Catching up on a little Integrated School News…

I’ve been out of town  (celebrating 20 years of marriage to a damn great man!) and wanted to catch up on school integration news…

National Politics (School Integration getting more attention!)

From the Atlantic:  “Secretary King will call on parents and teachers at the National PTA Convention in Orlando to create diverse schools … “Like math and reading, like science, social studies, and the arts, diversity is no longer a luxury. It’s essential for helping our students get ready for the world they will encounter after high school and, increasingly, throughout their lives.”

King will make the case that integration benefits not only black and brown students, who are disproportionately low-income, but their affluent white peers, too. “We have this emerging body of research around the importance of diversity for the success of organizations, and businesses,” he said, “and so there’s a case to be made that diversity is not just about trying to expand opportunities for low-income students, but really about our values as a country and to improve education outcomes for all students… Today, cross-cultural literacy is another way of saying competitive advantage.”

University-Land (College admissions criteria  [aka one of the many reasons we claim that our kids have to go to certain schools that end up looking very middle-class and usually whiter] may be shifting — another example)

“We are finally coming to the realization—based on mountains of good social science—that the measures of merit that colleges and universities have been using for decades to determine who gets in were never that good in the first place. The College Board’s own validity studies show that even when you combine SAT scores and high school GPA, you don’t have a very good chance of predicting which students will do well in their first year of college—and those correlations are worse for the very groups that are becoming our new majority.

We are long overdue for a clear-eyed debate about what we need to do to improve our ability to find and to cultivate talent broadly and equitably in the increasingly diverse generations that already are growing up.”

Amazing People Doing Cool Stuff – A Group Of Bronx Teens Are Trying To Transform New York City’s Segregated Schools

This is going to make stuff more difficult until we can figure out a replacement….

The metric we’ve been using to determine poverty and poverty concentrations in schools is on the rocks. Now we are going to need to replace the  “Free & Reduced Price Lunch” program (whose families below 185 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $45,000 for a family of four) measurement with something else…. … … …