Roughly a mile away, the demographics at Billingsville, another K-5, sat in stark contrast. Located in the Grier Heights neighborhood — an old farming community founded by a former slave — Billingsville was a high-poverty school serving an all-Black student population.

“We operated in silos that I never understood as a principal,” Hash said.

Portable classrooms on Cotswold’s overcrowded campus were evidence of the school’s popularity, while Billingsville occupied a brand new building with room to spare.

In 2018, the two schools became part of a unique experiment that was unlike any student assignment plan families had ever been part of. The schools would merge, but instead of moving into one building, the early grades would occupy Billingsville, and Cotswold would serve grades 3 through 5. 

Almost immediately, under the new arrangement, Billingsville went from having one white student to being 40% white, Hash said. Both schools now offer the rigorous IB program and have a more racially and socioeconomically balanced population. Across both schools, less than half of the students live in poverty, 41% students are Black, about 17% are Hispanic and 34% are white. 

“Our school looks like the world. Our school looks like Charlotte,” Hash said. 

The student assignment method, called a pairing, is not new. In fact, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district employed the same design in the 1970s following a that required the district to desegregate. But the model has been underutilized as an integration strategy, experts say. 

Now, shows that such mergers could reduce racial and ethnic isolation by as much as 60% in 200 large school districts nationwide. At the same time, the method would increase parents’ commute to school by only a few minutes — not a small matter for families managing busy drop-offĚýand pick-up schedules.

“What we’re trying to do … is highlight how student assignment policy changes might help produce environments that can reduce the concentration of different forms of disadvantage,” said Nabeel Gillani, an assistant professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and the lead researcher on the project. “Disadvantage can prevent young people and their families from reaching their potential.”

Under a , schools are no longer permitted to consider race when pursuing integration goals. But blending schools with different socioeconomic profiles can still result in more racially diverse schools. In a moment when leaders of the ruling party in Washington want to “” and argue that “,” Gillani urges districts not to back off efforts to create more integrated schools. He said he hopes that the Trump administration’s warnings against any emphasis on racial diversity “will light a stronger fire under more districts” to consider pairing, “instead of scaring them away.”

Along with the research paper, released Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ Nexus journal, Gillani and doctoral student Madison Landry created an that shows how pairing, and sometimes tripling, would change school demographics in communities across the country. 

For example, in Plano, Texas, 26% of the students at Shepard Elementary are non-white, according to 2022 data, while 83% of students at Sigler, about six minutes away, are non-white. 

Pairing the two schools would more than double the percentage of students of color at Shepard and decrease the percentage at Sigler to 52.9%, bringing both closer to the districtwide figure of 65%.

‘A desired racial balance’

Across the country, data shows that schools have grown increasingly divided by race, ethnicity and family income. A from the U.S. Government Accountability Office showed that more than a third of students attended schools in 2020-21 where 75% or more students were of a single race or ethnicity. , however, shows that students who attend integrated schools have higher test scores and lower dropout rates. 

In 2017, Billingsville earned a D rating from the state. Now the combined Billingsville-Cotswold earns a C, but also met its academic growth target, a measure that captures progress from year to year. 

Such results are one reason why the Biden administration in 2023 took steps to encourage districts to implement strategies like pairing. The U.S. Department of Education awarded $14 million to states, districts and charter networks working to create more integrated schools. 

Gillani has advised one of the recipients, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina, as it develops a redistricting plan. While the plans don’t involve pairing, leaders are still redrawing boundaries with an eye toward reducing socioeconomic isolation across the district. 

Other recipients included a Rhode Island charter network, the Oakland Unified School District in California and the Maryland Department of Education.

A department spokeswoman said she had no information about whether the program would continue, but one advocate for school integration doubts it, considering the administration’s opposition to diversity efforts. 

“I think it’s unlikely that they would run another competition for that grant under this administration,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. 

In fact, the department’s Feb. 14 “” letter warned districts against taking steps to “achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.” 

But “socioeconomic diversity has its own independent value,” said Richard Kahlenberg, director of housing policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “There is a wealth of research to suggest that students benefit from attending a mixed-income school … even if there is zero impact on racial diversity.”

The Supreme Court has also upheld race-neutral policies. Within the past year, the court has declined to hear two cases, one from Boston and one from Fairfax County, Virginia, that challenged efforts to create more diversity in highly selective schools.

“The judiciary will almost surely uphold socioeconomic integration plans at the end of the day,” Kahlenberg said. 

Even though the federal grant program was small, Potter said she hopes the efforts would offer “some important proof points” for how to encourage integration at a time when many districts are considering mergers because of declining enrollment. 

“There really is a chance to have a win-win situation when it’s structured right,” she said, “and when there’s community engagement to work through these hard conversations.”

‘Why are they changing everything?’

One benefit of pairing — over a typical redistricting plan that reassigns students to new schools — is that it doesn’t split up peers from the same grade level. They might relocate to a different building, but they stay with their friends.

That doesn’t make it easy, however. Families often have multiple children in the same elementary school and arrange afterschool programs and child care around that location. 

“Our first reaction was ‘Oh gosh, why are they changing everything?’ ” said Brantley Alvey, whose oldest daughter, now in seventh grade, went through the merger.  Her youngest is in fifth grade at the school. “When we bought our house, we said ‘We love that our kids are going to walk to elementary school for six years.’ ”

Parents also had questions over how the makeup of their children’s classrooms would change after the merger.

“Would they be the only child of color or would they be the only child that wasn’t of color?” Hash recalled. “Those were real conversations that we had to tackle.”

To help parents manage morning and afternoon routines, the schools have staggered bell schedules. The district also spent the entire 2017-18 school year preparing families for the change. Hash organized campus beautification days and concerts to help families from the two schools get to know each other. She said she had to view the merger of communities not just from an instructional and management perspective, but with a “micro-political lens.”

“You have to lean in with how we’re alike versus how we’re different,” she said. “This is a model that can be replicated across the United States, not just in Charlotte.”

