Practices like the school choices made every year by millions of privileged White families, families with real options, impact school diversity.
We often define concepts like racism and xenophobia with reference to high-profile incidents and practices — like hate crimes or the spectacle of “children in cages” — in which few of us recognize our own impulses. But the truth we often ignore is that such aversions often take root in the generally unremarked, routine spaces of “private” mass practices. Practices like the school choices made every year by millions of privileged White families, families with real options — families, quite possibly, like yours.
Harvard University researchers Eric Torres and Richard Weissbourd (2020) dig into this thorny terrain in their report Do Parents Really Want School Integration? Across lines of race, gender, education, income, and partisanship, majorities of parents say they want their children to attend racially and socioeconomically diverse schools. Yet most privileged White parents make choices that fuel segregation even when more diverse schools are available to them.
Why is that?
The report provides several answers. White, affluent parents fear that student interactions across differences could be painful for their children. They believe that the problems of poor kids and kids of color will deflect attention from their own children. They value “academic quality” and safety issues much more than diversity, and they tend to believe school diversity and school quality are in conflict.
Along with segregative housing policies, economic policies, and regressive court decisions, these biases help shape a preK-12 landscape marked sharply by race and class: Two in five Black and Latinx students currently attend schools where at least 90% of their peers are students of color, and White children are even more isolated. Two in five low-income children attend schools where at least 75% of their schoolmates are low-income (Boser & Baffour, 2017).
Torres and Weissbourd offer some ways forward, from ensuring that diverse schools have the resources to support the academic success affluent families prize, to marketing diverse schools more effectively, to encouraging privileged families to visit such schools for themselves rather than relying on the often-faulty impressions of others. The authors call on parents to include the social, emotional, and societal benefits of diversity in their judgments about school quality. Integration, they conclude, is a “collective act that is likely to benefit one’s own children and other people’s children, and that is critical to the country as a whole.”
Will these facts and arguments be sufficient to move a critical mass of White parents to make integrative school decisions? I’m not optimistic. Many parents, especially well-to-do parents, seem to gauge the quality of their caregiving in part by the selectivity of the education they afford their children. Parents who make brave choices for their children risk disapproval of family members, friends, and neighbors. As Amy Stuart Wells (2019) notes, many parents “live vicariously through their children, and thus feel ‘gifted’ or elite themselves when their children are admitted to selective schools.” These kinds of status considerations provide powerful disincentives to make integrative choices.
Still, significant efforts to promote school integration have appeared in recent years. Several 2020 Democratic presidential candidates presented integration plans, and three helped sponsor the Strength in Diversity Act of 2019, which would make (modest) federal funds available to communities that want to pursue school integration. Integration activism also has been embraced by growing numbers of parents. For example, Integrated Schools, a nonprofit that mobilizes privileged White parents to send their children to integrated schools, has more than 20 parent-led chapters (full disclosure: I’m a board member), and the work of champions like the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and organizations like IntegrateNYC, New York Appleseed, and the National Coalition on School Diversity offer reason for hope. Even more important than hope, though, they offer proof that when parents and community leaders take action to integrate their schools, they often succeed.
References
Boser, U. & Baffour, P. (2017). Isolated and segregated: A new look at the income divide in our nation’s schooling system. Washington, DC: Center for American Progress.
Torres, E. & Weissbourd, R. (2020). Do parents really want school integration? Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports
Wells, A.S. (2019, March 6). From one White parent to another: Don’t pick schools because they’re selective and mostly White. Hechinger Report.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Grant-Thomas
ANDREW GRANT-THOMAS is cofounder, with Melissa Giraud, of EmbraceRace, a multiracial coalition of parents, teachers, and others working to raise children who are informed, thoughtful, and brave about race.
