American Institutes for Research (AIR) invites stakeholders with varied roles and expertise to submit short essays describing a promising strategy for integration and equity that addresses today’s challenges such as housing or transportation systems; law; politics and policymaking; school funding and revenue; or student- and community-related dynamics or needs.

Selected essays will be published in early 2023 through AIR. Selected essayists will be invited to participate in a national strategy session, and will be among those invited to apply for an AIR equity grant of up to $1 million each.

For more information, contact Robert Kim or Terris Ross at airequityinitiative@air.org.

POLICY UPDATES

Legislative advocacy: The House 2023 appropriations bill included $100 million for the Fostering Diverse Schools grants program, modeled on the Strength in Diversity bill. Unfortunately, the initial Senate bill did not include these funds. We are still working on outreach to key Senate offices, as the two committees plan to resolve their differences before the end of the year. 

It is still valuable for NCSD members and supporters to contact their senators, especially those on the Senate Appropriations Committee, to urge inclusion of these funds. If you would like to help, contact Phil Tegeler at ptegeler@prrac.org.

Administrative advocacy: The House Appropriations Committee also included a directive in House Report 117-96 (pg. 244) requiring the Department to provide technical assistance to school districts regarding the use of ESSA funds for transportation to support voluntary school integration efforts, and to report back to the House Committee on their progress. NCSD staff recently met with Department of Education staff to follow up on these requests, as well as the 2022 budget request (pg. 123) to set aside Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) Title IV, Part A funds for school integration planning grants.

NCSD STAFF UPDATES

What We've Been Up to Recently

REPORT BACK: BETWEEN THE LINES SCREENING

Highlights from 8/2 Between the Lines Screening

Congrats to our intern, Gillian Richard, for organizing and beautifully facilitating NCSD's first official screening of Between the Lines, a play commissioned by PRRAC and NCSD about housing/schools policy. The event featured two Epic students (Dilisima Vickers and Anastazia Graham) and three respondents (Reggie Jackson, Cara McClellan, and Leah Rothstein), followed by a post-show Q&A. 

Here are some of the final reflections from our 50+ attendees:

• "When I watched Between the Lines I felt proud and I want to share the work of these talented young people."
• "I felt discouraged by what I learned and I want to educate my family and friends about these issues."
• "I felt hopeful and want more students to be able to participate in an immersive creative experience like this."
• "I felt historically enlightened, sad, and empowered..."
• "So impressed by the amount of research they'd obviously done and by how creatively they presented it."

Want to bring Between the Lines to your class, conference, or community? Learn more here. 

NCSD SUMMER INTERN SPOTLIGHT

It was difficult to say goodbye to our incredible Summer 2022 intern cohort. Our summer was filled with laughter, camaraderie, encouragement, and growth. Each intern created a trove of materials that we're putting the final touches on over the coming months. You will see evidence of each intern's hard work and passion throughout the year. 

Below you'll find a short blurb about each of our interns, compiled by Christian Robles. (One more will appear next month, as we're wrapping up a final internship this week.) 

Emma Knight (she/her) is a senior at Yale majoring in Ethics, Politics & Economics. She has been engaged in a number of Connecticut-related school integration projects this summer. She researched the state’s school integration history and developed research-driven policy recommendations for the state’s interdistrict transfer program, Open Choice. Through these experiences, she has deepened her appreciation for Connecticut’s rich civil rights history. She is grateful for opportunities to connect with stakeholders, advocates, and NCSD teammates.

Rebeka Cabrera (she/her) is a rising junior at Yale majoring in Ethnicity, Race & Migration and is a part of the Education Studies program. This summer she has conducted extensive research into Pauli Murray’s relatively unknown connections to Mendez v. Westminster and Brown v. Board of Education, as well as the mass firing of Black educators following Brown and contemporary youth activism. She has found her experience challenging yet incredibly rewarding, treasuring the NCSD community and learning from school integration leaders. Her favorite moment was hearing Bettina Love, a Columbia University professor focused on abolitionist teaching, at RESI (Reimaging Education Summer Institute).