Hash is the principal for both campuses, dividing her time between the two. Because of the pairing, Alvey said, the school has benefited from more resources — like two full-time art teachers, and more playground equipment and library books. For parent leaders, however, organizing carnivals and other family events has often been “labor intensive,” she said. “We’re constantly feeling like we have to duplicate our efforts on two different campuses.” 

While the positives, she said, have outweighed the negatives, the one-school, two-campus model won’t be in place much longer. will eventually bring all K-5 students together in a newly built Cotswold, while the Billingsville site becomes a district Montessori school. Grier Heights families will be able to choose which school they want their children to attend.

Still, Alvey said the pairing has benefited her children and helped to break down barriers between the two neighborhoods — especially since both schools feed into the same middle and high school.

“It’s not just low-income kids that benefit from diversity; it’s the higher income kids as well,” she said. “We want our kids to be comfortable with people from different backgrounds and different cultures. That’s only going to better prepare them to be good citizens of the world.”

For years now, it’s been conventional wisdom that the legacy of Brown is, at best, complicated and possibly even an outright failure. On the one hand, it ended the evil practice of sorting kids into schools by race. By citing the Constitution in seeking to end this once-common policy, the justices reimagined the American social contract and marked a hugely important milestone for the country. On the other hand, despite optimistic predictions, the public schools .

Read now, and you can see that the contradiction was there right from the beginning. The court lamented the impact that racially isolated schools can have on children of color, but the ruling itself didn’t outlaw racial imbalances. It simply made it illegal to assign kids to school based on their race. In later cases, the court explicitly declined to outlaw the racial imbalances that arise indirectly from policies that do not mention race.

This was the right call. Had the court done so, school districts would have been empowered to engage in social engineering on a revolutionary scale. Kids would have been reassigned to schools with the singular goal of eliminating any racial disparities in enrollment, leading districts to ignore all the other factors that might determine which school is the best fit for which child: size of the school, convenience of location, values, curricular focus, pedagogical approach, etc. This would have been a disaster for the country, and low-income kids of all races would have become pawns in a radical social experiment.

However, by defining the constitutional violation so narrowly, the court limited its jurisdiction to those districts that had a history of explicit racial segregation. Only they would be forced to end racial imbalances in their schools. And even in these cases, the courts’ scrutiny would end as soon as a district was found to have atoned for the sins of its past.

In effect, the court boxed itself into a corner that keeps getting smaller. Even as districts have stricken any mention of race from their school assignment policies, racial divisions have persisted or even worsened. Why? Because children are primarily assigned to schools based on their address, and American cities are largely divided along lines of race and income level, even within the same neighborhood. So schools come to mirror those imbalances. What’s more, the bundling of housing and education has driven up the cost of homes near elite, coveted public schools, further exacerbating these longstanding inequalities.

Today, Linda Brown, the little girl who gave her name to the landmark 1954 case, wouldn’t be turned away from a public school because of her race. Instead, she’d likely be rejected because of her address. I fear that’s no great improvement.

Take a look at elite, coveted public schools across the country, like Lincoln Elementary in Chicago. Or Mary Lin Elementary in Atlanta. Or Mount Washington Elementary in Los Angeles. The attendance zones of such schools often mirror of their neighborhoods from the New Deal era. In effect, the zones are doing the same work that redlining did back in the 1930s and 1940s, boxing out low-income families of all races. Call it .

The courts have decided that they are powerless to deal with these issues, even though these policies violate the clear language of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s 1954 opinion, which declared that public schools “must be made available to all on equal terms.” This is the forgotten promise of Brown.

My organization, Available to All, has just released a 50-state report titled “.” Looking at the laws that govern public school admissions, our report found that American families have very weak legal protections governing access to public schools. Legal discrimination based on geography or income is common, while neutral enrollment policies like lotteries are required only in rare cases, for example in charter school admissions. 

This leaves schools free to use a home address or family income level to turn a child away. Lack of oversight means school staff can and admit one family over another. Finally, the laws are riddled with inconsistencies and loopholes, meaning parents have to navigate a system in which the rules vary from school to school. Some public schools are required to have lotteries; others are not. Some are required to use exclusionary school zones to turn kids away; others are forbidden to do so.

We call on policymakers and the courts to bring much-needed oversight to public school enrollment. That means providing procedural protections for American families applying to public schools, including a right to apply to any public school, regardless of their address, and an appeals process for challenging schools that deny a child enrollment. State law should require schools to collect and publish data like acceptance and denial rates. And — perhaps most importantly — there need to be legal reforms that reduce the importance of exclusionary maps, by, for example, requiring that public schools reserve 15% of their seats for children who live outside their zone or district.

It’s time to take action and finally, after 70 years, fulfill the promise that Brown made.

 She’s a product of that community’s public schools, which host one of the country’s longest-running, and evolving, school integration experiments. We sat down to discuss her new book, which came out Aug. 22 to and as well as the past, present, and future of racial equity in the Cleveland suburb. 

“You have to do a lot of different things and you have to keep at it,” Meckler told me. “That’s why I came away from writing Dream Town with optimism. This is a community that is still trying and still looking at all sorts of different things — a community that hasn’t given up — whereas in a lot of America, people don’t even care or don’t even try.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Let’s start with some context: what makes Shaker Heights unique? What’s its history? 

Well, I think of Shaker Heights as a story in three acts. The first act is its founding at the turn of the 20th century as an elite refuge for wealthy Clevelanders escaping the city at a time when the number of black residents in the city was rising with the Great Migration. Shaker was developed as a sort of “best of the best” community, with very high standards for architecture and for the people who they let in. And that’s how it was for a few decades. 

Then we move into what I think of as the second act. Of course, Black families could not get in for a long time, but in the mid-1950s, a few Black families did manage to get into Shaker’s Ludlow neighborhood, and once a few got in, more got in, and soon that neighborhood was rapidly moving towards resegregation.

But something different happened in Shaker, something that really sets it apart from most of the country, which is that the white people living there and theĚýBlack people living there decided to get together and fight against all the pressures that were leading towards segregation and white flight. With the and fear mongering that was being driven by the real estate and banking industries, they chose something different.Ěý

So they got together and formed a community association. It started out with just getting to know each other, but then it moved into actual real estate, showing houses to white families and even offering second mortgages again to white families. They viewed it as a way to counter the forces that were pressing down against them. 

