Why Substantively Integrated Schools Matter at This Moment in History

The United States today is far from united. The political polarization that’s dividing the electorate can manifest in many ways, but one area where it’s recently had increasingly damaging impacts is education. Polarization has fueled culture-war attacks on public schools, including not only attempts to abolish the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), but also possible voucher expansion that would allow families, for example, to send their children to private religious schools using public funding. These attacks on public education have been accompanied by similar assaults on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, as evidenced by the anti-DEI executive order from the Trump administration, and its Dear Colleague letter that declares, among other things, that DEI efforts in preK–12 through college campuses are not permitted. 

After recent attacks on higher education and push-back from universities, the administration has begun to shift its focus toward preK–12, indicating the need for countermobilization. As long legal disputes emerge as one way to challenge such guidance, in the short term, the administration’s attacks could lead to a chilling effect for districts engaging in social justice work. In the medium term, these efforts will likely undermine the country’s public education system and fracture community spaces, critical for our democracy. In the long term, divestment from inclusive public schooling will likely lead to further polarization within an information landscape that requires critical discernment. Finally, if we can’t learn together, how will we live together?

Amid such attacks and the erosion of democratic norms, American institutions and individuals must find a way to protect public education and the very future of our democracy. But what does educating for a strong, pluralistic rather than polarized democracy look like in this fractured landscape? This commentary argues that substantively integrated public schools offer one of the best long-term strategies for achieving this goal, for three primary reasons: 

1. Integrated schools promote equitable outcomes, needed at this time of largely ethnoracially and socioeconomically segregated school settings and inequities in educational opportunity that prevent collective flourishing.  
2. Schools that bring youth together (with relatively equal power, working toward common goals) can help reduce us-versus-them mentalities and create a more united pluralistic democracy with reduced polarization/division.
3. School integration allows us to progress past our history of segregation toward moral realignment and the creation of a more just society, where communities stand in solidarity with each other, realizing we are stronger together. 

The commentary piece will first explore the concept of “substantive integration,” and then why such integration, with a renewed focus on democratic participation, is needed now more than ever.  

Who Should Be Doing the Work?

With the U.S. Department of Education in a fight for its very survival, and President Trump saying that his administration wants to move responsibility for education “back to the states,” it seems that the future of public education will be determined at the state and local level, including important areas like Civil Rights protections and protections for students with disabilities. Now is the time to leverage the largely decentralized education system so that states, districts, and schools themselves can strive for integration; however, it is important to be specific about what is meant by the term. Being specific and uniting around a shared definition of integration is needed as a first step to ensure such work is actually a lever for equity, democracy, and moral realignment. 

Specifically, integrated schools cannot succeed if they repeat the harms of past desegregated school contexts. For example, following Brown v. Board of Education policymakers pushed out Black teachers and administrators. Black students experienced increased rates of exclusionary discipline. School closures and the creation of vouchers only available to white students to attend private schools emerged to avoid desegregation. Busing efforts were largely unilateral, putting many Black and Latine students’ bodies on the line by sending them to be educated at formerly all-white schools.  

Additionally, in more modern contexts, schools that appear diverse on paper are not necessarily integrated. For example, last year I led the facilitation of a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project in partnership with a local government organization. This process involved meeting once to twice a month in a city building after school hours and working alongside a group of youth co-researchers. The youth participating in the project led the topic selection process and chose to investigate within-school segregation at a local high school. I and other adult facilitators guided student co-researchers through community asset mapping, research question generation, data collection, analysis, dissemination of findings, and action. At the conclusion of this work, the youth made policy recommendations to the city council and school board regarding potential shifts to tracking practices. Policy makers considered their findings—that these practices kept their relatively diverse high school largely segregated—while revamping the tracking program. 

While such detracking policy shifts are a step in the right direction toward school integration, that is still insufficient. All students should have access to similar opportunities for youth voice, democratic engagement, and shared power. These opportunities as well as access to inclusive, just, and diverse classroom spaces are pivotal for a pluralistic democracy. This is what democracy should look like. And this is what education should look like. All of these considerations motivate the need for a reimagination of what school integration could be. 

Defining What Is Meant by Substantively Integrated Schools

When defining substantive school integration, the 5Rs of Real Integration model from IntegrateNYC—a student-led movement—is an ideal starting point. This definition, created by historically marginalized students with lived experience, centers justice, power balance, harm reduction, and students’ overall flourishing. The main distinction made here is adding a sixth element that considers civic engagement opportunities. With this in mind, substantive school integration is defined through the following six components: 

1. Diverse racial, ethnic, and other intersectional identities within a community are represented in enrollment: In this tenet, I lead with race, in line with the initial framework, and add the need to consider other intersectional forms of identity (for example, language, ability status, urbanicity, gender, sexual identity, and so on). This type of diverse enrollment should extend to classrooms, after-school programming, lunchroom tables, less formal spaces, and so on. With this in mind, there should still be opportunities for affinity spaces. 
2. Restorative and transformative justice: First popular within the criminal justice space, restorative justice is an approach to accountability that can involve a variety of practices to acknowledge, amend, and prevent harm. This type of healing work will likely be necessary in diverse spaces with the potential for harm/misunderstanding across lines of difference. Finally, this expanded framework includes transformative justice, which incorporates changes to systems that perpetuate harm, not just harm generated between individuals.
3. Inclusive relationships: Positive relationships are key to school communities. Integrated schools help foster such trusting relationships and a sense of belonging between students, teachers, staff, families, and so on.
4. Representation: One primary form of representation in school diversity literature is teacher racial representation. Representation here includes race, alongside considerations of other intersectional identities in teachers, the broader staff, PTA leaders, and so on. Additionally, representation encompasses curriculum that represents the experiences of various cultures, the languages used, and the representation of student/staff voice in decision-making.
5. Equitable resource distribution: Given that money matters in schools, substantively integrated schools equitably distribute finances, access to programming (for example, AP courses), novice teachers, and other resources.

