School Integration and Education Justice

True integration goes beyond desegregation mandates and school assignment diversity goals. It embraces diversity and empowers all students regardless of their appearance, identity, background, resources, or abilities. Running through everything PSFNC writes about and shares, there is a common theme: ensuring that ALL of our students get what they deserve—their constitutional right to a sound, quality education.
Education Justice
School integration is part of a larger education justice movement to address injustice and inequity in the experiences and opportunities provided to students. Education justice advocates work to create environments where open acknowledgment, honest discussion, critical evaluation, and creative problem-solving can address institutional biases in our education system.
Learning for Justice, formerly known as Teaching Tolerance, is a community education program of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This video about the Learning for Justice Educator Fund highlights a program modeled on the Freedom Schools started by the SCLC during the Civil Rights movement. It captures the values and spirit of education justice.
EdJustice is a social justice advocacy network of the National Educational Association (NEA). It has created toolkits for educators and students that address the main principles of EdJustice: freedom to learn, gender empowerment, immigration justice, LGBTQ+ support and protection, and racial justice in education. The racial justice and Black Lives Matter at School resources on the site include topics related to school integration:
- Creating a more inclusive, welcoming, and culturally responsive environment for students of color
- Evaluating biases that drive unfair discipline policies and imbalanced placement of students in special education and advanced courses
- Using restorative practices in conflict resolution to reduce suspension rates, which are much higher for students of color
- Teaching truthfully about racial history and supporting the inclusion of Black history and ethnic studies
- Investing more in counseling and less in policing in schools to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline
- Recruiting educators of color to recover the support and leadership of Black educators that was lost during the desegregation era


Systemic barriers to integration
The School Choice movement
Integration and education justice cannot thrive in a community that prioritizes private interests over the common good – i.e., school systems driven by market forces instead of equality of opportunity. In North Carolina, as in many other states across the nation, school choice means privatization. The privatization formula:
- Under-funding and over-regulating public schools, driving educators from the profession and leaving schools starved for critical resources needed to provide academic, social, and economic support for the most vulnerable students.
- Pitting traditional public schools against charter schools that are allowed to limit access to certain populations indirectly through decisions they make about transportation, meal support, behavior standards, and parental involvement expectations.
- Using vouchers to shepherd more and more students and resources out of public schools to private, mostly religious, schools that are allowed to discriminate against students through their application, admissions, code of conduct, and expulsion policies.
Segregation and inequity within schools
The history of school desegregation and integration demonstrates remarkable progress in some aspects and spectacular failure in others. Schools in segregationist strongholds and urban areas with racial tensions were required to desegregate. However, they used deliberate and overt methods of driving Black educators out of teaching and leadership positions, tracking students into segregated classrooms, and implementing discipline policies and practices that disproportionately removed Black students from school. Even several generations removed from those intentions, schools stubbornly cling to institutional norms and policies that reproduce inequalities of achievement and opportunity. Solutions we support:
- Invest in developing and supporting restorative practices that emphasize building relationships and trust, facilitating open and honest communication between students and educators, empowering students to participate in intentional conflict resolution, and keeping students in school (versus being suspended, chronically absent, dropped out, or imprisoned.)
- Implement placement testing and referral practices that mitigate implicit bias in deciding which students are removed from regular classrooms for special education services or advanced coursework.
- Support and recruit educators of color because the vast majority of teachers, administrators, counselors, and other decision-makers are disproportionately white.
Neighborhoods and property values
As demonstrated by the massive anti-busing movement of the 1970s-90s, the most significant barrier to school integration is de facto residential segregation. For the past 25 years, the Supreme Court has incrementally removed legal mandates and remedies involving race-based or race-conscious school assignments and admissions. The federal courts will no longer intervene, even in school systems that have essentially resegregated, if it is due to de facto segregation and not intentional school district actions. Due to historical housing discrimination, redlining practices, and unequal economic opportunity, low-wealth areas have a disproportionate percentage of students of color. Low-wealth communities net lower property taxes, and thus, lower school budgets and per-pupil expenditures. In North Carolina specifically:
- The Leandro Plan, which resulted from a long-running lawsuit against the state, designated extra funding for resources to help low-wealth counties meet their students’ right to a sound, basic education. However, the NC General Assembly has not yet fully funded key provisions of the plan despite a budget surplus due to a political power struggle.
- The NC A-F School Report Card system is based on the nation’s strictest formula, with 80% based on achievement test scores and only 20% based on growth. Schools with a disproportionate number of low-wealth students are penalized under this system, creating a redlining effect in the real estate market, where school report card grades are prominent.
