has declined to hear two cases, one from Boston and one from Fairfax County, Virginia, that challenged efforts to create more diversity in highly selective schools.

“The judiciary will almost surely uphold socioeconomic integration plans at the end of the day,” Kahlenberg said. 

Even though the federal grant program was small, Potter said she hopes the efforts would offer “some important proof points” for how to encourage integration at a time when many districts are considering mergers because of declining enrollment. 

“There really is a chance to have a win-win situation when it’s structured right,” she said, “and when there’s community engagement to work through these hard conversations.”

‘Why are they changing everything?’

One benefit of pairing — over a typical redistricting plan that reassigns students to new schools — is that it doesn’t split up peers from the same grade level. They might relocate to a different building, but they stay with their friends.

That doesn’t make it easy, however. Families often have multiple children in the same elementary school and arrange afterschool programs and child care around that location. 

“Our first reaction was ‘Oh gosh, why are they changing everything?’ ” said Brantley Alvey, whose oldest daughter, now in seventh grade, went through the merger.  Her youngest is in fifth grade at the school. “When we bought our house, we said ‘We love that our kids are going to walk to elementary school for six years.’ ”

Parents also had questions over how the makeup of their children’s classrooms would change after the merger.

“Would they be the only child of color or would they be the only child that wasn’t of color?” Hash recalled. “Those were real conversations that we had to tackle.”

To help parents manage morning and afternoon routines, the schools have staggered bell schedules. The district also spent the entire 2017-18 school year preparing families for the change. Hash organized campus beautification days and concerts to help families from the two schools get to know each other. She said she had to view the merger of communities not just from an instructional and management perspective, but with a “micro-political lens.”

“You have to lean in with how we’re alike versus how we’re different,” she said. “This is a model that can be replicated across the United States, not just in Charlotte.”

Hash is the principal for both campuses, dividing her time between the two. Because of the pairing, Alvey said, the school has benefited from more resources — like two full-time art teachers, and more playground equipment and library books. For parent leaders, however, organizing carnivals and other family events has often been “labor intensive,” she said. “We’re constantly feeling like we have to duplicate our efforts on two different campuses.” 

While the positives, she said, have outweighed the negatives, the one-school, two-campus model won’t be in place much longer. will eventually bring all K-5 students together in a newly built Cotswold, while the Billingsville site becomes a district Montessori school. Grier Heights families will be able to choose which school they want their children to attend.

Still, Alvey said the pairing has benefited her children and helped to break down barriers between the two neighborhoods — especially since both schools feed into the same middle and high school.

“It’s not just low-income kids that benefit from diversity; it’s the higher income kids as well,” she said. “We want our kids to be comfortable with people from different backgrounds and different cultures. That’s only going to better prepare them to be good citizens of the world.”

But as commentators of that controversy this year, few have remarked on the legacy of a much more durable, and more successful, effort to bus underserved kids to better educational opportunities: METCO, an initiative that offers Boston students slots in several dozen suburban communities that participate voluntarily. With considerably less fanfare, the program has made a serious dent in segregation across one of the country’s biggest metropolitan areas.

Until recently, researchers struggled to quantify METCO’s effects. But a paper released in August has provided the fullest overview yet of how students’ lives change after being bused to better-performing school districts.

The , conducted by Tufts University economist Elizabeth Setren, finds that over the last few decades, METCO students enjoyed sizable improvements to their standardized test scores, school attendance, and disciplinary records compared with similar peers who didn’t participate. They were also more likely to both start and graduate from college and later earned substantially higher wages. The effects were especially large for boys and children whose parents didn’t attend college.

Those successes, achieved by a program with little national recognition, could offer lessons to attempting to engineer more racial and socioeconomic balance in their classrooms. Both and changing demographics have made desegregation a more complex process than it was during the movement’s heyday, but many education leaders about national data indicating that racial isolation has ticked upward since the 1990s.

It was in an effort to achieve racial balance across Boston’s heavily segregated neighborhood schools that a federal judge ordered local officials to shuttle students to schools in different parts of the city. Researchers what academic improvements resulted from racially directed school assignment, but the political response was so resoundingly hostile that the project was wound down by the end of the 1990s. By contrast, METCO has grown significantly since its inception and is now one of the longest-running voluntary desegregation programs in the country.

Setren said that her research, which relied on huge troves of student assignment, college enrollment, and later-life employment data, was especially compelling given the “unusual” granularity of information she was able to use to identify METCO’s impact. 

“What the METCO setting tells us is that going to schools in neighborhoods with much higher college aspirations, much higher college-going rates, and more advanced curricula can lead to a transformative change for these students’ academic and career trajectories,” she said.

To pinpoint the direct consequences of taking part in METCO, Setren only studied children whose parents filled out applications, whether successfully or unsuccessfully. Because the program receives many more applications than its roughly 3,300 annual slots, the study could simply compare the outcomes of those who were accepted — at the time, on a first-come, first-served basis, though more recently — versus otherwise-similar students who were not.

In all, Setren found, METCO students scored considerably higher on state tests, drawing 49 percent closer to the Massachusetts average in English than their peers by the third grade. They were only two-thirds as likely as their BPS peers to be suspended, and they accrued between three and nine fewer absences each year, in spite of the transportation hassle and time crunch of getting to school miles away from their own neighborhoods.

Things only got better from there: Making the trip to a suburban school raised children’s rate of graduating from high school on time from 79 to 92 percent, while lowering their chance of dropout from 4 to just 1 percent. Participants’ chances of scoring at least 1000 on the SAT were nearly nine points higher, while their chances of scoring 1200 or above were two points higher. They were 21 percentage points more likely to enroll in college and 12 points more likely to graduate.

Perhaps most striking of all is the impact farthest removed from the K–12 years. For those who work in Massachusetts, METCO students earn, on average, $7,708 more annually by the age of 25 than those who never received an offer. Ten years later, that gap grows to an average of $16,250.

Positive peer effects

If the benefits of busing between districts are clear, how they are achieved is somewhat less so. 

The act of switching school districts amounts to “a bundle of changes about your academic career” all occurring simultaneously, Setren observed, making it difficult to isolate which factors led to academic and behavioral improvements. But some evidence supports the idea that exposure to higher-performing peers and loftier expectations could be exerting the most influence.

In 1966, when METCO was launched, the differences in resources between Boston and its inner-ring suburbs were greater than they are today. But in 2021, Boston Public Schools , one of the highest rates in the nation. That figure is also of the 38 districts that accept METCO transfers, making it unlikely that higher funding is powering participants to more learning.

