Economic School Desegregation

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

On Feb. 16 of this year, parties in a San Francisco lawsuit reached an extraordinary settlement replacing a long-standing racial-desegregation scheme for schools with a new and creative compromise that emphasizes integration of students by economic status. ( "San Francisco Desegregation Decree To End," Feb. 24, 1999.)

San Francisco's groundbreaking economic-desegregation plan satisfies the short-term goals of the litigants--creating a student-assignment system that avoids racial quotas, passes constitutional muster, yet also maintains a degree of racial diversity in the schools, given the connection between racial and economic status.

But far more important, the plan forthrightly addresses what educators and sociologists have long known to be the single greatest impediment to equal educational opportunity: concentrations of school poverty. The plan explicitly recognizes, once and for all, that separate schools for rich and poor are inherently unequal. As racial-desegregation plans are jettisoned in city after city, San Francisco's innovative economic plan may foreshadow a new, more potent, and durable form of school integration...