Gillian Richard (she/her) is a rising junior at Amherst College majoring in Economics and Math. During her time at NCSD, she has been exploring the connection between school funding and school segregation through interviews with experts, a 15-page memo, and an annotated bibliography. She has also conducted outreach for Between the Lines, a play commissioned by PRRAC and NCSD on housing/school segregation. She describes her experience as “enlightening” because of the opportunities she has had to self-reflect and unlearn racial biases through her work. Her favorite moment was attending RESI with Rebeka in New York City.

Jasper Liles (he/him) is a rising senior at Amherst College majoring in Law Jurisprudence and Social Thought/Political Science. This summer he has written three chapters for NCSD’s upcoming “State of Integration” report, addressing: legal challenges to admissions policies for specialized schools, state-level integration policy efforts, and school integration efforts in California. He has been grateful for being surrounded by a supportive community at NCSD and seeing different projects come together. Some of his favorite moments include making research breakthroughs in PACER (a search engine for court materials) and building relationships with peers and mentors.

Christian Robles (he/him) is a rising senior at Yale majoring in Political Science and is a part of the Education Studies program. This summer he has written two chapters — one on housing/school policy intersections and another on Washington, DC — for NCSD’s upcoming “State of Integration" report in addition to compiling a list of educators with curricula on redlining and supporting NCSD’s federal advocacy efforts. He is appreciative of the community and the opportunities NCSD has provided him. His favorite moment has been hearing principals present what integration looks like and means to them to policymakers at HUD and ED.

Valerie Sterne (she/her) is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in Education Policy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is in Washington D.C. this summer as an Archer Fellow. The first project that she worked on at NCSD was developing an assessment tool for interdistrict integration programs. ​​This assessment tool was created to support program staff in deeply examining the systems, practices, and outcomes within their schools for ongoing growth towards eliminating racial inequities. She has also identified "white island" districts in the United States that contribute to school segregation. Finally, she collaborated on an article for Poverty and Race Journal on parents’ conceptions of enrollment rights as property. Her favorite part of the work this summer has been building relationships with advocates, scholars, and practitioners working in the school integration space.

Thank you to all of our interns!

NEW NCSD STAFF MEMBER

We are pleased to announce a new member of the NCSD team! With a background in education policy, research, events, and communications, Jenna Tomasello joins NCSD as a communications consultant. 

Prior to NCSD, Jenna was an associate director at The Hatcher Group, a full-service communications and marketing firm headquartered in Bethesda, MD that works with education and other mission-driven clients. In that role, Jenna supported strategic communications and events for a variety of nonprofit, foundation, and government clients. She also previously worked as a policy associate at the American Youth Policy Forum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan convening organization based in Washington, D.C., focused on education, workforce, and youth policy issues. Jenna is also the co-founder and president of Learn Together, Live Together, which is also an NCSD member. Jenna has a background in philosophy and legal studies and holds a master’s degree in educational policy from the University of Rochester Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development.

As a product of public schools and a first-generation college student, Jenna is a fierce advocate for school integration and has always held a deep appreciation for education and the opportunities it has afforded her. 

Look out for emails from Jenna (jtomasello@prrac.org).

National -

• Unmitigated school choice policies increase segregation, research shows (Science X, August 22) - “School choice is often touted as a way to desegregate schools, but a new study by USC Marshall School of Business researchers shows it may drive segregation. ‘We found that school choice increases racial segregation even when parents do not factor racial demographics into their choice because racial groups have different priorities when it comes to school characteristics,’ said the study's lead author Kalinda Ukanwa, an assistant professor of marketing at USC Marshall.”

• K-12 Groups Back Racial Diversity as Supreme Court Schedules Affirmative Action Arguments (Education Week, August 3) - “In a pair of U.S. Supreme Court cases about college admissions, several K-12 groups this week filed briefs supporting the consideration of race in elementary and secondary education contexts as well, with one arguing that a ruling against affirmative action would only increase efforts to limit books about and discussions of race in the K-12 classrooms.”