Resources
SPLC Learning for Justice website (formerly Teaching Tolerance) of learning resources for educators and students by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
EdJustice website of resources on how to advocate for social justice in schools, by the National Education Association (NEA)
Brown’s Promise website with in-depth guides for educators, researchers, and community leaders working to support school diversity
Facing History and Ourselves website of Social Studies and ELA resources about standing up to bigotry and hate
The Century Foundation: P12 Education research and reports on topics related to integration and equity
Education Resource Equity website by the Alliance for Resource Equity with interactive resources, guides, diagnostic tools, toolkits, and advocacy support
The Toolkit Before the Toolkit for laying the groundwork for the successful implementation of restorative practices by the WestEd Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety
Bridging Difference Playbook guide by the UC-Berkeley Greater Good Science Center with research-based strategies needed to tackle equity work
Know Your Rights: North Carolina by NEA, which currently focuses on the Parents’ Bill of Rights law passed in 2023
Increasing School Diversity dashboard to see how experimental algorithms by researchers at MIT and Northeastern University could change elementary school demographics in any state and school district
Beware of Equity Traps and Tropes article from ASCD Educational Leadership, 2021
DRIVE Taskforce: Supporting teacher diversity website, established by Governor Cooper’s executive order, includes resources on the Hunt Institute website
Charter Schools and Their Impact on Local School Districts PSFNC webinar with Rodney Pierce (Eastern NC middle school teacher) and Christine Kushner (former Wake County school board member)
The webinar is also embedded below. It includes discussions about the impact of charter schools on school diversity and the exclusionary policies used by voucher schools.
References
Alliance for Resource Equity. (n.d.). Education Resource Equity. https://educationresourceequity.org/
Blackwell, A. (2017). The Curb-Cut Effect. Stanford Social Innovation Review. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_curb_cut_effect
Blitzman, J. (2021). Shutting Down the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Human Rights Magazine; American Bar Association, 47(1). https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/empowering-youth-at-risk/shutting-down-the-school-to-prison-pipeline/
Dudley Flood Center for Educational Equity and Opportunity. (2024). Equity Framework. https://floodcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Equity-Framework.pdf
Dugan, J. (2021). Beware of Equity Traps and Tropes. ASCD Educational Leadership, 78(6). https://ascd.org/el/articles/beware-of-equity-traps-and-tropes
Facing History and Ourselves. (n.d.). Facing History. https://www.facinghistory.org/
Krueger, S. (2024). WRAL Investigates wide disparities in school funding across NC counties. WRAL. https://www.wral.com/story/wral-investigates-wide-disparities-in-school-funding-across-nc-counties/21591775/
National Education Association. (n.d.). Racial & Social Justice. EdJustice. https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/racial-social-justice
National Education Association. (2024). Know Your Rights: North Carolina. NEA Resource Library: Legal and Employment Guidance. https://www.nea.org/resource-library/know-your-rights-north-carolina
Network For Public Education. (2024). Public Schooling in America: The best and worst statehouses for supporting public schools and their students. https://networkforpubliceducation.org/public-schooling-in-america-2024/
North Carolina DRIVE Task Force. (2020). Supporting teacher diversity. Office of North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper; The Hunt Institute. https://hunt-institute.org/equity-in-education/drive-taskforce
Northeastern University Plural Connections Group, & Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Constructive Communication. (2022). Increasing School Diversity. https://www.schooldiversity.org/
Southern Education Foundation. (n.d.). Resources. Brown’s Promise. https://www.brownspromise.org/resources
Southern Poverty Law Center. (n.d.). Education Resources. Learning for Justice. https://www.learningforjustice.org/
Tegeler, P., & Milwit, L. (2019). Title I Funding and School Integration: The current funding formula’s disincentives to deconcentrate poverty and potential ways forward. The National Coalition on School Diversity, Policy Brief(9). https://www.school-diversity.org/pdf/DiversityIssueBriefNo9.pdf
The Century Foundation. (n.d.). PK-12 Education. TCF.org. https://tcf.org/topics/education/
The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. (2020). Bridging Differences Playbook. In Bridging Differences. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/Bridging_Differences_Playbook-Final.pdf
Trout, L. (2022). The Toolkit Before the Toolkit: Centering adaptive and relational elements of restorative practices for implementation success. In WestEd Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety. https://selcenter.wested.org/resource/the-toolkit-before-the-toolkit-centering-adaptive-and-relational-elements-of-restorative-practices-for-implementation-success
by Nancy Snipes Mosley,
PSFNC staff member and former high school Social Studies teacher
Last updated 11/6/2024