Policy solution: Positive student experiences

Foster Positive Student Experiences in Integration Efforts

Keep Children at the Center

Just like every plant has its individual sunlight needs, every student needs unique attention and support. The point of integration is to improve students’ lives, not just rearrange people to achieve diversity. And we should always keep students' experiences at the center of our universe.

Integrated and integrating schools have not always been warm, welcoming places for students—especially students of color.

The integration policies that followed Brown v. Board almost always prioritized white communities: firing Black teachers and principals, segregating students within the walls of allegedly “integrated” schools, and creating and maintaining hostile learning environments for students of color.

Integration today must explicitly focus on fostering positive student experiences for all children. States have an obligation to foster positive student experiences in integration efforts.

What states can do

1. Promote educator quality and diversity in integration programs through strategies like publishing demographic data, setting concrete targets and deadlines for meeting those targets, and investing in opportunities to prepare, support, and retain teachers of color.

2. Provide guidance, training, and funding to local leaders embarking on school integration efforts to encourage meaningful community engagement.

3. Ensure all students have access to rigorous coursework via universal screening for gifted and talented programs and automatic enrollment into advanced classes in all schools, but especially in integrated and integrating schools.

Oregon’s Department of Education has created a robust community engagement toolkit complete with practical levels of community engagement. This kind of outreach is especially important in systems and schools making changes to student or resource assignment in pursuit of resource equity and integration.
Look to Dallas, Texas and Washington State’s automatic enrollment policies that put all students who demonstrate readiness on one or more of a wide variety of valid metrics (including grades, end of course assessments, standardized tests, and teacher recommendations) into advanced courses.
And Maryland conducts universal screening for participation in gifted and talented programs at the elementary level.