At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha and Vanessa spoke with Halley Potter, Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, where she researches public policy solutions for addressing educational inequality with special focus on school integration. We talked about issues our education system is facing and what we can do with them, what equality in education would look like, and how we can reconcile what we currently see in schools and classrooms with what we want to see. Halley underscored that we value diversity… as a concept; it’s far harder to achieve in practice. She underscored that school segregation didn’t happen by accident or by individual choices. Decades of policy have created the systems and structural barriers that lead to segregation as the default. Charter schools have potential to be sites of integration as a result of combining choice and enrollment features and diversity controls IF diversity goals are front and center, which they generally aren’t. These things can’t just be left to the free market; as things stand, charter schools are not very integrated as a whole. The challenging reality is that you can’t tell if a school is integrated by looking at demographics along–you really need to analyze who is attending, who is teaching and in what configurations (for example, gifted programs within schools are often highly segregated), is the curriculum reflective of all students’ experiences, and more. One thing we agreed could help us as we strive to build a better path is to step back and question assumptions about what the best learning environments are. Just because a school may have the best test scores does not make it the best school and unfortunately many of the most screened schools are segregated pressure cookers that don’t benefit youth. Overall, Halley emphasized that choice isn’t bad or good, it’s a tool. We hope that listening to this episode will help you use that tool for good. Thank you for joining us!
