The Next Kind of Integration - Class, Race and Desegregating American Schools - NYTimes.com

This research by Ferguson (from the same article as below) makes an important point about integration. At large middle-class schools, like where I went to school in Orlando, the school itself was incredibly integrated. Yet I had classes with mostly white and Asian students. The use of tracking continues to prevent socio-economic and racial integration at many large schools.

Now, I like the idea of smaller schools for the most part as a way to solve this. Being such a large school, my high school had to find a way to separate students out. However small schools prevent students from learning a diversity of subjects... especially when it comes to foreign language. So there isn't one answer... but a mix, which I think is what Louisville is trying, seems to be on the right track.

The Next Kind of Integration - Class, Race and Desegregating American Schools - NYTimes.com: "Ronald Ferguson, an economist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is less persuaded. His research highlights the nagging persistence of a racial achievement gap in well-off suburbs. “What happens with the achievement gap in a place like Louisville,” he says, “will depend on how vigilant their leaders are to make sure high-quality instruction is delivered across the board.” Such teaching is more likely in a school with a critical mass of middle-class parents, he concedes. But he stresses that to reap the benefits, poor kids have to be evenly distributed among classrooms and not just grouped together in the lowest tracks. “To the degree a district takes the kids who struggle the most academically and spreads them across different classrooms, they’re making teachers’ work more doable,” he says. “And that may be the biggest effect.”"