Setren also found that the various inclusion measures taken by districts to welcome students coming from Boston — including tutoring, after-school transportation, and access to social workers — made little difference to whether they flourished in their new schools; regardless of whether their new districts took such steps, METCO participants massively out-performed their peers in Boston Public Schools.

Some important differences separate the schools in receiving districts, however. They pay their teachers, on average, $3,000 more per year, which could be explained by the fact that they can boast roughly one year more classroom experience than those working in Boston. METCO participants are less likely to be taught by someone with less than two years’ prior experience — but also less likely to be paired with an African American or Latino teacher, which research has consistently shown can boost their achievement and belief in themselves.

By comparison, however, the classmates they encounter are appreciably different from those they leave behind. METCO participants study alongside pupils who are less than one-third as likely to come from low-income families, who score much higher on state exams, and who are less frequently disciplined by teachers. In their freshman year of high school, METCO students are less than half as likely to have a classmate who was suspended the previous year. 

Even more notably, enrolling in the program transforms the expectations they meet every day. While only about half of students in non-METCO classrooms pursue a four-year degree, more than three-quarters of those in METCO classrooms do.

Kenneth Ardon, an economist at Salem State University who on METCO, noted broad commonalities in resources, teacher experience, and curricular materials between Boston and nearby communities. While cautioning that he was not familiar with Setren’s work, he said it made sense that the influence of peers would play a prominent role in lifting students’ life outcomes.

“As you go through and compare urban districts to suburban ones, the biggest difference comes from peers,” Ardon said. “So it’s not surprising if that’s explaining a large part of the improvement in performance.”

Setren agreed, noting that METCO’s largest impact was manifest in children who were previously least exposed to higher education. For both college aspiration and enrollment in four-year degree programs, participants with parents who didn’t graduate from college saw gains more than one-third larger than those with at least one college-educated parent.

“I think that speaks to the importance of this shift in expectations,” Setren argued. “Now these kids are learning more and expected to go to college more than they would have been otherwise.”

Milliken has been “one of the worst Supreme Court decisions” in the Washington Post, which decried its “awful legacy.” According to the , in the view of those who had fought for the end of segregation, it “killed any hope of integrating the public schools.” And, in 2014, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a of essays calling the decision “dreadful” because it “betrayed the promise” of Brown v. Board of Ed, the historic ruling that outlawed racial segregation in the public schools.

Our organization, Available to All, fights educational redlining, and we often make the case that assigning children to schools based on where they live (using exclusionary maps) is morally wrong. 

District boundaries are one of our primary targets, as they often keep low-income kids trapped in failing schools, even while coveted public schools in nearby districts are allowed to turn those kids away. So you might think that we would join in the chorus denouncing the Milliken decision for these same reasons.

But that’s not quite right. In our view, Milliken was an unexpected but important decision by the Supreme Court. It was right on the law. Just as importantly, it put the brakes on a potentially disastrous social experiment. Hundreds of thousands of children, living in an area of over 800 square miles, would have been put on buses taking them far from their families and their homes every day. While many in the establishment supported bussing, it’s easy to see that the cost would have been born by the children, who would spend hundreds of hours on buses every year, robbing them of precious time with their family and friends. Those who designed the plan ignored this very real cost.

What’s more, such a plan likely would have had deleterious effects on public education in the Detroit area. A parent — of any race — would have been very eager to avoid such a fate for their children. You can imagine that many families would have moved to places like Utica, Trenton, and Northville, cities just out of reach of the social engineers. Others would have put their kids into private schools. 

Of course, the poorest of the poor would have been unable to afford either of these options, leaving them to bear the brunt of the reassignment plan.

That’s the key word in this whole saga: reassignment. Everyone involved in the case — and most commentators today — just assume that the government needs to assign children to public schools. Governor Milliken and his allies argued that kids should be assigned to schools based on race, while their opponents argued that kids should be assigned to schools based on their address.

Here is the huge moral problem with both of those positions: Whenever the government takes on the role of assigning children to specific public schools, then it also takes on the role of enforcing their exclusion from other public schools. This is why parents, in the 21^st century, can be put in jail for using someone else’s address to get their kids into a high-quality school. This is why school districts hire private eyes to and to conduct residency checks.

The answer to this conundrum is so simple: We need to move away from school assignments. Parents, not bureaucrats, should be allowed to ignore the arbitrary school district lines that divide our communities. 

Public schools should be required to be open to the public.

In practice, this means we need more and better Open Enrollment policies. In many states, public schools are not required to consider applications from students who live outside the district boundary. We have also argued that every public school should be required to reserve 15% of its seats for children who live outside of the attendance zone or the school district. But no child should be forced to attend a school outside his or her neighborhood.

The creators of the Detroit plan were right about one thing: Educational boundaries have indeed been used to separate Americans, and they have indeed contributed to the racial divisions in our schools. But the way to fix the problem is not to give bureaucrats the ability to ignore the school district lines as they determine the fate of hundreds of thousands of children.

It is American families who ought to be allowed to cross the lines.

Disclosure: Stand Together Trust provides financial support to Available to All and The 74.

Before Brown, in the 17 states that had segregated school systems, . Even in the face of systemic inequities, Black teachers held kids to high expectations, and Black communities came together to schools that helped move young people into greater opportunity. But in the aftermath of the decision, tens of thousands of Black teachers and school leaders of the field due to resistance of some white people to integration. This had a profound impact on who was teaching students, and a detrimental economic effect on the tenuous, emerging Black middle class.

For several years after Brown, young Black people who wanted to become educators — including Marc’s mother — were still denied entry into postsecondary teaching programs in the South, solely because they were Black. Sybil Haydel Morial did go on to earn her master’s degree in education, at Boston University in 1955.

It’s long past time to ensure that the nation’s schoolchildren have the chance to learn from diverse, effective educators.

Today, just and are people of color, and in , students do not have a single teacher of color. Yet, are people of color. Moreover, the proportion of adults aged 25 to 64 who are teachers is nearly for white adults (3%) than adults of color (1.1%). 

Given the depth of the around the country, it’s just common sense to build stronger pipelines to bring thousands of talented, diverse educators into the classroom.  

But solving teacher shortages is not the only reason that educator diversity matters. Research shows that benefit from having educators of color. And , in particular, achieve at higher levels and are less likely to be suspended or drop out of school.  