This spread to other Shaker Heights neighborhoods, and eventually to the city itself, which chose to be a place that was embracing diversity and promoting integration. So Shaker developed a national reputation as an integration leader—first in housing and then in schools. In 1970, a very forward-looking superintendent led the district to a voluntary school busing plan to desegregate the elementary schools. This, of course, was at a time when lots of communities across the country were to do the same. Shaker was embracing it, white families voluntarily sending their kids into the predominantly Black school, and vice versa. 

The third act comes in more recent years: a struggle over what racial equity means, over whether the schools are delivering it.

Shaker Heights is your hometown, you’re a product of its school district. But what brought you to this particular project for this particular moment? Why Shaker Heights? Why now? 

I first started thinking about reporting on my hometown back in 2013, when I was coming off of the White House beat and onto a beat covering demographics. I heard about a new Shaker superintendent who was taking on the achievement gap and taking on the question of racial equity. I was interested and intrigued. 

It took a while, but it . Usually, when I’m done with a big story, I sort of take a deep breath and move on to the next one. This time it felt like I had just scratched the surface.

There had never been a book about Shaker Heights. There had been a lot of media coverage, a lot of academic work, but never a book for the general public and I felt like I was really in a great position to tell this story. And then the pandemic hit, and I thought, “Well, if not now — when I have some time — then when?” So I started working on it in earnest.

The book is a story about, as you put it, “the promise and problems of Shaker Heights,” about its efforts to advance racial equity in the past and present. In recent years, various tracking systems — honors and AP classes and so forth — threatened the district’s equity efforts. How?

For a long time, Shaker Heights had this glow, like it felt really good about itself. “Hey, we’re doing this. We’ve got this. Maybe you guys out there have trouble with race, but we’re enlightened, and we are a model.” 

But in more recent years, there was growing discomfort with the academic achievement gap and the racially disproportionate placement of students by academic levels. The top levels — the Advanced Placement (AP) classes, the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, the honors classes — were all disproportionately white, and the regular and remedial classes were disproportionately Black. When you walked into Shaker Heights High School you’d look at the hallways, and it would be incredibly diverse. And then you’d walk into a particular classroom, and you’d say, “Is this an all-white school or is this an all-Black school?” depending on which level it was on.

There were a variety of things tried over the years to try to address this, none of them successful. When arrived a few years ago, he started combining some of the honors classes with what were called “core” classes, regular-level classes. So there’d be kids in honors and kids in core learning together in the same classrooms, with maybe different assignments or workloads. 

Then, in the , the superintendent made a huge change — to dismantle the tracking system. In one fell swoop, he moved all children into the honors level, basically starting in fifth grade all the way through ninth grade. Essentially everything up until you got to AP and IB classes. 

How did the community react? I mean, that’s the central theme of the book, right, Shaker Heights wrestling with its sense of itself, with its priorities and what those actually require it to do. 

There was a lot of confusion, because a lot of other pandemic stressors were in the air and this change was not well explained. Some people didn’t know about it at all. Other people thought that they were getting rid of AP classes. Both sides of that were wrong. 

Some people were thrilled. A lot of very equity-minded people, Black and white in the community, were very pleased. They thought, “It’s about time. We’re finally taking this on.” Others, who felt like these classes weren’t truly being taught at the honors level because they had such a wide range of academic ability in the class, were very unsettled. 

At the same time, the district was reducing homework and was giving people more time to do work, just sort of lightening the load. That happened in other communities also during the pandemic. But here, it happened at the same time as the detracking. So some people felt like the standards were dropping. Shaker, in addition to having a national reputation for integration also had a national reputation for excellence. 

So there were parents and students who felt like, “Are we no longer valuing, you know, real academic achievement? Are the very top kids gonna be lost in this?” 

Finally, this was sort of sprung on teachers at the last minute. They did not have any training before it happened. It was particularly hard for math teachers. Think about it: all eighth graders were put into Algebra I, which is typically a ninth-grade class. On the honors track it’s an eighth-grade class. But there were eighth graders in there who had never had pre-algebra, and maybe they didn’t do all that well in whichever seventh-grade math class they took. Now, all of a sudden, they’re not doing seventh- or eighth-grade math. They’re taking ninth-grade math.

Teachers told me that the training they got was mostly about the moral urgency of the matter, not the nuts and bolts of implementation. 

This is exactly what I was thinking as I was reading. I’m a former teacher and I feel like differentiation gets treated like a magic wand. It pops up when folks have theoretical priorities that run into practical headaches. Somebody says, “OK, well, what are you gonna do about the fact that a bunch of these kids haven’t had pre-algebra?” And then people go, “We’ll differentiate!” as though that’s just an easy, obvious answer. But differentiation is wildly difficult to do, even if it’s easy to say! How is Shaker Heights wrestling with the possibilities and limits of differentiation?

I did observe some classrooms where I saw teachers trying, and I saw some good things happening. 

The thinking is that you know, if everybody’s talking about the same thing, they can all be in the class together learning together, even if they show that learning in different ways. For example, they can all read the same novel—maybe some kids are writing long papers in response and other kids are doing a graphic panel. Someone else is maybe doing a podcast. 

I saw an eighth-grade math class working on probability. There were two girls working together, one Black and one white, and the Black girl was lost. I mean she was really lost. I could see she didn’t really understand it. The white girl definitely had it mastered, but she was very patiently explaining it to the Black girl. It was helping both of them, because the girl who was struggling was getting this one-on-one help, and she seemed to be getting it. And the girl who already understood, told me later that explaining it to somebody else solidified it in her own mind. We’ve all had that experience. 

At one point in the book, Shaker Heights High School principal Eric Juli asks: what if high schools focused on teaching kids to live and work together as opposed to looking up the Battle of Gettysburg? We don’t need you to memorize that, really. But we do need you to be able to live with one another and work together.

We often talk about school integration as this strategy in and of itself — integrating schools means changing the demographics of a school and its classrooms. That’s the work. Shift the demographics and you’ve done the reform. We don’t always talk about the necessary, discomforting system changes that come next. 

