The Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) seeks a Housing Policy Counsel. (This position will offer some opportunities to collaborate with NCSD staff on housing/schools work!) Please share this information with your network via Twitter, Facebook, or email.

POLICY UPDATE: CERD REPORT

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) completed its review of the United States’ compliance with the CERD treaty in August 2022. Its resulting report offers an overview of U.S. progress – and lack thereof – on racial justice issues. The Senate ratified this important treaty in 1994, committing the U.S. to take affirmative steps to address systemic discrimination and segregation.

The new UN report specifically calls out America’s persistent school and housing segregation and recommends the following:

• “(a) Developing and adopting a comprehensive plan to address socio-economic and racial segregation in schools and communities, with concrete goals, timelines and impact assessment mechanisms;
• (b) Promoting that states analyse and rectify funding disparities to public schools and reduce the disproportionate impact on low-income communities;
• (c) Expanding federal funding for programmes and policies that promote racial integration in public schools;
• (d) Adopting appropriate measures to address racial discrimination in the administration of student discipline, including school-based arrests leading to referrals to the juvenile and criminal justice system for minor non-violent offenses.”

Several of our members and partners weighed in with CERD, including:

• Holding the Line: Combating Racial Discrimination in a Divided America was submitted by The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund
• Poverty and Race Research Action Council submitted two shadow reports, one on housing and another on education
• Southern Poverty Law Center (this was one of three submissions)

NCSD STAFF UPDATES

What We've Been Up to Recently

FACT SHEET: RECENT FINDINGS ON SCHOOL INTEGRATION

In this new NCSD fact sheet, we summarize several recent studies and reports that further underscore the importance of K-12 school integration, including:

• Social Capital and Economic Mobility study
• CERD Committee report
• GAO report

NCSD SUMMER FELLOW PUBLISHES ARTICLE ABOUT PARENTS' CONCEPTIONS OF SCHOOL ENROLLMENT IN POVERTY & RACE

In Parents’ Conceptions of School Enrollment as Property (pg. 7), published in PRRAC's quarterly journal (Poverty & Race), NCSD Summer Fellow Valerie Sterne and PRRAC Legal Intern Janelle Taylor describe ways that some parents misconceive school enrollment as property.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Home buyers conceptualize school enrollment rights as property that they have purchased with their home. These enrollment rights are imagined as property in two distinct but related ways: the school as a commodity that delivers an economic benefit to the students, and the property value of real estate that is related to the perceived value of the zoned school...The beliefs about how this value is mediated through the school are entangled with racialized conceptions of school quality."

NCSD JOINS AMICUS BRIEF IN BOSTON PARENT COALITION CASE

We joined an amicus brief with the ACLU and Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law in support of the Boston Public Schools Board's appeal to the First Circuit in Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp. v. School Committee of City of Boston.

Some highlights from the amicus brief:

"Efforts to consider the impacts of existing admissions policies on school integration, diversity, and access are fully consistent with equal protection principles. These considerations fit within the Supreme Court’s framework of permissible admissions plans."

"Fostering diversity of all kinds creates an environment in which students learn how to treat each other with respect and dignity, perform at higher levels, and become better prepared to integrate into a heterogenous, complex society. Nothing in the law prohibits schools from pursuing these goals or implementing the Plan."

National -

• OPINION: School Is for Making Citizens (New York Times, September 1) - "Lessons about racism make students more likely to engage and empathize across race. Such cross-racial solidarity is essential for members of our most diverse generation. In our increasingly diverse nation, insulating students from lessons about racism will create a generation ill equipped to participate in a multiracial democracy."

• How to fix policies that unintentionally promote preschool segregation (The Hill, September 5) - "In collaboration with Education Trust, Century Foundation and Educational Alliance’s Manny Cantor Center, our team at The Hunt Institute has been hard at work in recent months exploring both the values of diversity and inclusion in preschool and the ways that policymakers can better support the robust integration of early childhood settings." 

• Ruby Bridges, desegregation trailblazer, writes kids book (Associated Press, September 6) - "Ruby Bridges was a 6-year-old first-grader when she walked past jeering crowds of white people to become one of the first Black students at racially segregated schools in New Orleans more than six decades ago. Now, with teaching about race in America more complicated than it’s ever been, she’s authored a picture book about her experience for the youngest of readers."

• OPINION: Our education system is not setting up students for success (Hechinger Report, September 6) - "Unfortunately, many Americans, especially white Americans, have rejected public initiatives to address the growing cultural and economic divides between how we invest in and educate our kids. Despite evidence that school integration improves educational outcomes for Black students without negatively affecting white students, as research by University of California, Berkeley Professor Rucker Johnson has shown, segregation of Black students has increased in almost every region of the nation in recent years."

• Is Brown v. Board the Next to Fall — And Does It Really Matter? (Washington Informer, September 7) - "I wonder if people have ever considered how expensive segregation was – the need to have two of everything had to cost a lot of money – and all because of the amount of melanin in my skin.”

• Do you think our schools are worse than ever? You’re wrong. (Washington Post, September 25) - "It could be due to educationally beneficial changes in family income, parental education and family size within the Black community... Other factors may also be in play, such as school desegregation, civil rights laws, early interventions like Head Start and other preschool programs, and compensatory education for low-income students.”