We know firsthand the powerful effect diverse educators can have on the trajectory of a young person’s life. Tequilla grew up in poverty in rural Arkansas and lived with her grandparents, who were sharecroppers. They didn’t have indoor plumbing until she was 12 years old. She credits early and continued access to effective educators, many of whom looked like her, as a central reason for her climb to Yale and now CEO of TNTP.  

At a time when13-year-olds are recording the and racial wealth gaps are widening, the nation needs to leverage as many strategies as possible to get real results for kids. Curriculum matters a great deal to student success, but it takes diverse, skilled educators to bring even the best academic programming to life. 

It’s clear to us both that the traditional pathway to teaching is not meeting the demand. State and education leaders must embrace new and alternate pathways to teaching that are more attractive to the nation’s increasingly diverse talent pool. According to TNTP’s report , traditional teacher preparation programs are far less diverse than the public school student population. In some programs, participants are more than 90% white. 

Encouragingly, many states and districts are starting to adopt alternative certification programs and “grow your own” programs to provide more accessible and affordable pathways into the classroom for diverse teachers, including high school students, classroom assistants and paraprofessionals.  

We know that the best recruitment strategy is a strong retention strategy. To better retain all educators, including teachers of color, the nation must ultimately rethink the industrial-era model that has dominated public education for the last century. 

Seventy years post-Brown, it’s clear that doing nothing is not an option. That’s why we applaud efforts like the , a coalition of which TNTP is a part, that has an ambitious goal of dramatically expanding and diversifying the educator workforce.   

After all, the nation is at an inflection point. There aren’t enough effective, diverse teachers. But there’s also an incredible opportunity ahead. The nation can draw on evidence-based strategies to diversify the educator workforce. Doing so will benefit students today and have a profound economic impact for families and communities of color in years to come.  

Our hope is that the nation does not waste any more time. Now is the moment to see the full promise and potential of Brown v. Board of Education through the finish line. 

Passersby can be forgiven for mistaking Friendship Aspire Academy for a place of worship: One of the elementary school’s main buildings is actually a repurposed church, a towering, ‘60s-era cast concrete sanctuary complete with a pipe organ tucked into an old choir loft.

The architecture suits the tiny elementary school on South Hazel Street, which has taken on a kind of spiritual significance for families since it opened six years ago. The first of seven charter schools here either taken over or built from the ground up by the Washington, D.C.-based , the school has quietly earned a position of trust in a community whose schools often mirror the city’s decline.

From 2010 to 2020, Pine Bluff’s population fell 12.5%, the largest drop in any metropolitan area in the U.S. Meanwhile the district lost nearly 2,000 students, or about 41% of its enrollment, according to .

But in just six years, Friendship Aspire Academy has jumped to the top of the ranks of elementary schools, not only in the city but the state, thanks in large part to fully staffed before- and after-care programs, wraparound services like tutoring, a packed calendar of family events and a rigorous, literacy- and math-focused curriculum. 

In Pine Bluff, that’s enough to persuade many families to give it a try. The school now has a lengthy waiting list, and last year Friendship opened a second elementary school downtown.

Kimberly Davis, dean of the School of Education at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff , said the school is “really changing the outlook on education” in the city. “You look at Friendship, you go into the school, it’s like, ‘Am I still in Pine Bluff?’”

Observers like Davis say the new Friendship schools, while educating just a fraction of local students, have become the de facto alternative to the district as the only charter schools in town. And they’re helping to restore faith in a city that was once a highly educated, prosperous Black metropolis. 

Davis should know: Relocating here in June 2022, after a nine-year tenure as a professor of special education at Arkansas State University, she recalled, “People were like, ‘Why are you going to Pine Bluff?’ I said, ‘You don’t see what I see. I see potential. And where there is potential, that could be success.’”

‘Every kid here has a voice’

For parent Kazmira Davis (no relation to Kimberly), the moment she knew her kids belonged at the school was in 2018, when her daughter sat for skills tests as one of the school’s first kindergartners. She tested in the second- and third-grade levels in reading and math, respectively. Since then, Davis said, she’s always tested at least a year above grade level. “She hasn’t been stagnant since.”

Our kids have an environment where they feel like they matter. Every kid here has a voice.

Kazmira Davis, Pine Bluff parent

Nor have her two younger siblings, who are also testing above grade level.

“Our kids have an environment where they feel like they matter,” said Davis, who runs a tutoring and college counseling business. “Every kid here has a voice.”

The approach amounts to what she calls “Go mode,” a constant challenge to both students and teachers to push the limits of what’s possible.

Ten-year-old Kylie, Davis’s oldest at the school, is now a fifth-grader. She pointed out that she has earned straight A’s since kindergarten and has no plans to earn anything less than A’s going forward. “I like the teachers and I have a lot of friends there,” she said.  

She wants to go into clothing design and has already created two shirts for her family’s Christian-oriented clothing line. She said teachers focus a lot on helping students figure out what they need to be successful once they graduate. 

“Some days in school, they’ll ask you what you want to do when you grow up, and then we’ll have an essay that we have to write,” she said.

Rebecca Newby, one of the school’s academy directors — a job equivalent to an assistant principal — grew up in Pine Bluff and was educated in a district that was long ago swallowed up during one of many rounds of consolidations. In four years, she attended five high schools. She graduated from Pine Bluff High School in 2013, and taught for four years in the nearby district, remembering that the only times parents were invited on campus were for orientation and parent-teacher conferences, she said. “And those were required days.” 

At Friendship Aspire, parent nights are packed, she said. “You can’t even get down the street” because of all the cars parked along the school’s fence-lined street.

Perhaps most importantly, she and others said, students here, about 98% of whom are Black, are immersed — often for the first time — in teaching by well-trained Black instructors, which research shows can have many benefits. In March, researchers at the University of California and the University of North Carolina that Black boys, especially from low-income families, are less likely to be referred for special education when they have Black teachers. 

Many of Friendship Aspire’s teachers grew up here and were trained at the local branch of the University of Arkansas, an historically Black university. Overall, about 90% of Friendship Aspire staffers are Black.

“I do see it as a long-standing change agent that Pine Bluff has needed for a long time,” said Newby.  

‘An exporter of talent’

Many see Friendship Aspire and its sister schools as part of a long-term, perhaps even multi-generational, effort to restore Pine Bluff to its former glory as a haven for well-educated, prosperous families. 

But even as the school radiates a contagious, productive energy, it can hardly make up for the loss that so clearly lies at the heart of this community.