Juli’s view is that there are all sorts of ways to learn. And he’s very interested in project-based learning. His view is that let’s aim for a class that’s fun and cool, where you build and set off rockets, instead of just aiming for AP Physics. 

When I asked him, “Is there any value to, you know, reading a novel and being able to write a paper where you explore the characters and themes and show that you’ve understood it?” 

And he said, “Yes, but not every semester for all four years.”

Racial equity work isn’t just about in-class differentiation. It’s about shifting things like dress codes, disciplinary systems, the PTO, and such to help all kids and families feel like they belong, right?

Absolutely. That might even be the most important thing. What does it mean to feel like you belong? Why does that matter? You think, “Oh, you don’t go to a PTO meeting, someone else will plan the carnival. You don’t need to go.” 

But it does matter, because that’s the place where informal information is exchanged. That’s where people find out about the cool new classes or the teachers you really do or don’t want. That’s the information that affects kids’ lives. 

If you don’t feel comfortable walking into the school, are you gonna show up at the parent-teacher conferences? It’s easy not to. Maybe it’s hard because you’ve been working all day, you’re exhausted, your kids haven’t had dinner, and you don’t have any energy left. Maybe you also think, by the way, I don’t really like it there. Maybe that’s because you didn’t do well in school, maybe school doesn’t feel warm and fuzzy to you.

But if you have a sense of belonging and you’re part of this community, then yeah, you’re gonna go to Back to School Night. You’re going to the parent-teacher conferences. You’re going to the PTO meeting. 

Obviously, it also matters for students. Do you see yourself in the curriculum? Are your strengths and accomplishments reflected in the school’s trophy cases? How do you experience the school’s discipline system? If the Black kids are always, just always getting in trouble, you know, how are you feeling about this? Is school your place, or are you feeling like this is a place I have to go and just make it through the day? 

One day, Eric Juli was talking to a science teacher who’d asked a kid in his class to remove his durag, a tight skull cap that some Black boys and men wear, and the mother complained. The teacher says to Juli, “It’s against our dress code. You’re not allowed to wear any sort of hood.”

And Juli said, “Yeah, technically, this is against the dress code, but we’re not enforcing it.” He even said, there are skinny white girls walking around here half naked, and no one’s stopping them. We can’t be seen as just selectively enforcing it for this one kid. We don’t have bandwidth as a staff to start enforcing it evenly, so we’re gonna let this go. The teacher goes, “You know what? I hear you and I understand.” 

It’s one small thing, but I think it was reflective of something larger. Because how do you feel like you belong in this school when you don’t get to wear the thing you want to wear when it really isn’t bothering anybody.

Exactly. School integration isn’t an alternative to structural education reforms. It’s not like we get to choose between integrating schools and changing the internal systems and dynamics of how schools operate. We have to do both — a serious push towards racial equity that begins with student demographics and race at the center ends up requiring all kinds of uncomfortable things from adults, right?

It’s definitely both, and there’s no magic bullet. There’s no five-point plan for fixing your schools. It’s not that simple. You have to do a lot of different things and you have to keep at it. That’s why I came away from writing Dream Town with optimism. This is a community that is still trying and still looking at all sorts of different things — a community that hasn’t given up — whereas in a lot of America, people don’t even care or don’t even try. 

So no simple plug-and-play plan for the world beyond Shaker, fair enough. But is there a message for the rest of the country? For other schools? 

Different places have different demographics. Different places have different challenges. Different places have different potential for integration. Different places have different levels of achievement gaps. Everybody’s got their own, their own puzzle to solve. But I think if they look at the different kinds of strategies that Shaker has tried, communities can pull out different things and give people in their communities things to think about. 

So much of the conversation about education today is rooted in culture wars. Should you even be talking about racial equity? Is that critical race theory? Is that offensive? Is that racist in and of itself? Some people feel that way— so this may not be for them. But there’s also another part of the country that is interested in a different conversation, in exploring these issues and looking under that hood. 

I wouldn’t say that they’ve cracked the code, but I would say that they’re still at the decoder.

As education scholars who have spent over a decade in three cities talking to parents about their school choices, we found that a surprisingly large number are aware of and considering social-emotional factors in their decisions. Usual narratives about school choice focus on privileged parents seeking out prestigious academic environments for their children from a young age, whether in the form of selective public schools or programs, private options or an affluent suburban district. These choices have been tied to increasing school segregation across the country.

But in our , we found a racially diverse group of privileged parents seeking urban schools that prioritize their child’s happiness. We identified this group of “happiness-oriented parents” using a qualitative meta-analysis of seven studies we and several colleagues conducted over the last decade. Examining interviews with families conducted during that research helped us to draw out similarities, demonstrating this phenomenon across geographies, communities and time frames.

In those interviews, we found this group of parents prioritized factors outside of academic rigor, saying they were looking for schools that were “happy and comfortable,” “happy and grounded” or “not too academic,” and where “each child is known by a teacher.” Our findings over the last decade are aligned with a recent that found mental health was parents’ leading concern for their children in 2022. 

In contrast to research that emphasizes or test scores as indicators of a school’s desirability, happiness-oriented parents use a wider lens in describing what a “good school” looks like. Many are even willing to buck the trend in choosing a different type of school from their peers. What this happiness orientation looks like varies across families — some avoid schools perceived to be too academically competitive, while others prioritize racial/ethnic inclusivity, an alternative pedagogy, a special theme, outdoor time, arts, individualized attention, ease of commute or social-emotional learning. 

These parents often emphasized that they sought schools where their children could develop qualities beyond standard academic skills, like a love of learning, confidence, social interactions or an interest in the arts. Many parents told us test scores don’t tell the whole story about a school’s quality and that they believed rankings and perceived rigor mattered less than relationships, racial representation and school climate.

