Many suburbs that strongly opposed regional solutions a generation ago now need them to prevent resegregation, but there are no tools to achieve them. This means that there are critical limits on the possibility of integration under current law.
A second key restriction is that achieving the maximum benefits of integration theory requires not merely getting students into more diverse schools but also avoiding classroom segregation and ensuring equal treatment within the schools. Typically, however, choice plans focus simply on getting students into more-advantaged schools and not on changing schools and faculty in ways that would maximize benefits, such as integrating faculty and providing appropriate training for teachers in techniques to create equal-status interaction, which research across the world shows facilitates successful intergroup relationships.51 Faculty should also be taught to understand and respect the diversity of children’s backgrounds and assure they feel welcome and receive fair treatment. Decades of research have documented that such conditions are necessary for maximizing gains.52 Changing the internal operation of schools and the beliefs and practices of teachers requires serious help. The Reagan Administration canceled the Emergency School Aid Act, the major federal desegregation assistance program, in 1981 in spite of evidence of its substantial educational and race relations benefits.53 This generation’s policy debates have ignored the challenge of creating successful diverse classrooms with teachers who can work well across lines of race/ethnicity.
American political philosophy and ideology are closely linked to legal developments. The integration theory of choice developed out of the experience of attempting to realize the goals set forth in Brown v. Board of Education and civil rights law. The Supreme Court’s later decisions, which in 1991 led to the ending of most large mandatory desegregation plans and in 2007 forbid the most common forms of voluntary desegregation, have eliminated most of the infrastructure for pursuing the policies of the integration theory and forced school districts committed to diverse schools to come up with new approaches.54 After legitimating race-conscious plans for decades, the court has now adopted a much more individualist approach and says that most of these plans are unconstitutional. The parents who brought the cases against voluntary plans devised by local school boards claimed that the primary right in choice plans must be individual choice, even if it resegregates the schools. The Supreme Court agreed, holding in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 that no student could be given or denied an assignment on the basis of his or her race in a voluntary desegregation plan. In his concurring opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy adopted the goals of the integration theory, calling integration a compelling interest, but forbade the means that had worked to achieve it; he did not reconcile this contradiction.55
Current legal limits block integration choice approaches in a number of settings. This does not mean, however, that it is impossible to devise policies that would produce considerably more integration and make the desegregation that does exist, often because of blacks and Latinos moving into previously all-white suburban communities, more successful and stable. Nor do these legal barriers prevent discussing what would be necessary to seriously pursue the integration theory in the future or examining the settings in which desegregation across city-suburban lines was implemented. And districts that have never desegregated or that commit new forms of discrimination are still liable to court-ordered integration plans.
A 5–4 Supreme Court decision does not mean that the legal battles are permanently settled: a number of school districts are seeking indirect ways to preserve diverse schools, and theories have long lives. Even as Friedman could develop his theory at a time when there was no significant support for it, theories of integration can be further developed and perhaps pursued in indirect ways now—and more directly in the future if the law changes back.
The premise underlying the integration theory is that inequality of opportunity is linked to social stratification, which means that normally the most-privileged students receive the best schooling opportunities and historically excluded populations receive the worst. This theory draws from both the historic record of unequal opportunity in racially and economically stratified schools and evidence of the impact of peer groups on educational success articulated in the 1966 Coleman report and many other studies of schooling.56 A peer group’s family and community background and the distribution of qualified and experienced teachers and challenging classes strongly shape a school’s impact. Family influences are more powerful for middle-class students with resources and education, while school is more decisive for students isolated in families and neighborhoods with far less social capital. This theory says that schools as they have normally been organized tend to reflect and perpetuate the relative status of their students.57 Changing this outcome requires getting disadvantaged students access to the strongest and most-respected schools.58 Integrationist choice plans aim to do that by creating win-win situations in which both privileged and disadvantaged students gain in a variety of ways.
Desegregation, however it is accomplished, is powerful because it connects students from excluded groups to the information and opportunity networks that exist in better schools and that greatly enhance their prospects for later success in mainstream institutions and relationships.59 Choice systems that produce magnet schools with authentically distinctive curricula not only enrich the system’s educational offerings and capacity to meet the needs of individual children, whatever their race, but also help keep middle-class families in urban communities and retain their support for public schools.60 Ironically, the very success of this strategy sometimes gives birth to attacks on desegregation policies. The intense parental demand for access to excellent magnets originally created to produce integration can lead to struggles over their admissions methods. Since an important part of the attraction of these schools is that they are stably integrated, successful attacks abetted by conservative courts following an intensely individualist theory of opportunity can kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Stable integration is a clearly positive attribute for most families but rarely happens by accident, and removal of the controls that create and maintain it in schools usually means that no one can have what a great many want.
But integration theory goes beyond the creation of a diverse student body, also emphasizing the importance of an integrated faculty, multicultural curriculum, and equal-status treatment in all aspects of school operation. It is about producing stably integrated and equitable institutions in a segregated and unequal society and sees schools as critical not only for educational opportunity but in preparing young people to effectively live, work, and be citizens in a highly diverse society.61 In a society with no racial majority, these skills will be important for white children also.62 This is a theory of deep institutional change.
Integration theory also includes elements of competition, but of a different kind than those in market theory. The basic idea is that students learn from one another, that contact and competition with high-achieving students stimulate learning, and that teachers operate at a higher level when there are more well-prepared students in a class. Educators in general prefer to teach well-prepared groups of students in well-regarded and well-supported schools.63 Accountability systems, which tend to brand as failures and sanction a great many schools serving minority and poor communities, only speed the departure of the teachers who can find jobs elsewhere.64 Schools with a critical mass of privileged students offer more competitive courses and tend to provide a clear, default path to college. If desegregation is implemented well, the impacts on children’s lives can be substantial and they can face and learn to deal with the kind of experiences they will encounter in today’s diverse colleges.
Integregation theory is much more, of course, than an educational reform strategy, though it is that as well. It has a broader social goal: to change the beliefs sustaining prejudice and discrimination and to help both students of color and white students function more effectively and fairly in a diverse society, most of whose children will not be white. This theory is strongly connected to the creation and maintenance of diverse neighborhoods, since racial change and resegegation are much more likely in communities with segregated or resegregating schools than in communities with good integrated schools. Choice, with appropriate regulations, is a way to attain these diverse neighborhoods.
Is Integration Impossible? The White Flight Hypothesis
Some argue that