Each morning, Mary Ann Lee turns the key to her storefront cafe, Indigo Blue, on a quiet side street off Pine Bluff’s once prosperous Main Street. Originally a dress shop built in 1883, the renovated building now features Instagram-worthy high ceilings and stylish, comfortable seating that wouldn’t be out of place in a college-town cafe. Jazz plays on the stereo and historic civil rights memorabilia, lovingly collected over decades by Lee herself, cover virtually every wall. At the back of the room, an eclectic assortment of books, mostly from Lee’s personal collection, comprise what amounts to an ad-hoc used bookstore. 

But as cozy and inviting as Indigo Blue is, the shop looks out onto abandoned storefronts in nearly every direction. A cake shop opened next door a few years ago, and an engraver now operates on the other side of Lee’s cafe, but these few establishments, plus one or two nearby, amount to the largest concentration of functioning businesses for blocks.

It wasn’t always this way.

Just a century ago, the scholar and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Dubois surveyed the city and found that Pine Bluff had the fourth largest concentration of Black wealth in America. In 1900, a city directory listed 235 Black businesses. 

In 1913, the 23-mile-long , the first concrete road in the South, opened here, reaching about halfway to Little Rock. Drivers would actually ship their cars in by rail to drive on the bump-free, high-tech road.

For generations, a passenger railway station greeted visitors in the center of downtown, as did the magnificent six-story neoclassical and a .

In the late 1950s, Lee, the cafe owner, recalled, “Pine Bluff used to be ‘the thing,’” a bustling little city with department stores, movie theaters, amusements, a horse racing track and an annual carnival. “You couldn’t even walk on the sidewalks, there’d be so many people,” she recalled.

The city now has exactly zero movie theaters. The streetcar, department stores and amusements are all long gone. Rail service ended in 1968 and the Pines closed in 1970.

After the loss of much of the domestic cotton industry, as well as decades of disinvestment from manufacturers and government, families moved away, abandoning not just businesses but homes. Block after block of crumbling buildings now haunt the quiet streets. The city’s population has never exceeded its 1970s census numbers. 

Lee, who attended city schools, remembered that teachers pushed her and other Black students to excel “because integration was coming and we needed to show that we could compete, and that we can learn just like any other kid.”

She left town in the late 1970s, and would go on to a long career promoting human rights and civil rights in Michigan, first with Detroit’s city government and later as a leader of the state NAACP. In that sense, she’s like a lot of Pine Bluff residents who took their good educations and got out.

Over the past century or more, the city has seen a diaspora of smart people leave and, in many cases, never return, said local historian Lori Walker Guelache. They included , co-founder of the National Urban League, and businessman , who founded Tulsa’s Greenwood district, otherwise known as “.”

“We’ve done a great job of cultivating talent historically, but we haven’t done a great job of creating pathways for them to come back,” she said. “And so I guess you can say we’ve been an exporter of talent.”

‘We found it’s a great city’

Those losses have eased somewhat in recent years, she and others said, with small upticks in population for most age brackets — except two: children, as well as adults aged 35 to 44. “So basically young families,” Walker Guelache said. 

That reality, among others, drew Friendship to the region. It now runs 11 schools statewide. Already the operator of half a dozen well-respected charter schools in Washington, D.C., it came here in 2018 at the invitation of the Bentonville-based Walton Family Foundation, which admired its work creating a pipeline of Black teachers — especially Black male teachers — in D.C., said Kim Davis, a senior advisor who leads Walton’s work in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta. 

“They’re really good at not only saying, ‘Hey, we think that there is a talented person at the beginning of their career, but we also have a development program for those individuals,’” he said. 

Davis also said Friendship’s willingness and ability to partner with the local University of Arkansas campus was critical to attracting more Black teachers to schools here. 

But the decision on where to invest was up to Friendship, said Phong Tran, its southern regional superintendent. “Pine Bluff has always been the city that no one wanted to touch,” he said. “But we found that it’s a great city.”

In many educators’ eyes, Friendship Aspire and the six other network schools — they include the new downtown elementary school and a new middle/high school — are leading the push to keep families here. Through its strategic takeovers and new openings, Friendship has quietly built a group of schools that nearly matches the number of remaining district schools, with plans to continue expanding.

A lot of what Friendship has done is to simply offer families a peek into what high-quality schools do, said Friendship Aspire Principal Jherrithan Dukes. Though not a Pine Bluff native, he attended college here at the University of Arkansas and worked at charter and traditional public schools in Little Rock before arriving in the fall of 2020.

Newby, the academic director, said Friendship’s policy to offer free before- and after-care from the beginning showed that it understood the community. “We have working parents that need the support,” she said. “And so we offer that free,” an anomaly in the city.

It doesn’t hurt that the Friendship schools offer nationally recognized curricula that are raising literacy and math skills in ways that other local schools have struggled to do, said Davis, the University of Arkansas dean.

In the most recent state achievement tests, no district-run school earned a grade ; just 19.4% of third-graders districtwide proved “ready” or exceeding standards in math and 15.4% in reading. 

At Friendship Aspire, a different trend is beginning to take shape: 75.9% of students scored “ready” or exceeding standards in math and 33.3% in reading, scores high enough to earn the school a respectable 70.7% rating, a solid C.

When Friendship expanded last year, one show of support was to build the new elementary school in the heart of downtown, partnering with the local public library, which was renovating its downtown building. 

“When you want to revitalize a city, what better place to build a school than downtown?” said Tran, the regional superintendent. “There are a lot of parents who come to work downtown. So where are they going to drop their kids?”

For Pine Bluff, that comes with fraught considerations. The city ranks as one of the least safe in the U.S., with more than a dozen teens killed since 2020. So when they designed the new school, architects included a large outdoor space surrounded on all four sides by classrooms to keep students from having to leave the school’s confines to play outside. 

Kay’Leah King, 12, a sixth-grader at Friendship STEM Academy, said she thinks a lot about safety, and worries about school shootings, which are often on the news. She’s glad the school, like Friendship Aspire Academy, which she also attended, keeps its doors locked all day. “On every door that’s on the outside and in the office, you have to have a key code to get in,” she said. “And you can’t get in without it. You can’t get in through those doors without being let in.” 

Best in the state

Dukes said many of his students’ parents vividly remember the substandard education they got in Pine Bluff just a few years ago — and don’t want a repeat experience with their kids. 

As a result, they fiercely support the school, organizing events such as the annual “Trunk or Treat,” a Halloween tradition in which they park cars outside the school and essentially recreate house-to-house trick-or-treating for students who may not be able to do it otherwise. Several parents said the city’s violent crime rate makes them think twice about letting their kids go house-to-house each October.

