The most notable aspect of the Sunday Times Magazine’s roundtable on the “new world of educational philanthropy,” which was intended to promote outside-the-box thinking on school reform, was how the entire discussion was locked in the tired old box of trying to make “separate but equal” a workable reality. The ideas batted around in the article—charter schools, small high schools, programs to bring in creative new teachers and principals, upgrades in technology and infrastructure, stricter accountability—are all perfectly worthwhile. But none of them broach what is far and away the central problem: the isolation of low-income minority children in high-poverty urban schools.

Studies have shown that the kinds of reforms that the roundtable participants advocated, like any number of other urban fixes that have been tried in the past, can produce some scattered successes but in the aggregate don’t seem to produce improvements that can be replicated on a large scale. The obstacles that they are up against are just too severe. In high-poverty schools, as my Century Foundation colleague Richard Kahlenberg  has argued based on a wide-ranging body of research, students are more likely than in middle-class schools to be disruptive and have problems at home; their parents are less engaged in the school, less active in the PTA, and more apt to move from one school zone to another during the year; their teachers have lower test scores, less experience, and lower expectations; and the physical condition of the school is apt to be considerably worse.  While some individual high-poverty schools—traditional public, charter and private—have managed to achieve excellence in spite of those obstacles, no overarching strategy has consistently enabled a “separate but equal” approach for low-income schools to work district-wide at anywhere near the level of middle-class school systems.

The one strategy that has consistently produced significant improvements in the performance of low-income children is to enable them to attend middle-class schools. This report by Rick conveys examples of programs where that strategy is working. While the political impediments to promoting the voluntary integration of low-income students into middle-class settings are significant, they have been overcome in a variety of settings. And many cross-district integration plans that have been in place for years have become so popular that efforts to close them have been rebuffed.

For philanthropists preoccupied with pushing forward ideas that demonstrate results, targeting their resources toward creative efforts aimed at promoting socio-economic integration is the most logical investment they could make. At the very least, the subject shouldn’t be left entirely off the table. 

Greg Anrig is Vice President of Programs at The Century Foundation.