• The Abortion Decision, Haunted by Brown v. Board of Education (The New York Times, August 1) - “In the Supreme Court decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, the justices engaged in an extended debate over the meaning and legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that said the Constitution does not permit racial segregation in public schools. The connection between abortion and education may seem elusive. But the justices cited Brown 23 times, using it to make points about precedent, about popular opinion and, most tellingly, about how to interpret the Constitution.”

• City residents who support neighborhood schools are often divided by race and purpose (The Conversation, August 1) - "These movements don’t always succeed. I found in my research that different experiences of gentrification produce segregated movements to preserve neighborhood schools. This split ultimately keeps activism fragmented and prevents it from turning into a stronger, larger, more unified multiracial movement.”

Louisiana -

• Federal court reverses the closing of Catahoula Elementary in 50-year desegregation battle (WGNO, August 12) - “The school’s closure was ordered in 2021 by the U.S. Western District of Louisiana as part of a 54-year court battle over desegregation in St. Martin Parish. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Foote ordered the closure in 2021, finding the school district failed to treat black students and black teachers equally, as well as failed to address racial inequity in academic achievement.”

New Jersey -

• N.J. schools are among the most segregated in America. So what can we do about it? | A Q&A (NJ.com, July 31) - “Here in New Jersey, what’s known as a progressive state, we have the most segregated schools in the country, a 2017 report by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project found. Our schools are more segregated than those in Alabama or Mississippi.”

• Civil rights group: If NJ won't tackle school segregation, we'll call in the feds (The Gothamist, July 28) - "The New Jersey Coalition Against Racial Exclusion, or NJ-CARE, hand-delivered a letter to Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke at last week’s NAACP convention in Atlantic City. The letter says the coalition will soon file a federal complaint alleging New Jersey uses federal funds ‘to knowingly promote and perpetuate one of the most segregated and unequal public school systems in the nation.’”

North Carolina -

• Low school test scores linked to racial segregation and lead exposure in NC (Science X, August 15) -“Black children who have been exposed to the metal lead have lower test scores than their peers, and this effect is exacerbated for those who live in racially segregated neighborhoods, according to research led by a Duke environmental epidemiologist.”

South Carolina -

• The unintended consequence of Charleston’s population changes: School diversity (The Post and Courier, August 20) - “Racially integrated public schools offer learning advantages that result in better social and academic outcomes. The Charleston County School District includes many schools that are mostly White or mostly Black. In recent years, though, many of the district’s schools have become more racially diverse.”

Texas -

• Dallas parents flocking to schools that pull students from both rich and poor parts of town (The Hechinger Report, August 4) - “Other research suggests that school choice programs, like the one in DISD, can influence segregation in either direction, depending on how they’re implemented. For example, choice programs that don’t factor in students’ socioeconomic status can actually make segregation worse, according to a research brief by the National Coalition on School Diversity."

• How Dallas is reversing decades of white flight from its school system (The Guardian, August 4) - “Segregation concentrates Black and Hispanic students in high-poverty schools, said sean reardon, professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. Using data from every school district across the country, reardon tracks educational outcomes, economic status and race."

Virginia -

• Youngkin criticizes SOL scores, sets sights on in-person learning (VPM, August 18) - “Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, a VCU professor who studies school segregation, told VPM News in May she worried that without context, focusing on test scores will create additional barriers to success. ‘The test scores fuel a rating, a really simplistic rating that often gets posted on the real estate websites,’ Siegel-Hawley said. ‘And some researchers have called this educational redlining because it creates whole swaths and school zones and communities that families with means avoid because of the low test scores associated with the school without any kind of context.’”

NCSD MEMBER UPDATES

BRIDGES COLLABORATIVE SEEKING NEW MEMBERS

The Bridges Collaborative is now inviting applications from school districts, charter schools, and housing organizations seeking to increase access to diverse, integrated, and inclusive schools and neighborhoods.