The school is tidy and orderly. On a recent morning, Dukes patrolled the halls, reminding students to cross their arms in front of them as they pass between classrooms to keep their hands to themselves.

Davis, the Arkansas dean, said her students, teachers in training, push to work at Friendship Aspire and the other network schools, lured by their energy. In a sense, she said, salaries have become less important due to a that raised public school teachers’ minimum salaries from $36,000 to at least $50,000. That puts the burden on schools to support teachers in other ways. 

People were like, 'Why are you going to Pine Bluff?' I said, 'You don't see what I see. I see potential.

Kimberly Davis, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff

Last fall, Friendship brought in the D.C. coaching firm , which provides literacy coaches to work with small groups of students. The Arkansas Public Schools Resource Center also provides tutors and helps teachers pace lessons. And the school partnered with the Detroit-based Center for Strategic Leadership, which helps teachers improve math instruction and provides retention bonuses for those who stick around. 

More importantly, Friendship is offering what many here never got during their K-12 schooling: a plethora of well-trained Black educators. 

Countless adults here can recount the experience of attending school with mostly Black classmates but mostly white teachers. “Growing up, the majority of my teachers did not look like me,” said Friendship Aspire Academy Director Brianna Reynolds, who began here as a kindergarten teacher in 2018. 

Growing up, the majority of my teachers did not look like me.

Brianna Reynolds, Friendship Aspire Academy Director

In many years, she said, her only Black teacher was her home economics teacher.

From kindergarten on up, Dukes and others said, Friendship principals prioritize hiring Black teachers. At the new Friendship high school, they comprise half of Principal Anitra Rogers’ staff. She recounted literally praying to God to provide the campus with the teachers it needed, “preferably with Black men.”

The result is a small but growing set of schools that are quietly changing people’s minds about the city, said Reynolds one recent morning. “It changes the narrative.” 

As if to underscore the change, that morning as he chatted with Reynolds and other staffers in his office, Dukes received a flat cardboard parcel in the day’s mail. He sliced it open to reveal a gleaming glass plaque: Friendship Aspire had been named a U.S. News & World Report “.” The magazine, which ranks schools and colleges nationwide, named Friendship Aspire the 28th-best elementary school in Arkansas and its No. 1 charter elementary school.

As he scanned the plaque, colleagues cheered. Dukes beamed, saying repeatedly, “There it is. There it is.” He held it up to pose for photos. “There it is.”

‘We’re raising a great generation of students’

Meanwhile, in downtown Pine Bluff, small signs of life are beginning to peek through. A new aquatic center, proposed in 2011, finally opened in 2019. The historic hotel’s owner to a nonprofit named Pine Bluff Rising, which plans to revitalize it.

And Lee, the cafe owner, is now thinking about renovating the second story of her building to create a loft apartment for her retirement. Forever busy scheduling speakers at the cafe and working with other building owners on downtown preservation projects, she’s excited about the new possibilities. 

Each morning, she looks out her renovated storefront windows and across West Barraque Street onto a block of three abandoned, brick-wrapped buildings. Their owner says he’s finally ready to renovate them, with plans for an ice cream shop, loft apartments and a martini bar.

But all of these efforts, locals said, need families to stick around.

Friendship continues to explore new schools and new takeovers, even as the State Board of Education last fall to return full local control of Pine Bluff schools to the district. State officials will continue monitoring the district’s academic and fiscal performance for another year.

For his part, Dukes, the elementary school principal, is cautiously optimistic — and patient. He believes real change in the city may take years.

“I feel like once these kids get older and get grown and come back to this community, we’re going to see a real take-off in the city,” he said. He’s not actually sure he’ll be around to see it, but he’s convinced a rebirth is at hand. “I feel like we’re raising a great generation of students.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74. The foundation also provided early financial support to the Friendship Education Foundation to set up a charter network in Pine Bluff.

]]> /article/mn-high-court-school-racial-imbalances-alone-dont-violate-state-constitution/ Wed, 13 Dec 2023 19:17:08 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=719345 In its second decision regarding an eight-year-old school desegregation case, the Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that racial imbalances in Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools do not necessarily on their own violate the state constitution. returns the class-action lawsuit to a Minneapolis district court, where it may proceed to trial. 

Plaintiffs had sought the Supreme Court decision to short-circuit the standard trial court process, asking the justices to rule that the existence of racially imbalanced Twin Cities schools by itself proved their case.

If the families who brought the 2015 suit, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman vs. State of Minnesota, move forward, they will not have to prove that the state intended to create segregated schools. They will need to show only that schools in each community ended up with racial imbalances.

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They will, however, have to demonstrate that those enrollment patterns deprive some groups of students of the “adequate” education they are guaranteed under the state constitution. Over the last quarter-century, Minnesota has required traditional school districts to make good-faith efforts toward integration, resulting in a tangle of ineffective “voluntary” rules.

In trying to craft rules that conform to the law, officials have not been able to prove that racial isolation per se results in poor academic outcomes. Nonetheless, the task forces and policymakers have repeatedly concluded that a large bipartisan majority of people value diverse schools for moral and cultural reasons. 

The decision overturns a ruling from a state appellate court, which held that only “intentional segregation of the type described by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education” would violate the state constitution.

The lawsuit asks the court to find that Minnesota laws allowing students to attend schools outside their home districts and in public charter schools contribute to segregation. Charter schools are specifically exempted from the state’s integration rules, which require districts to make good-faith efforts to foster diversity. The plaintiffs asked the court to overturn the relevant portion of the charter school law. 

In response, a number of charter schools were allowed to join the case. While students apply for seats in blind lotteries, a number of Minnesota charters now enroll students almost entirely of a single race or culture. Several of the schools that joined the suit dramatically outperform their traditional district counterparts, complicating the plaintiffs’ argument that racial imbalances alone deny students their right to an adequate education.

If the plaintiffs prevail, attorneys for the charter schools have argued, the high-performing schools would be hard-pressed to continue with their culturally affirming models — which serve the families who sought them out — while responding to pressure to enroll a racial and ethnic cross-section of students. 

In the main opinion, the justices made a distinction between state and district policies that exclude particular groups of students — intentionally isolating or segregating children — and the existence of racial imbalances. 

Newly installed Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, the first Black woman to hold the post, issued a blistering dissent, arguing that “de facto segregation” in Twin Cities schools by definition violates the state’s constitution. 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs have not yet said whether they plan to proceed to trial.