In addition to these five elements, all drawn from the 5Rs of Real Integration, I include a sixth element in the definition of substantively integrated schools. I have included this element given my belief that schools are primarily for civic development, that the civic argument for integrated schools is one of the strongest as evidenced by the Brown ruling itself, and from my own experiences witnessing youth voice and power, when included in civic processes. 

6. Civic engagement opportunities: These are built-in opportunities for students to engage in democratic decision-making and direct service/social justice action. I argue this additional element is needed, given the many theoretical justifications for school integration as the foundation of building a pluralistic democracy. 

With this new guiding definition, the next sections discuss how, if done well, substantive integration could deliver a host of benefits. (For a list of these six elements as well as strategies for pursuing them, consult Appendix Table 1.)

Promoting Equitable Outcomes

Past desegregation efforts, although imperfect, improved the academic, health, and economic outcomes of Black students, without harming white students. There is some evidence of similar academic benefits for Mexican students, an important note given the rapidly diversifying school age population. Despite these equitable benefits, desegregation efforts were short-lived and faced massive resistance, parallel to educational backlash today. 

Today there is evidence that racially and socioeconomically integrated schools have the power to promote educational equity. For example, research around modern diverse school and district contexts demonstrate academic benefits for students. Additionally, there is evidence that diverse socioeconomic networks yield economic mobility benefits. These benefits are large in magnitude, relative to other educational interventions, and distributed across those with less educational opportunity. 

Even with this evidence, seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education II, schools remain highly segregated, with interest holders continuing to await the promise of “all deliberate speed.” Segregation reinforces stark inequity and hierarchy through mechanisms such as the inequitable distribution of financial resources and novice teachers within the school system. Furthermore, these inequities are perpetuated by society’s more-privileged families through the idea of education as an individual good to be consumed, zero-sum mindsets (one’s gain is another’s inherent loss), and opportunity hoarding. To be fair to these families, under current systems, the United States has stark economic inequality and a relatively small safety net for the degree of wealth produced, thus taking a protective stance of family resources within this context is understandable. What individuals may not realize, however, is that acting in ways that hoard resources at the family level does not fix the larger resource distribution problem that is the root of their concerns. This can only be faced through solidarity, which substantively integrated school communities can help foster at this moment.

Forging Ties to Fuel a Pluralistic Democracy

Substantive school integration fosters solidarity through bringing people from different identities to the same space to ask questions, debate, and learn together. Students coming together on relatively equal footing and working toward shared goals results in powerful social consequences, such as bias reduction. Furthermore, building diverse and inclusive coalitions can promote understanding across differences and empathetic collectives, empowered to work against oppressing one another through democratic processes. These are the skills desperately needed at this moment.

Living the Values of Justice, Equity, and Shared Humanity

Finally, arguments for integrated schools are fundamentally rooted in justice, equity, and shared humanity. Black activists—specifically, women within fights for educational justice—have paved the way for working collectively to ensure a better future. Working toward integrated schools provides a pathway toward moral realignment and healing, with a tent wide enough for everyone, again given the interconnectivity of liberation.  

As the second Trump administration ramps up efforts to polarize American society even further, communities are already feeling the impact. As experts aim to safeguard civil rights through the courts and prevent future federal overreach in the legislature, advocating for substantive school integration should be part of these efforts in the long and short-term. Finally, this should not only be a top-down approach, but also incorporate bottom-up power. 

For state, local, and community leaders looking to create substantively integrated schools, there are various resources and considerations. First, the Bridges Collaborative offers direct support to schools, districts, and housing organizations doing this work. Next, advocates should examine their area’s segregation/desegregation history and then identify what approaches have worked in other similar contexts and political landscapes. Advocates can then start asset-mapping of the resources that already exist in their community that could help with implementing the six components of substantive integration listed above. Advocates should select strategies that fit their needs from Appendix Table 1 and involve various community interest holders in these shifts and look to grassroots organizing, such as the Integrated Schools movement. 

Finally, advocates should be aware of potential challenges (for example, the experience with diversity planning in Queens). While building substantively integrated school communities is worth it, this work is, frankly, quite hard to do within existing hierarchical, individualistic, and competitive structures. In addition to anticipating challenges of political will and backlash, advocates also need to consider the ways that white supremacy may transform policies with equitable intentions. This could look like centering privileged voices/interests, backlash to curricular shifts, the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, within school tracking/differential course taking, district secession, unfettered school choice, families exiting the public school system, use of “soft” PTA money to only help certain students, and so on. 

Looking Ahead

Now more than ever, the United States needs substantive school integration to address educational inequities, promote a functioning pluralistic democracy, and work toward a more just future, together.

Appendix Table 1

Tags: school diversity, school integration, educational equity