Taken together, happiness-oriented parents’ school choices could have a broader impact beyond their own children. In downplaying academically competitive criteria (which often align with schools that are disproportionately white and/or high-income), these families are in some cases willing to consider a wider and potentially more racially and socioeconomically diverse set of schools. This could aid in school integration efforts and . These parents could with students, educators and advocates for social justice and integration, or at least not actively oppose these efforts. More broadly, happiness-oriented parents prioritize a welcoming school environment, happy and content students, and loving teachers and school staff; if administrators and policymakers focused more on these aspects of schooling, it would improve the educational experiences of children across the board.

In terms of integration alone, however, happiness-oriented parents may not always be partners in these efforts, since for some, diversity was more of a by-product of their choice than a central factor in their decision-making. Moreover, because their focus is on their children’s individual happiness, even parents with a stated openness to choosing diverse settings may cause harm by existing families in a school or exercising the privilege of their choices by moving their kids when they are unhappy. 

As the mental health crisis among children comes into clearer focus, education policymakers and leaders should take happiness into greater account by supporting schools that prioritize equity, strong student relationships, creativity and social emotional well-being — criteria that are good for all students. This could create a path toward more welcoming, inclusive and racially integrated schools while addressing one of the biggest crises facing America’s young people today. 

“The existence of a racial imbalance in the student body of a school, as compared to other schools in the same school district or school system, is not a per se violation of the education clause of the Minnesota constitution, unless the racial imbalance is caused by intentional … ˛őąđ˛ľ°ůąđ˛ľ˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô,” in upholding a Hennepin County District Court judge’s decision.

Within hours, attorneys representing the plaintiffs, a group of Twin Cities parents, said they would appeal to the state Supreme Court.

The case dates to 2015, when Minneapolis and St. Paul parents sued state officials, alleging that racial isolation in schools deprived children of the adequate education they are guaranteed by the Minnesota constitution. The parents called a number of state efforts to desegregate schools stretching back more than 20 years inadequate.

Since the start of the case, state officials have insisted they did not cause school segregation. 

Because the plaintiffs challenged a state law exempting charter schools, several high-performing Twin Cities charters asked to participate in the case as defendants, arguing that they do not exclude any group of children. Rather, they say, their “culturally affirming” school models appeal to families looking for an alternative to local district schools, which have some of the largest achievement gaps in the nation.

The state Supreme Court already decided a separate issue in the case, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman et. al. v. State of Minnesota, in 2018. By law, the next phase of the case was mandatory mediation. After 18 months of closed talks failed, the plaintiffs asked a Minneapolis judge to stop the case from proceeding to trial by declaring that concentrations of poverty and of students of color in their schools was, by itself, a violation of the right to an adequate education under the state constitution. 

In an order issued last winter, Hennepin County District Court Judge Susan Robiner did not go so far as to call racially isolated schools segregated, noting that the term has a particular legal definition regarding the separation of students by race: “The court will use the term ‘segregated’ when referring to plaintiffs’ allegations in order to accurately describe what plaintiffs allege. It will use the term ‘imbalanced’ otherwise, recognizing that the word ‘segregated’ often connotes an intentional policy of separating races, or other protected classes.” 

Minnesota, like many states, requires charter schools that have more applicants than seats to conduct blind lotteries, a practice initially designed to ensure fairness in enrollment. Among other challenges to school choice, the plaintiffs want the state’s desegregation rules to apply to the publicly financed, independently managed schools — in other words, charters. 

The suit’s historical roots are tangled. In the late 1990s Daniel Shulman, the main plaintiffs’ attorney in the current lawsuit, was involved with a different Twin Cities desegregation suit. That case ended in a settlement that ordered the state to pay to bus students from impoverished census tracts in Minneapolis to then-largely white suburban schools, to create regional magnet schools and to give districts financial incentives to expose students to children of other cultures. 

Among other problems, the children of color who attended suburban schools did not perform as well academically as those who stayed in Minneapolis Public Schools. A state audit found that some districts spent their integration aid on such questionable things as ethnic art. Subsequently, lawmakers appointed a bipartisan committee, which decided that integration was valuable for its own sake, but had few recommendations about how to encourage it. 

Since Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court has put parameters on the mechanisms states and districts may use to integrate schools, drawing a line between intentional and unintentional segregation and ruling that race can’t be the sole factor determining a student’s school assignment. As a result, like Minnesota, a number of places have adopted voluntary integration policies, but . 

In May 2021, the Minnesota plaintiffs and the state announced they had reached a tentative settlement that included a number of the same elements put in place after the first suit. State lawmakers, however, did not take up the bills proposed to facilitate the agreement. The charter school defendants, meanwhile, opposed the settlement. 

With the case then seemingly headed to trial, the plaintiffs asked Robiner to decide the case herself by ruling that segregation per se violated their rights. If the state Supreme Court upholds her refusal to do so, or declines to consider another appeal, the case will head back to her courtroom.

“They were both segregated middle schools,” said Akeshia Craven-Howell, who until recently was assistant superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, overseeing student school assignments. 

“Sedgefield Middle School serves students primarily from lower socioeconomic communities and Alexander Graham serves students from communities with primarily higher socioeconomic factors.”

But in 2019, the district, fueled by strong parent advocacy, tried something new. It mixed the two buildings’ student populations by creating a combined attendance area and rearranging which elementary schools sent students to which middle schools.

“We were able to create two middle schools that were much more socioeconomically diverse,” said Craven-Howell, who now works as an advisor for Bellwether Education Partners.

Across the country, thousands of schools closely resemble the segregated Sedgefield and Alexander Graham, a new U.S. Government Accountability Office reveals. 

Over 7,800 predominantly same-race schools, it finds, are located within just five miles of a different same-race school. Widening the radius to 10 miles swells the total to over 13,500. 

Those cases may represent “low-hanging fruit” for integration efforts, said Craven-Howell. 

“It doesn’t require a significant trade-off with home-to-school distance, which I think is often a barrier for some families when they think about school diversity.”

A strong majority of parents say they would like to see schools increase their racial and socioeconomic balance, but support wanes when the undertaking involves busing programs or further travel, according to from The Century Foundation. Opponents of integration schemes often cite lengthy bus rides in their resistance to the plans.

In many cases, however, such a sacrifice is not required, said Richard Kahlenberg, the organization’s director of K-12 equity.

