Book Review of the Future of School Integration : Socioeconomic Diversity as an Education Reform Strategy

The last decade has seen a quiet but steady expansion of interest in using socioeconomic diversity in schools to improve educational outcomes. Ten years ago, only a few school districts around the country used formal strategies to integrate their schools along class lines. Today, over eighty school districts around the United States, together educating around four million students, ensure that poor children are taught alongside middle-class and wealthier children through a variety of voluntary integration programs. The message of The Future of School Integration: Socioeconomic Diversity as an Education Reform Strategy, the important new book edited by Richard Kahlenberg, is simple: these strategies are more educationally effective than other reform strategies; they are more cost effective; and recognizing these facts has important implications for a number of pressing law-reform choices at the federal, state, and local levels