Economic integration is the next step for schools in U.S.

For the last five years, officials of the sprawling Wake County school district in central North Carolina did what Americans generally don't like to do: recognize the influential role that class plays in educational achievement.
Rather than assign students to schools strictly by residence or race, the district initiated an ambitious program of integrating by income, ensuring that poor kids made up no more than 40 percent of any school.
Ever since, the standardized test results of those poor kids -- most of whom are black or Hispanic -- have improved dramatically, and not at the expense of other students. The district's SAT scores are well above the state and national average and climbing, while the number of students taking AP courses has soared.
There is, however, a painful irony to this success story, for at the very time that Wake County and other districts are adopting economic integration plans, the nation as a whole is more and more segregated by wealth. The gap between high-income and low-income Americans is widening, while access to selective higher education and affordable housing is becoming even more elusive for the poor and working class.
This is happening even as the economy is technically growing. The U.S. Census Bureau reported in August that as the rich became richer, the poverty rate rose and household incomes stagnated for an unprecedented fifth year in a row.
Wider landscape
Not every school district can engineer what Wake County did. Unlike in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, states with zillions of individual districts, North Carolina organizes its public schools on a wider landscape, encompassing city and suburb. Students there are used to boarding buses; they've done it for 30 years.
But that shouldn't allow us to nod approvingly at the lessons learned in Wake County and not try to adapt them elsewhere. Economic integration makes not only academic sense. It also makes civic sense. Every step America takes to stratify by class -- from encouraging the concentration of poverty in cities to weakening mass transit to repealing the inheritance tax -- loosens the pull of the common good.
One way to reverse those trends is to institute broader public school choice. Already, about half a million Americans go to public schools outside their home districts. That number could increase if better-off suburban schools were given incentives to accept city kids and if the strong, creative magnet schools long established in cities were more widely available.
"You have to think of students as being citizens of their states rather than just their local districts," argues Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has written about economic integration in schools.
When that happens, low-income students in middle-class schools have three advantages: peers with the expectation that college is in their future; parents who are more active in the schools; and teachers who are more qualified, especially to teach in their fields.
Opening doors
Those advantages are available to middle-class kids -- whatever their race -- merely by virtue of where their parents chose to live. In truth, those "advantages" ought to be basic for every child in America, but until that happens, shouldn't more doors be opened for those willing to step inside?
The school buses wouldn't have to cross district lines, of course, if housing were more integrated by income, but national trends are moving in the opposite direction. A Brookings Institution analysis found that the percentage of people living in affluent or poor suburbs in 50 metropolitan areas grew from 1980 to 2000, while middle-income areas shrunk.
This isn't a law of nature. Inclusive zoning, good planning, and economic incentives can help economically diversify neighborhoods and, by extension, their public schools.
While America's elite now come in many colors and flavors, that diversity is often of people who look different but hail from the same class. A study conducted last year by the Century Foundation found that at the nation's 146 most selective colleges and universities, you are 25 times as likely to run into a rich kid as a poor kid.
America's poor children deserve better and so, frankly, does everyone else.
X Jane R. Eisner is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.