“It’s so often true that people will say, ‘We would love integrated schools, but it’s just not logistically possible because of distances,’” he told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

That’s often a false dichotomy.

“Distance, in many cases, is not an excuse for ˛őąđ˛ľ°ůąđ˛ľ˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô,” he said.

‘Wrong side of the tracks’

Roughly a third of the 13,500 schools identified in the federal report belong to the same school system as their counterpart campus, meaning possible desegregation efforts would lie directly in the hands of district leaders. 

Some 9 in 10 have a pair across district lines, which can entrench racial imbalances between campuses, said report co-author Jacqueline Nowicki. (The percentages, 32% and 90%, add to more than 100% because some schools have pairs both within and outside of their district.)

“Where we choose to draw school district boundaries, … that matters a lot as to where kids are going to schools,” the GAO education director told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

“School district lines are not God-given,” added Kahlenberg. Florida and several other states, for example, use large county-based school systems to help balance their classrooms racially and socioeconomically.

Using 2020-21 data, the most recent figures available from the U.S. Education Department’s Common Core of Data, Nowicki’s team found that over a third of U.S. students — roughly 18.5 million — attend predominantly same-race schools. They applied the “predominantly same-race” label to schools where students of a single race or ethnicity make up at least 75% of the enrollment. The percentage of highly segregated U.S. schools decreased slightly from 2016, the last time the GAO investigated the issue. But given increases in diversity over that time span, including more students who identify as Asian or Hispanic, the researcher doesn’t see the numbers as particularly encouraging. 

The share of students of color attending highly segregated schools, which tend disproportionately to also be high-poverty schools, ticked up, she pointed out. Those campuses, on average, have worse academic outcomes compared to their wealthier peers.

“What does it mean, in a country that’s increasingly becoming more diverse, to have large portions of kids going to school only with other kids who look like themselves?” said Nowicki.

The reasons why the U.S. continues to have divided classrooms stretch far into the past, her agency’s report explains. In one major example, redlining, a federal 1930s practice of denying home loans to borrowers of color while supplying them to white candidates, systematically reduced Black homeownership and codified racial divisions between neighborhoods. The impacts of the discriminatory policy continue to haunt education outcomes to this day. 

“This is where phrases like ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ have come from,” said the GAO director.

‘The city that made desegregation work’

In the case of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the recent school integration push comes on the heels of a back-and-forth history after Brown v. Board of Education.

Charlotte was as “the city that made desegregation work.” After the landmark 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling upheld the district’s busing scheme, the city’s integration plan became a model for cities across the southern U.S. — which in the current day are than other regions of the country.

“Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated schools,” the Charlotte Observer editorial board in 1984.

But after a 1999 decision struck down court-mandated desegregation requirements, campuses in the area quickly became — with between its 180 schools.

In 2014, the area received sobering news: a by Harvard University researchers ranked Charlotte dead last out of 50 American cities in upward mobility, or the likelihood of low-income youth rising out of poverty.

The report blamed two main factors for the abysmal assessment: racial segregation and school quality.

“One of the predictors of low levels of social mobility is school and neighborhood ˛őąđ˛ľ°ůąđ˛ľ˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô,” explained Kahlenberg.

When the 140,000-student district resurrected decades-old conversations on how to integrate its schools, the memory of past efforts remained vivid for many residents. There was an appetite for the changes, but they still proved difficult, said Craven-Howell. In merging communities that had different socioeconomic makeups, the district had to be careful to make sure the voices and needs of wealthier parents did not drown out those of lower-income families.

But the effort has been a success thus far, said the former Charlotte-Mecklenburg administrator, and they have begun to move the needle on integration. However, they affect only a small share of campuses. She hopes the district will continue to build on its progress and “identify opportunities to replicate some of the great work that was done six years ago,” the last time it reviewed student school assignments.

Charlotte is not alone in the push. The district is a member of The Century Foundation’s , a network of 27 school systems, 17 charter school networks and 13 housing organizations across the country undertaking efforts to chip away at segregation in their schools and communities. Though they account for only a tiny fraction of the 13,500 segregated school pairs identified by the GAO report, Craven-Howell believes they demonstrate what’s possible. 

“There are districts all over the country who are thinking about [integration], who are trying things,” she said. “It’s not the case that a district has to embark on this work without there being any models or examples to look to.”

And as for Sedgefield and Alexander Graham, the Charlotte middle schools that combined their student bodies in 2019, the change has worked, said Craven-Howell.

“People don’t think about it as the two schools and the two communities that paired. They really have become a single community.”

Each school day, the students of the John Jay Educational Campus line up outside their squat, brick-lined Brooklyn building and make their way through a metal detector on the way to class at one of the four floors inside.

Isa Grumbach-Bloom heads up to the third floor for classes at Millennium Brooklyn High School. Hajar Bouchour has been learning remotely for a year now, but when she is on campus, she keeps walking, up to the fourth floor, the site of Park Slope Collegiate.

Despite sharing a roof, students’ learning experiences inside can look very different. Millennium has been rated “excellent” in set by the city, making it one of the top schools in the borough. Park Slope, on the other hand, garners “good” ratings and occasionally just “fair” for some metrics.

Why students end up at one school instead of another can be a bit mysterious—the product of “screening” algorithms that more than 100 high schools in the city customize and then use to decide which students to admit, often using variables like test scores, attendance, and behavioral records that disproportionately affect students of color. Millennium has chosen to use screens to pick its students, while Park Slope’s high school program does not.

Bouchour, who is North African Arab and now a sophomore at Park Slope, applied for admission to Millennium Brooklyn but didn’t make the cut. She wasn’t sure why—maybe the week of school she missed because of the flu in seventh grade. “They don’t actually give you why they don’t accept you,” she said. “They just don’t.”

What both students couldn’t help but notice was how many white students shuffled up to one floor and how many students of color moved on to the others. Park Slope was 10% white during the 2019–20 school year, compared to 46% at Millennium. “I enjoy most of my classes,” Grumbach-Bloom, who is White, said, “and I think the main thing that’s missing is a diverse group of students in my classes.”