Massachusetts -

• The longevity of the METCO program and its affect on education in Massachusetts (WCBV, September 5) - “Around the same time at the Boston Bussing crisis of the 1970s, METCO, a voluntary school desegregation program began and it has been around for more than 50 years."

New Jersey -

• Plan to integrate schools, cut ‘courtesy’ busing roils N.J. school district (NJ.com, September 12) - “Some parents are upset the South Orange-Maplewood school district eliminated courtesy busing this year as the district continues a plan to better integrate its schools. The busing change comes as the district is also implementing an integration plan to move some students to other local schools to create more racial diversity."

• Thanks to the courts, NJ is finally building affordable homes. Let’s keep it that way. (NJ.com, September 20) - "[R]esearch has demonstrated the benefits of affordable housing in addressing racial inequities. Living in areas of higher opportunity, with better schools, improved infrastructure, and access to jobs and other resources, leads to improved health and wealth outcomes for low-income families and people of color."

• Key ruling on school segregation case still pending (NJ Spotlight News, September 27) - "[E]ducation advocates are awaiting a decision on New Jersey’s school segregation lawsuit. Despite being among the most diverse states in the U.S., a key study found New Jersey’s schools are some of the most segregated in the country."

New York -

• Tensions high as NYC soon starts middle and high school admissions season (Chalkbeat, September 14) - "Tensions are rising ahead of an anticipated announcement about whether New York City middle and high schools will fully bring back selective admissions for the first time since the pandemic. Removing test scores, attendance, and other “screens” from the selection process helped move the needle on desegregating the nation’s largest public school system."

• Segregation in Syracuse’s school system needs to be acknowledged (Daily Orange, September 19) - “For more than 10 years, the result of systemic segregation in Syracuse has been ignored. The operation of a segregated school system and academic issues have been pushed aside as if they are not important to Syracuse. It is affecting hundreds of children and families around the community." 

North Carolina -

• New charter schools could open in Garner and Monroe. Would they promote segregation? (News Observer, September 13) - "A state advisory board narrowly recommended Tuesday approving a charter school in Garner that the Wake County school system says would increase segregation in surrounding schools." 

• Historical marker will honor Black family’s efforts to integrate Raleigh schools (News Observer, September 18) - “The N.C. African American Heritage Commission will place a marker in front of the former Raleigh home of Joseph Holt Sr. and Elwyna Holt to mark it as a stop on the state’s Civil Rights Trail. The Holts waged a legal battle in the 1950s that, while unsuccessful, paved the way for the later integration of Raleigh City Schools."

Ohio -

• Marching On: The Fight for School Integration in Hillsboro, Ohio (Ohio Humanities, September 9) - "When their school district refused to integrate after Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, a group of Black mothers in Southwest Ohio marched their children to the white school, demanding admission, only to be turned away every day for two years. Their activism resulted in one of the longest sustained protests of the civil rights era. Today, their children remain committed to telling the story of their mothers’ activism and of Ohio’s role in the movement."

South Carolina -

• Former Clarendon County schools join Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Park (Post and Courier, September 27) - "Two South Carolina schools joined the historical sites recognized under the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park Expansion and Redesignation Act. Under the new federal recognition legislation, the U.S. Department of the Interior and National Park Service partnered to help tell the school desegregation stories that paved the way for the landmark high court ruling."

Texas -

• Dallas Parents Flocking to Schools That Pull Students From Both Rich and Poor Parts of Town (Hechinger Report, September 24) - "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."

Missouri -

• Former students at all-Black school in Higginsville working to preserve history (News 84 Media, September 9) - "For almost 70 years from the post-Civil War period, to the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, Lafayette County and the greater Higginsville, Missouri, area had one school for Black children. It has sat vacant for years, and now a former student is leading an effort to restore and preserve its history."

• Eighth Circuit hears latest dispute in decades-old St. Louis school desegregation saga (Courthouse News, September 20) - "Any delay and any decrease in state desegregation funding to St. Louis public schools would have a critical impact on students... the sales tax portion of a 1996 settlement agreement to fund desegregation programs should go solely to the district and not neighboring charter schools."

AMPLIFY & ENGAGE

ELISE BODDIE JOINS DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE 

NCSD MEMBER UPDATES

• Recent article by ERASE Racism's Elaine Gross: Denial of Housing to African Americans: Post-Slavery Reflections from a Civil Rights Advocate "In this article, I draw on two decades of experience as a civil rights advocate to reflect on the denial of housing to African Americans in post-slavery America... I undertake historical research and share insights from my own experience to create and reflect upon six lessons related to understanding the systematic discrimination and segregation of African Americans."

• Recent policy brief from NYU Metro Center's Center for Policy, Research, and Evaluation: Striving Toward Equitable Partnerships in Rural Settings: Lessons from Berea, Kentucky "Research suggests rural schools and communities have specific advantages that equip them with the tools to make partnership efforts more effective....This study demonstrates that key to any school district’s equity agenda is the engagement of those most closely affected, including educators, community partners, and families. In the rural setting of Berea Community Elementary School, a history of partnerships between families and schools were conditions that led engaged and empowered families to act as advocates for an equity agenda."

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