Class no longer dismissed: why some conservatives are warming to socioeconomic school integration.

• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.
• Position: Book review

The Diverse Schools Dilemma: A Parent's Guide to Socioconomically Mixed Public Schools

by Michael J. Petrilli

Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 119 pp.

In the decades following the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, many school districts engaged in a grand experiment of racial desegregation through compulsory busing. Although desegregation significantly raised the academic achievement of black students, it also fostered an enormous white backlash in the 1960s and '70s, which helped move the entire country to the right politically. Since then, most of the school reform movement has avoided school integration, instead favoring ideas like charter schools, private school vouchers, and merit pay for teachers. For example, Chester E. Finn Jr., a former Reagan Department of Education official and president of the center-right Thomas B. Fordham Institute, has suggested we should focus on fixing high-poverty schools rather than integrating them--the latter being a project he dismisses as caught in a "time warp" of "social engineering."

But this attitude is beginning to change. Even conservatives are starting to admit that while it is possible to improve individual high-poverty public schools, no one knows how to do it at scale. Majority low-income schools are twenty-two times less likely to be high performing as middle-class schools. And while some high-poverty charter schools do well, the most comprehensive study of charters found that only 17 percent outperformed regular public schools, while 46 percent performed about the same, and 37 percent actually performed worse.

So a new generation of school reformers are taking a second look at school integration. They are backing diversity programs that are updated to focus more on socioeconomic status than race and employ school choice and incentives rather than compulsory busing. The poster child for hard-nosed reform, former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee, is backing economic school integration plans in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and La Crosse, Wisconsin, noting, "Research shows that socioeconomic integration clearly benefits low-income kids." And now comes Michael Petrilli, a former George W. Bush Education Department official and Chester Finn's right-hand man at the Fordham Institute, no less, suggesting in a provocative new book, The Diverse Schools Dilemma, that socioeconomic school integration deserves a chance.

Efforts to "fix high-poverty schools" through the Bush...