]]> /article/feds-award-millions-to-school-districts-to-address-tricky-issue-of-integration/ Mon, 13 Nov 2023 16:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=717628 Since the beginning of his administration, President Joe Biden has for $100 million to help schools become more integrated by race and family income.

The proposal never received serious consideration from Congressional Republicans. But the Department of Education didn’t give up and won approval from to apply a far more modest amount of existing funds toward helping districts stem increasing racial isolation in the nation’s schools.

“It has been a priority for our administration since day one to really build on our country’s greatest strength, which is our diversity,” said Roberto Rodriguez, the department’s assistant secretary for the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development. 

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in California, the , Tennessee district, which includes Chattanooga, and a are among the recipients. They plan to use the funds on family engagement, college and career programs and improving student performance in high-poverty neighborhoods. The will work with five districts to increase diversity in pre-K, expand dual language programs and push more minority students to apply for selective schools and programs. 

The grants, totaling $14 million, follow a from the department that connected widening achievement gaps to the end of major desegregation efforts in the 1980s and ‘90s. Nearly one-third of all students now attend schools where the vast majority of their peers are minorities. The Fostering Diverse Schools program also comes in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end race-conscious college admissions, which Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said calls for a“courageous commitment to equal opportunity and justice.” The court is now considering whether to take up an appeal over a competitive high school admissions policy in Virginia. 

At the state level, meanwhile, conservative lawmakers have restricted how educators can discuss or address — all of which makes integration efforts “tricky politically,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a Georgetown University researcher and senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

“These grants will help showcase models for school leaders across the country who might be nervous about tackling segregation and are looking for concrete ways integration can be accomplished,” he said. 

With House Republicans wanting to and the fiscal year 2024 budget over issues like aid to Israel and Ukraine, it’s unclear if the department will be able to award more grants next year. But Rodriguez said officials see the need for “a stronger investment from the federal level to encourage and partner with districts that are doing more to intentionally enhance diversity and in their schools.” 

‘Thinking across sectors’

During the Obama years, former Education Secretary John King launched a similar initiative, called . The department allocated $12 million for the program and 26 districts applied. But former President Donald Trump eliminated it once he took office. 

Reviving the effort by using funds dedicated for student support and enrichment will allow the department to “get this off the ground,” said Halley Potter of The Century Foundation, a left-leaning that is part of the , a network of almost 60 organizations. The Foundation, she said, worked with “champions on The Hill” to tap funds for providing students a “well-rounded education.”

Three districts — , , and — received the largest awards to implement programs intended to attract a broader cross section of families to public schools. 

The department awarded the New York City schools two separate grants totaling over $3 million to further integration efforts, even as the district continues to face opposition over efforts to diversify elite schools and programs. 

Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the district to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students from low-income schools considered for admission to the district’s specialized high schools. But Asian American groups sued, saying the change is discriminatory. 

, pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, shows how controversial such changes can be. The city’s efforts to increase diversity in and middle school have also received pushback. 

The district aims to create more racially and socioeconomically balanced schools in other ways. In District 3, on the West Side of Manhattan, schools will focus on “culturally affirming” learning, according to a of the application. The goal in Brooklyn’s District 13 will be to attract more minority families to the city’s middle schools — including those who attend charters, which can minimally contribute to segregation.

“If your goal is to have integration in your schools, you really need to be thinking across sectors,” Potter said.

The other 10 grants are smaller and will support planning efforts, giving districts a chance to “piggyback” integration efforts onto other priorities, such as school construction and renovation projects, she said.

The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina will use the $445,000 it received to take a fresh look at its school assignment plan, which hasn’t changed in 30 years. The district is among the top 10 most in the state, with predominantly white schools concentrated in the western part of the county, schools with a higher enrollment of Hispanic students in the southern region and those in the urban core with a majority-Black student population. 

The district will use the funds to hire mapping experts and gather input from families and district employees on school attendance boundaries, with the goal of reaching at least 5,000 students, parents and educators over the next nine months. As a bonus, leaders hope that redrawing attendance boundaries will reduce commute times for students. 

“These zones have not been adjusted to reflect population shifts since the 90s,” said Effie McMillian, the district’s chief equity officer. It’s important, she added, to give “students an opportunity to interact with people that they may not always interact with within their local community of where they live.”

]]> /article/68-years-after-brown-schools-still-highly-segregated-4-takeaways-from-study/ Tue, 17 May 2022 11:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=589415 In the 2018-19 school year, one in six students attended a school where over 90% of their peers were of the same race, with school districts in New York City and Milwaukee among the most segregated, according to a released Tuesday. 

The publication of the report from The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, was timed to mark the 68th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and demonstrates the degree to which the nation’s schools remain segregated by race long after it was legally outlawed. 

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‘Pernicious’ segregation between school districts, not within them, is the primary reason for racial isolation in 280 out of the 403 metro areas, the report said. That is particularly true in the Northeast and Midwest, where counties often have multiple small school districts. Within-district segregation is greater in the South, which tends to have larger, countywide districts.

“The way that district lines are drawn has a huge impact on segregation and the resources that students in segregated districts have,” said lead author Halley Potter, a senior fellow at the progressive think tank.

Enrollment losses in urban public schools, exacerbated by the pandemic when many students left for private and charter schools, have likely contributed to further racial isolation in some communities, Potter said. But she chalked up the chief causes of segregation to migration, immigration and population growth. School attendance policies that keep students from enrolling in neighboring districts and white residents’ push to secede from majority minority districts are also contributing factors.

The Biden administration has proposed policies to address the issues, including a $100 million to support racial and socioeconomic diversity. Potter said states also have “carrots and sticks” to achieve more integrated schools.

For example, states can allow students to transfer across district lines. They also can design magnet schools to draw students from multiple districts. And they can require districts to take diversity into account when making boundary changes — a practice that only Arkansas and California have implemented.

“It’s a lot of work and coordination to get individual districts to come up with this on their own,” she said, adding that if more states prevented secessions and actively encouraged district mergers that promote integration, “that could be a powerful tool for tackling interdistrict segregation.”

The report complements recent research from Bellwether Education Partners that focused on “border barriers” — district boundaries that keep low-income families from enrolling their children in higher-quality schools.

The Foundation’s report features a first-of-its-kind interactive — developed by Ann Owens of the University of Southern California and Sean Reardon from Stanford University — that allows users to isolate metro areas and different types of segregation. The team developed a measure that ranges from 0, which means no segregation, to 1, which indicates students attend schools with no students from other races. 

