Last Sunday's New York Times Magazine included a piece titled The Next Kind of Integration, which was about school districts that have, since the Supreme Court's ruling last year regarding the race-based student-assignment plans of Louisville and Seattle, restructured their own plans to make them less race-based, more "race conscious" (Justice Kennedy's words), and more class conscious, too.
Identifying problems with these new plans and the jurisprudential logic that produced them is akin to shooting fish in a fishbowl. The scaly carcasses can be scrutinized here.
Buried beneath the dead seafood and likely overlooked by most is one tiny sentence from the Times Magazine article that is particularly troubling. Here it is: "This study underscores Ronald Ferguson's point about the value of seating students of different backgrounds and abilities in class together, as opposed to tracking them." (Italics mine.)
Some background: Diversity defenders have realized, it seems, that elaborately engineeered school-assignment policies that bus pupils from one side of a district to the other and limit parental choice are unpopular. They've also realized that justifying such Rube Goldberg assignments with fluffy diversity language--students will be exposed to different types of people, different ideas, etc.--just doesn't cut it with parents whose children are forced to attend class far from home and who want a compelling reason for it.
Thus, diversity defenders have now adopted "increasing academic performance" as their casus bussi. We're told that schools that mingle neat combinations of white, black, and Latino, poor, rich, and middle-class hold much promise to boost student achievement.
Assuming that's true: Is forcing such amalgams the best way, the most efficient way, to improve student learning? Is it not eminently more sensible to devote resources to, say, attracting knowledgeable teachers and building solid curricula?
But it hardly matters because the whole idea is far-fetched. Pupils spend their learning time in class, and classes, even in putatively "diverse" schools, are for the most part segregated by academic ability, with low-achieving students taking courses with other low-achievers, and the high-achievers similarly grouped together.
Unless... unless... schools seat "students of different backgrounds and abilities in class together, as opposed to tracking them."
Call it diversity creep. What began as an admirable and justifiable goal has metastasized into an obsession, whereby young people are no longer seen as students in need of education but pieces, each with different race- and class-based attributes, to be strategically shifted among schools and now classrooms. The Brookings Institution's Tom Loveless long ago warned us about the harm that such classroom "de-tracking" can do.
If increasing academic achievement is the goal, then muddying course rosters by amalgamating pupils of all different academic abilities is foolhardy. It disserves the high-achievers, who must patiently wait while the material they've already mastered is repeatedly explained to the low-achievers and who must watch the level of their classroom discourse plunge. And it disserves the low-achievers, who may simply be unable to keep up with the curriculum, no matter how much their teacher waters it down. Teachers know this.
Promoting race- and class-based school-assignment admixtures as a method to boost academic achievement is a ruse and, if not fingered as such, could do much to stifle the academic achievement it purports to encourage.