On Top of the News
Integrating a School, One Child at a Time
New York Times| June 17, 2012
Behind the Headline
Is Desegregation Dead?
Education Next | Fall 2010
In an article that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times, Liz Robbins looks at what’s happening in four Brooklyn elementary schools that won a federal grant to promote desegregation. The schools are located in Williamsburg, a rapidly gentrifying part of Brooklyn. The grant requires that the schools reduce the percentage of Hispanic students by attracting white, Asian, and black students from outside of the neighborhood.
Robbins sums up, “Today, as the Williamsburg schools show, integration is an uneven process at best, hampered by geography, legal limits and, critics say, a lack of ideological commitment from the city.” (Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott says “I am focused on having high-quality schools in all neighborhoods. That’s the ultimate civil rights policy.”)
In the Spring 2005 issue of Ed Next, Christina Rossel wondered what ever happened to magnet schools.