Harvard Law School, National Summit on Interdistrict School Desegregation
Professor Orfield's powerpoint presentation for the panel: What the Future Holds: Hopeful School Integration Models
Segregated schools harm children, communities, and the metropolitan region. Segregated schools intensify the region's segregated residential patterns, concentrating poverty and magnifying its harms. This isolates the most disadvantaged children from educational and economic opportunity. "Expanding Educational Opportunity Through School and Housing Choice" was published in the Summer 2007 CURA Reporter, Volume 37, Number 2. http://www.cura.umn.edu/reporter/abstract.php
The complete report referenced in "Expanding Educational Opportunity" above was released by the Institute on Race & Poverty, May 2006, "The Choice is Ours: Expanding Educational Opportunity for All Twin Cities Children."
"Choice, Equal Protection and Metropolitan Integration: The Hope of the Minneapolis Desegregation Settlement," authored by Myron Orfield and published in the Law and Inequality law review (2006). This article examines the increasing segregation of students and neighborhoods in the Twin Cities despite legal civil rights "advances" and gains.
"A Missed Opportunity: Minnesota’s Failed Experiment with Choice-Based Integration" chronicles Minnesota’s adoption of school integration rules—including its missed opportunity to adopt strong, metro-wide mandates—and evaluates the rules’ reliance on choice as a flawed vehicle for real change in the racial makeup of its schools. Although the article describes Minnesota’s experience in detail, it does so not only to preserve that part of Minnesota’s history but also to use Minnesota’s experience as a lesson for all states in the post-Parents Involved era. The article argues that states should not rely on choice-based, laissez-faire school-enrollment policies, but rather that they should, consistent with Justice Kennedy’s specific guidance in Parents Involved, fashion race-based education policies that proactively prohibit racial isolation in our nation’s schools.