Here are four takeaways from the data:

1 Milwaukee leads the pack

Overall, Black-white segregation is especially pronounced in 39 — or about 10% — of the nation’s 403 metro regions, including Milwaukee (.73), Newark (.71), Chicago (.70), Detroit (.70) and New York (.69). 

Hispanic-white segregation is greatest in Philadelphia and Reading, Pennsylvania, as well as Boston, Memphis and Los Angeles.

2 Economic segregation affects Black students the most

Economic segregation is also extreme in many metro areas, particularly Newark, Bridgeport, Milwaukee and Chicago, and affects Black students more than other groups. The average Black student attends a school where the rate of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals is 16 percentage points higher than in the average white student’s school in the same metro region.

3 Private schools are not a leading factor

Private school enrollment is not a driving force behind segregation overall. But there are some areas where it’s a bigger factor, including Sumter, South Carolina, Napa, California, and the New York-Jersey City-White Plains area of New York and New Jersey. 

4 Research influenced White House on charters

Potter’s past influenced the Biden administration’s controversial proposal to revamp the federal Charter Schools Program. The plan would discourage the creation and expansion of charter schools in districts that have voluntary integration programs. 

The new report, however, shows that charter schools account for just 6% of segregation by income and 4% of white-nonwhite segregation across metro areas. 

]]> /article/first-ever-study-of-mexican-american-school-desegregation-finds-marked-gains-for-chicano-students/ Tue, 03 May 2022 17:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=588695 The first major judiciary win for K-12 school integration in the U.S. did not come in 1954 as the common narrative goes, but in 1947. Nearly a decade before the landmark Brown v. Board case, a federal District Court judge in Orange County, California ruled in Mendez v. Westminster that it was illegal to separate Mexican and non-Hispanic white learners into segregated schools. 

But until recently, it remained unclear what impact the decision had on California’s Chicano students.

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This spring, in a published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, scholars Francisca Antman and Kalena Cortes filled the gap with the first-ever quantitative analysis of the case’s long-run impacts. 

Participating in desegregation, they found, led to a significant increase in educational attainment for Mexican-American students. Those born after the ruling completed nearly a full year of schooling more than a comparison cohort born 10 years prior and were nearly 20% more likely to graduate from high school. In the decades following the case, Chicano students in highly segregated counties were able to cut by more than half the disparity in their schooling outcomes with those of Chicano students in minimally segregated counties.

“What we see is really a dramatic rise in educational attainment for Hispanics after the end of de jure segregation,” said Antman, an associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. That finding, she noted, held true “particularly in those areas that we think were most likely to be segregated.”

In California before the Mendez decision, segregating Mexican-American students into separate schools was common practice, driven to a large extent by . Those who advocated for separate schools claimed Hispanic students were unclean, intellectually inferior and lacking English language skills — even though Mexican-American youth who did not speak Spanish were also segregated.

Today, Latino residents make up of the U.S. population and an even of the nation’s public school student body. Yet Latino youth continue to be . Analyzing the Mendez decision is key to understanding the present circumstances for Latino students and families, the authors .

With desegregation, Antman explained, “Hispanic students [began to] have access to white classrooms or schools that they didn’t before” — meaning more resources and improved facilities. Though exact data on the flow of financial resources does not exist, she and her co-author hypothesize that such shifts may have triggered the outsized benefits for Chicano youth.

At the same time, education outcomes improved for all learners, Mexican-American and white students alike.

“Educational attainment is rising for all groups,” she said, adding that students nationwide tended to complete more schooling over the time period her study observed.

There is no official record of which areas separated Mexican-American students into separate schools as exists for school segregation in the American South — posing a major obstacle to research on the topic. That did not stop Antman and Cortes.

“A lot of times, researchers only pursue questions that they can answer [cleanly with existing data],” said the CU Boulder economist. But “sometimes the question is so important that you want to pursue it even if you can’t get the absolute best, clearest answer.”

She and her co-author got around the limitation by using 1940 census data to create a proxy measure for segregation levels. According to historical accounts, areas with the highest share of Hispanics in their population were the locales with the most rampant segregation. The researchers then identified the top quarter of California counties with the highest share of Hispanic residents and compared them to the bottom quarter with the least to represent high- and low-segregation counties.

In another key hurdle, records are also absent on how effectively each school district followed through on the desegregation effort. Implementation varied at the local level with some districts opening separate schools or maintaining segregation in certain grade levels while desegregating others. The authors account for the messy rollout using what’s called an “intent-to-treat” approach that includes all students in their analysis, regardless of their district’s follow through on desegregation. The method simply measures the effect of students’ exposure to the legal change. If anything, the approach would understate the impacts of integration, the authors explain, by grouping students who experienced desegregation together with those who remained separated.

As with the Brown case, impacts grew over time, Antman and Cortes found. Mexican-American students who were toddlers at the time of Mendez were likely to complete more total years of schooling than those who were in primary school (who in turn were more likely to see higher educational attainment than their older peers). Achievement gaps between Chicano and white students closed over time.

Compared to cohorts that began school before Mendez, those who matriculated after segregation was outlawed were 18.4% more likely to graduate from junior high school and 19.4% more likely to graduate from high school, the analysis revealed.

Fast forward to the current day, and school segregation levels nationwide have — with a for Latino students, who continue to have than any other racial or ethnic group in the U.S. and have been hit especially hard by the pandemic. With that backdrop, Antman said her results underscore the continued need for integration.

“Some might might say, ‘Well, would it really matter to desegregate [in the present day]?’” she said. “This certainly would suggest that it would matter very much.”

]]> /zero2eight/most-child-care-is-segregated-heres-how-one-center-intentionally-integrated/ Wed, 10 Nov 2021 10:00:05 +0000 https://the74million.org/?p=6002 For decades, the Educational Alliance on Manhattan’s Lower East Side ran two parallel but separate early childhood programs. If you were a family living in nearby public housing, chances are you attended the Head Start program for low-income families. And if you lived in the neighborhood’s middle-income housing co-ops or signed a lease in one of the glassy new high rises, you could pay tuition for your child to attend the center’s private Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool. When Jacqueline Marks, senior director of early childhood, first started working at Educational Alliance’s Early Childhood at Manny Cantor Center, she remembers “seeing these schools that live side by side in the same building, and thinking, huh, that’s strange.” Parents thought so too, she says.