Most media attention has focused on the city’s handful of “specialized” high schools, which admit students based on the results of a single test, called the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), and which have a history of admitting a dismal number of Black and Latino students. This year, were admitted to the competitive Stuyvesant High School, in one high-profile example.

The controversy has spurred calls to consider other factors when students apply to those schools. But the many screened high schools around the city that already use other factors for admission are also creating apparent barriers for students of color.

New admissions data obtained by The Markup and THE CITY shows how Black and Latino students are regularly screened out of high schools across New York City—most strikingly, the city’s top-performing schools. While Black and Latino students do apply for admission to these schools, they are consistently admitted at much lower rates than White students and students of Asian descent.

Black and Latino students are frequently filtered out of the top-performing screened schools

Source: NYC Department of Education/The Markup. See the fall 2020 data .

The Markup and THE CITY do not have access to data on the students’ test scores, grades, attendance, or other academic measures used to assess their qualifications for admission in any given school, but the admission rates show clear racial trends.

At Millennium Brooklyn, which has been consistently ranked “far above average” in multiple metrics the school system uses to measure success, 24% of the more than 5,700 applicants in the 2020 admissions cycle were Black, but Black students made up less than 10% of those ultimately admitted. White students? They made up 23% of the applicants but more than 34% of the offers. That disparity extends across the top high schools in the city.

At Millennium Brooklyn, there was a wide disparity between applications and offers for Black and Latino students

Source: NYC Department of Education/The Markup. See the fall 2020 data .

Of the 27 best-performing screened schools in the city, White and Asian students were admitted at almost double the rates of Black and Latino students. While 4.4% of Black students and 4.9% of Latino students who applied to these schools were accepted, 9.2% of White students and 8.6% of Asian students who applied were offered a spot.

The school a student is accepted to can mean a major difference in resources and set a student on a different academic path.

Bouchour couldn’t help but notice the better options Millennium offered in its course catalog. “I saw that they had a lot of AP classes, and they had photography class, and all this stuff. I was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa! That would be so cool,” she said. “And then I was like, Oh, wait, but we don’t have that.”

After years, the schools in the building only recently decided to merge athletics programs—Millennium Brooklyn’s was at one point of the other schools’.

Pushed by the pandemic, the city has made changes to the process for the next school year, curbing the use of some screens and improving transparency, but experts say it’s nowhere near enough to undo the racism baked into the system.

“We continue to remove barriers and make our school system more equitable, and we’re always exploring ways to build on the promising results we’ve seen already,” Katie O’Hanlon, a spokesperson for the NYC Department of Education (DOE), said in a statement. “The recent admissions changes are driven by the best interest of our students and, while we know there is more work to do, we won’t stop working to bring real, lasting change to our public schools.”

School screening has become a part of segregation in the city that goes well beyond education, said Johanna Miller, an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union, but one the city has in its power to change. “It’s the primary driver that we have to grapple with as a city,” she said. “In our opinion, it’s also the most clearly wrong policy choice that the city has made.”

Black and Latino Kids Are Screened Out of the Top Schools

In 2014, from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that New York City had among the most segregated schools in the nation, and since then, the city has been forced to look for answers on just how the situation turned so dire.

Like other American cities, schools in New York have a long history of residential segregation to reckon with, but one contributing factor has stuck out: New York City’s intense admission process for public high schools.

This year, as it has in the past, the New York City 2021 high school admissions guide , almost topping 500 pages. Schools have wide latitude to make decisions about admissions, and even if families are dedicated to learning the exact requirements for different schools, it’s not easy to find them. For a , researchers scoured web sites and contacted high schools directly to find the exact admissions criteria for 157 screened programs. They got just 20 responses back.

“That’s one thing about New York is that the screened and audition programs, they pretty much rank students however they see fit,” said Sean Corcoran, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University who’s tracked data on admissions in New York City schools for years. “There’s no uniform formula that schools use across the city, so you never know what’s happening behind the curtain of these screening programs.”

Students rank up to 12 schools when applying and are then matched by computer. At any one of those schools, a formula might rank students with a score calculated through something like, say, 40% test scores, 30% grades, and 30% attendance. But the variables, and how much they count for, can vary wildly. Some screens are complicated algorithms that set rigorous requirements for entry—high test scores, consistent attendance, excellent grades.

Other academic “screens,” as some , are almost meaningless. Students with barely passing grades, or even below-grade-level test scores, can still be admitted. Some more targeted “screens,” like an audition for a dance-focused school, are less controversial.

and have looked at whether screening disadvantages students of color more than other ways of picking students. A local student advocacy group, Teens Take Charge, also late last year on admissions rates as part of a U.S.ĚýDepartment of Education civil rights complaint on screening practices in the city.

The Markup and THE CITY wanted to know precisely how many students were pushed out of every school by the screening system—and where the gaps were the largest.

There are 75 non-specialized high schools that select all of their students with a screen, and through a public records request to the NYC Department of Education, The Markup and THE CITY obtained the number of students of each racial demographic who applied to every screened school for the fall 2020 admissions cycle versus how many were accepted.

Portions of the dataset that involved very small numbers of students were redacted to protect students’ privacy, and the data didn’t include racial data about applicants coming from private schools. Beyond the 75 schools we looked at, there are dozens more that select some of their students with a screen and others without one. But to focus on the effects of screening specifically, our analysis only tracked completely screened schools.

We also looked at recent achievement metrics for each of the schools, using , and found that screened schools with some of the high rankings for metrics like four-year graduation rates, access to advanced courses, and math and English test scores, were more likely to use screens that disproportionately accepted White or Asian students.

Take the Scholars’ Academy in Queens, a top-ranked school that stood out in the data for its admissions gaps. Nearly 300 White students applied, and 103 got in—an acceptance rate of about 35%. Slightly more Black students, 315, also applied—but only 25 received offers, an acceptance rate of around 8%.

The principal of Scholars’ Academy didn’t respond to a request for comment.

At Scholars’ Academy in Queens, White students had a much higher offer rate than other demographics

Source: NYC Department of Education/The Markup. See the fall 2020 data .

The mayor’s office has the broad authority to decide whether schools can use screens or whether to allow only specific types of screens. Right now, though, schools have been given wide discretion over what their screens look like.

