Integrating schools

For several years, CPRL has partnered with education leaders at the state, district, and school levels to pursue school integration as one strategy for creating more equitable school systems. Below are some resources we have developed in partnership with others to support school integration. 

Initiating, Monitoring, and Sustaining School Integration Projects: A Toolkit for New York State School Districts is a step-by-step guide for initiating, monitoring and sustaining school and district-level integration efforts. Developed for NYSED’s New York State Integration Project (NYSIP) in partnership with the Center for Public Research & Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia University, this toolkit is organized around the elements of CPRL’s Leading Through Learning framework, a cornerstone of CPRL’s approach to supporting equitable educational outcomes. Since 2018, NYSED and its partners have supported NYSIP, a program to help school districts create more diverse schools as a mechanism for increasing student achievement in Title I schools. 

A 2021 essay published in Fordham Urban Law Journal summarizes some of CPRL's earliest work to understand how current school enrollment policies can help create more diverse schools. 

The Culturally Responsive-Sustaining (CR-S) Education Framework published by New York State Education Department (NYSED) includes principles tied to civic engagement. In May 2021, we hosted a 3-part webinar series on student-led civic engagement and compiled a resource list.

The Impact of Middle School Integration Efforts on Segregation in Two New York City Districts (2020) was developed with MarGrady Research to study the impact of some of the ideas we have developed in collaboration with education leaders to create more integrated schools.

In 2019, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) published the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining (CR-S) Education Framework, a set of principles to create equitable, inclusive, and student-centered learning environments. In collaboration with educators, we developed a set of complementary resources that supplement the resources included in the CR-S Framework.

CPRL also created a curated list of resources to help district and school leaders create more integrated schools and classrooms.

CPRL helped MarGrady Research design IntegrateNY, a dashboard that summarizes county, district, and school diversity across New York State. Watch an overview of the dashboard to learn more.