Government funding for child care has historically been reserved for the very poor, leading to subsidized means-tested programs for low-income families, with everyone else’s child care options defined by what they can and cannot afford. This has created our current patchwork of early education programs that are rigidly segregated by income and race.

But in truth, separating toddlers and preschoolers based on family income is the default in early education. It just usually happens in separate programs rather than the same building, making it harder to see. Early childhood programs are likely the most racially and ethnically segregated educational spaces in the country, according to . Government funding for child care has historically been reserved for the very poor, leading to subsidized means-tested programs for low-income families, with everyone else’s child care options defined by what they can and cannot afford. This has created our current patchwork of early education programs that are rigidly segregated by income and race.

But as Marks and her colleagues sensed, defaulting to segregation is a missed opportunity. It normalizes the experience of segregated schools for new parents, and a growing body of work suggests that racially and economically diverse preschools have significant learning benefits, which some researchers say is not surprising given how much growth in preschool happens through playing and sharing with peers. “Children of all backgrounds learn more on average in racially and socioeconomically diverse preschool classrooms, and diverse early learning settings can help reduce prejudice among young children,” wrote Halley Potter, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, in a that dives into that research and offers ideas for how the federal government can foster integration in universal preschool.

In 2018, Marks and her colleagues began the process of combining the two early education programs which served more than 200 children into one intentionally integrated school. Early Learning Nation talked with Marks about that process and what other programs can learn from their work. She notes that if the Build Back Better plan passes, the growth of affordable and free early education programs could pave the path for more intentional integration.

The interview has been condensed and reorganized for clarity.

KENDRA HURLEY: Educational Alliance’s preschool program has been around since the 1800’s and your Head Start program since the 1960’s. What sparked the decision to combine them?

JACQUELINE MARKS: When I was hired in 2014, there was a new CEO, Alan van Capelle, and Joanna Samuels was the new executive director for the organization’s just-opened Manny Cantor Center. The community center housed the early childhood programs, and our vision was to make it . But that doesn’t go with having two separate schools. You’d walk into the building and push the elevator button to go to a different floor, and then you were going to a different school with a different funding stream, and a different philosophy. So the three of us who were new all had the same wondering: Why are families separated in the first place? Can we change that?

I soon began to also hear from families that having two schools didn’t seem to be consistent with the mission of the organization. At that point it became really clear we needed to find a way to make our school open and accessible to all.

HURLEY: Why were the schools kept separate for so long?

MARKS: The backend finances are very complex. We’re a direct federal Head Start grantee. We’re also a direct grantee from the New York City Department of Education. And we have many philanthropic gifts. Each of those funding streams has very specific requirements that are different from one another.

For example, in the Head Start landscape you need to do developmental screenings of children and there’s a lot of other reporting that needs to happen. And then the Department of Education has their own system for many of the same things, but it’s in a completely different system, and those systems don’t talk to each other.

To blend the programs is a lot of work and takes a lot of resources, so I think what we had done as an organization, and what we have done as a city, actually, is separate children based on how they’re paid for.

HURLEY: How did your funders react to the idea of blending the two schools?

MARKS: There was a lot of lore out there saying it’s not possible. Our funders had questions like, “Why would you want to do that? It’ll make the finances really complicated.”

But we heard that as an opening. We thought, “Great, if we’re able to figure out the finances, this is something that’s possible.”

After that, one of the things we looked for was: Where’s the model for this? Who are the people that we can talk to and learn from? That’s when we kept encountering places that weren’t able to do it. One economically integrated school we found charged tuition based on a sliding scale, but they don’t receive federal and city funds so did not face the same challenges as us.

In the end, we needed to make sure that the money that comes in is spent as intended, while continuing to hold our progressive pedagogy. That required a pretty complex finance team. We are a large organization and were able to make that happen, and at this point, all of our funders are very interested in the work we’re doing. They’re now connecting us to other schools and programs that are interested in doing this. If the Build Back Better plan passes, I think more schools will have an easier time with the funding piece.

HURLEY: How did you decide programming for the blended school?

MARKS: We wanted to combine the best of what we had. Our tuition-based school is progressive and inspired by the schools of Reggio Emilia in Italy. Our curriculum is co-constructed with the children and teachers and families through observing what the children are interested in and creating opportunities that are specific and relevant to them. It’s based on the idea that all children come to school capable and full of potential, and that every family has much to contribute. We wanted to give everyone access to that.

Our Head Start program, while more traditional in nature, had thoughtful social work supports that we thought all families could benefit from.

To combine them, we were again unpacking the lore around what was possible with our funders. We learned that you actually can have what’s called an “emergent curriculum” like ours through Head Start. On their grant application, you select from a box of options for what curriculum you’re using, and we just had to check “Other,” which means we would need to prove that our curriculum is a research-based effective curriculum, and the emergent curriculum we use is exactly that. Once we knew we could do that, we knew that what we were hoping for was possible.

HURLEY: How did staff and families adjust?

MARKS: Many families come to this neighborhood because they want to raise a family in this beautiful, diverse landscape. So for families it felt right, like this is something that has needed to happen for a long time. Our Policy Council, which is the Head Start term for Parents Association, has been working to create ways for families to come together outside of the classroom too, though due to the pandemic these gatherings have been a bit different and smaller than planned.

With teachers it has been more complex because that’s where we’re asking people to make change. When you have two schools with two philosophies, and both groups of teachers are deeply rooted in their own understanding of early childhood education, it can be challenging to ask for change. If you’re used to taking a curriculum book off the shelf and following it, that can be hard, because that’s no longer the school’s philosophy.

So we gave ourselves lots of time to come together. We started professional development with teachers before we combined the schools as a way for teachers to begin to get to know each other and learn about the strengths of each program. We learned that one teacher may have a really strong background in progressive education, while someone else may have a strong background in building trust with families. For teaching teams we thought about who’s going to work well together and complement each other.

HURLEY: What advice would you give other programs interested in creating economic integration?

MARKS: When programs have different funding sources that serve different populations separately, children then grow up through those different streams. They go to public school according to who they’re in preschool with, and it continues from there and you have these segregated schools. As preschool providers, we can help stop that cycle.

Now, every day during morning drop-off, I see the relationships that families from all backgrounds are building as they help each other fold a stroller, or sit together on a bench and talk about their weekend. It’s happening because they have the opportunity to be together.

We need more of this, and I think that some of the federal funding that will hopefully soon roll out for child care and pre-K can create more opportunities for economic integration. My advice to programs in diverse neighborhoods is to absolutely do this. This is important.

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