O’Hanlon, the Department of Education spokesperson, told The Markup that the city has prioritized community engagement, including with disadvantaged families, to build a fairer process. But the data shows the potential limits of engagement alone. A similar number of Black and Latino students applied to the best-performing schools we looked at, compared to other demographics. They were just less likely to get in.

The city and state have also provided funding to some districts to develop diversity initiatives, O’Hanlon pointed out. More than 100 schools are part of the city’s “Diversity in Admissions” program, in which schools pledge to give priority to disadvantaged students. But only 10 of the 75 screened schools we looked at were part of the program during fall 2020 admissions, according to city data.

argue that the algorithms are simply measures of academic strength. But the families with the most resources, those in favor of reform say, are better positioned to navigate every part of the admissions system. They can hire tutors, get test prep, learn about admissions to the best schools through networking, and have the means to make sure their kids get there on time.

Many of the admissions criteria are beyond a student’s control. Until this year, if a student lived in a different district, in order , that student may have had to contend with the hurdle of a high school geographically preferencing some students for admission. Black and Latino students are also more likely to suffer from some chronic health conditions, which might affect middle school attendance records. Advocates say other potential screening factors, like behavioral records, are also prone to bias against students of color.

Screening didn’t bring racial segregation to schools in the city—schools were segregated well before the system was in place. But it has further separated students by their records of achievement and put in new barriers that reinforce an already racially divided system.

“The way I always think about this is, the legacy of racist housing policies laid out the groundwork for ˛őąđ˛ľ°ůąđ˛ľ˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô,” said Matt Gonzales, director of the Integration and Innovation Initiative at New York University’s Metro Center. “The school admissions policy, particularly the most egregiously racist ones, basically uphold and reinforce and replicate those patterns of segregation.”

That system doesn’t ensure certain students won’t succeed, but, he said, it effectively stacks the deck against them.

Eliminating the “Low-Hanging Fruit” of Racial Discrimination

Late last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio to the screening system in the city. Middle schools, he said, would “pause” using screens for the upcoming school year and re-evaluate the following year. All high schools, he announced, would permanently phase out the use of geographic preferencing, which favors admission for students living in certain parts of the city and can disproportionately lock students of color out of schools in White areas.

Eleanor Roosevelt High School, for instance, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which has been ranked as “far above average” by the city in metrics like four-year graduation rate and math test scores, had prioritized admission for students living in District 2, an part of the city.

For fall 2020, the school offered slots to 345 students. While 26% of the applicants vying for a slot were Latino, less than 5% of the offers went to those students. The exact number of Latino students that eventually got through the screen was redacted in the data because the DOE claimed that releasing it would violate students’ privacy.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s principal did not respond to a request for comment.

High schools, however, will be allowed to continue using other screening metrics.

There will also be more transparency: Schools are now required to publish their screening requirements on a centralized city website.

“Getting rid of the geographic screens was sort of the low-hanging fruit,” Miller said. But she adds that “we want to see public schools be a public resource.”

“We don’t think, at any scale, the best and most supportive and most well-resourced schools should be something that everyone doesn’t have access to,” she said.

Others haven’t been so pleased. Some parents have argued that students who work especially hard or perform especially well should be placed together in schools where they can get advanced learning. After the announcement, one parent advocate there was “a sense that there is no regard for even pretending to maintain academic excellence and that they are more concerned about optics.”

The decision was largely driven by the pandemic, which caused schools to temporarily abandon measures of success like test scores and attendance for the year, and, depending on your view, school officials to overhaul the system or gave them reason to do so.

, Richard Carranza, de Blasio’s recently departed schools chancellor, explained that the plan would “address the current circumstances attendant to the pandemic.” It particularly wasn’t viable to screen middle school kids based on pandemic attendance and grades, especially when state test exams were canceled for the year. “We’ve had to re-invent the building blocks of public education in the nation’s largest school system from how to go to class, to a grading policy, attendance and everything in between,” he said.

There have been some signs of success. Early data, , showed that low-income students were receiving more offers to competitive middle schools, compared to past years.

At Eleanor Roosevelt, the Department of Education said in an email, the removal of geographic barriers made a big difference: More than 60% of offers went to students outside of District 2, compared to 1% the previous year.

Admissions for students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch also tripled this year—from 16% to 60%. That might be partly because Eleanor Roosevelt started participating in the Diversity in Admissions program this year, which prioritized those students for 38% of offers.

The city hasn’t yet produced racial data on schools for the year.

How lasting those changes are may hinge on the winner of this year’s mayoral election, which will determine who takes authority over school screening policy.

“This is an administration that’s on the way out, so they basically punted to the next administration and said, We’re going to pause for a year and then let whoever else comes in figure it out,” Gonzales said.Ěý

The data The Markup obtained shows how many students were eventually turned down by the system, but what it can’t show is how many students felt out of place in the system even when they succeeded.

Stephanie Chapman, who is Afro-Latina, is a high school junior who went to a middle school in the Bronx. “It was a low-income neighborhood; we barely had any funding,” Chapman said. “We had half of a floor—literally our school was half of a floor.”

When she was looking for high schools, she decided to take the SHSAT for entrance into one of the school’s elite specialized schools. She got a seat at one but worried with her background she wouldn’t fit in. “I just didn’t want to go, because I felt imposter syndrome,” she said. “I felt like I didn’t deserve to go.”

She ended up going to Bard High School Early College Queens instead, a screened school that’s been great for her. She’s on her way to getting a college associate’s degree there, and the faculty goes above and beyond to help with anything students need.

But she’s had to take some time to adjust. Other students would talk about going snowboarding over the weekend as if it were a regular activity. She had a hard time relating. “Growing up in the Bronx, my school, we were all pretty low-income,” she said. “Just to see the shift in people and their economic stance was kind of a shock.”

Bard Queens’s principal didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“Not all people are test-takers, not all people are interview people, not all people have the same access to things,” said Bouchour, the Park Slope Collegiate student. “It’s just not fair how you judge someone based off that stuff and you know absolutely nothing about their story.”

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