Discarded integration method sees new life - Class Struggle - The Washington Post: Few education experts have been as true to a seemingly unworkable idea as Richard D. Kahlenberg, author and senior fellow at the Century Foundation. Since the 1990s, he has been the nation’s leading exponent of socioeconomic integration. That means he wants as many low-income students as possible to attend schools with a majority of middle-class children.
As Kahlenberg says in an illuminating new piece in American Educator magazine, research shows that poor kids transferred to schools with middle-class majorities do better academically, on average, than in schools with low-income majorities. Why? Kahlenberg offers three reasons: predominantly middle-class schools have student peers with better study habits and behavior, parents who are more involved in the school and more likely to complain about problems and stronger teachers with higher expectations for their students.
