In recent interviews, outgoing education secretary Arne Duncan has identified his failure to do more to combat school desegregation as one of his greatest regrets. His successor, John King, has flagged renewed efforts to promote socio-economic integration in schools as a top priority for his own limited time in office. But how have patterns of school segregation evolved in recent decades? Are American schools re-segregating, as newspaper headlines often suggest? And what do we know about the consequences of school segregation for students?
In this episode of the EdNext podcast, Marty West, associate editor of Education Next, talks with Steven Rivkin, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, about how school segregation has changed since the 1960s. It turns out that measuring segregation is surprisingly complex.
Rivkin is the author of a new EdNext article “Desegregation Since the Coleman Report.”
The EdNext Podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher and here every Wednesday.
—Education Next