The Bridges Collaborative is a national initiative working to increase the number of students attending diverse, integrated, rigorous and inclusive schools by fostering authentic collaboration among school and housing partners pursuing integration, providing strategic support to practitioners using research and policy, and influencing the national dialogue on school integration.

Since the launch in fall 2020, the Bridges Collaborative has engaged its 250 participants from across 22 states in more than 300 hours of programming. 

Applications are due Friday, September 2, 2022. Apply today!

Please reach out to bridgescollaborative@tcf.org with any questions.

• Recent report from Beyond Conflict (co-authored by Research Advisory Panel member Linda R. Tropp and Tim Phillips): Renewing American Democracy: Navigating A Changing Nation "analyzes America’s current social divides through the lens of social science to understand how threats–both real and perceived–shape our sense of identity, our feelings of belonging, and our perceptions of status and power relations in society... The study builds on Beyond Conflict’s earlier research on partisan divides and its Understanding the Psychology that Drives Us Apart report, to expand the focus beyond polarization to explore a broader range of psychological processes that drive social division and threaten American democracy."

• Recent policy brief from National Educational Policy Center: State Accountability Rating Systems: A Review of School Report Cards as Indicators of School Quality "This policy brief discusses the difficulties that arise when states' school report cards use this summative-rating approach, and provides recommendations for resolving these challenges."

• Recent report from the Othering & Belonging Institute: Single-Family Zoning in the Sacramento Region "As with the San Francisco Bay Area and the greater Los Angeles regions, Sacramento’s residential areas are dominated by single-family-only zoning, stifling the development of denser housing options, perpetuating racial and economic segregation, and shaping communities and the distribution of opportunity for millions of Californians."

DIVERSE CHARTER SCHOOLS COALITION SEEKS CONSULTANT

The Diverse Charter Schools Coalition (DCSC) is launching a new advocacy strategy and platform stream of work and is seeking an advocacy consultant to drive this bold initiative. The goal for this position is to engage 45 partners/influencers as champions for the diverse-by-design charter sector, adopt a federal, state, and local policy platform, and create an advocacy community of practice. DCSC is looking for a consultant with experience planning and implementing advocacy strategies, storytelling, and engaging a diverse set of stakeholders. Ideally, this person has experience in the school integration advocacy space.

Please send any recommendations to Ashley Heard: aheard@diversecharters.org.

Check out our conferences listing page, which is evolving given the COVID-19 crisis.

Please let us know of upcoming events, by emailing school-diversity@prrac.org.

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund * Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund  American Civil Liberties Union * Poverty & Race Research Action Council * Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law * Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund * Magnet Schools of America * One Nation Indivisible * Southern Poverty Law Center * Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School * Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA * Campaign for Educational Equity, Teachers College, Columbia University * University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights * Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the Ohio State University * The Othering & Belonging Institute * Education Rights Center, Howard University School of Law * Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School * Education Law Center * New York Appleseed * Sheff Movement Coalition * Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation * ERASE Racism * Chicago Lawyers' Committee * Empire Justice Center * IntegrateNYC * Intercultural Development Research Association * Reimagining Integration: The Diverse and Equitable Schools Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education * Institute for Social Progress at Wayne County Community College District * Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity at Rutgers Law School * Equity Assistance Center (Region II) at Touro College * IntegratedSchools.org * The Office of Transformation and Innovation at the Dallas Independent School District * Live Baltimore * Maryland Equity Project * Center for Education and Civil Rights * National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector * The Center for Diversity and Equality in Education at Rutgers University * Being Black at School * UnifiEd * The Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy * Public Advocacy for Kids * The Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools * The School Desegregation Notebook * Fair Housing Justice Center, Inc. * Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, Inc. (METCO) * Learn Together, Live Together * Beloved Community * Chicago United for Equity * Learning Policy Center * Public School Forum of North Carolina * The Bell * North Carolina Justice Center * The Bridges Collaborative at The Century Foundation * South Side Early Learning * Oneonta For Equality * NestQuest * Metis Associates