The Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2019 by Tawnell D. Hobbs
CLINTON, Miss.-Nearly five decades ago, this town on Jackson's outskirts decided to send students to schools organized by grade level, rather than geography.
So all of the kindergartners and first-graders would go to one school, all of the children in second and third grades would be at another, and so forth, all the way through 12th grade. The approach in Clinton was rolled out in 1971 to little fanfare.
Today, the 5,300-student Clinton Public School District is being held up by researchers and educators as a success-and a possible solution as the number of "intensely segregated" minority public schools increases throughout the U.S. The UCLA Civil Rights Project, a research center, defines "intensely segregated" minority schools as those made up of at least 90% of nonwhite students.
Research shows that minorities concentrated in high-poverty schools tend to have lower performance and fewer educational opportunities than those who attend schools in more-affluent areas.
The structure in the Clinton schools assures that public-school students learn alongside each other, regardless of race, economic status or where they live in town. According to state education data, the district has maintained diverse schools in an area of the country with a history of racial division.
Clinton's student population is 54% black, 36% white, 6% Asian, 2% Hispanic and 2% other, with almost half of the students considered low-income.
The community has endured as a greater percentage of minority students in the U.S., especially poor ones, attend "intensely segregated" schools than they did decades ago, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal education data.
"In principle, one could do something like this in any district," said Sean Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University. "Done right-with zones drawn to create diverse schools and with school cultures focused on creating real social and academic integration-it's a promising model."