Navigating Legal and Enforcement Complexities

Ruthie Payno-Simmons:

Hello, and welcome to Integration Now, where we explore how history continues to shape today's integration challenges...and what we can do to advance more equitable outcomes for our students. I am Dr. Ruthie Payno-Simmons, Project Director for the Center for Education Equity, Region III at MAEC. We work alongside schools, districts, and state agencies to face the legacy of segregation head-on and turn the promise of integrated public schools into a reality students experience every day.

In today’s episode, we focus on districts across the Midwest and Plains region, where patterns of segregation persist despite efforts at reform. What practical steps can education leaders take now to build and sustain more integrated schools?

Integration Now is hosted by my colleague Dr. Kathleen King Thorius, a leading scholar whose work focuses on dismantling systemic barriers and advancing culturally responsive practices for historically underserved students. She is a professor and has led major equity-focused initiatives, including founding the Great Lakes Equity Center. This episode, she’s joined by nationally-recognized desegregation and policy scholar, Dr. Sarah Diem, to explore how districts can use data and redesign enrollment and assignment strategies and navigate shifting federal civil rights guidance while leveraging tools and support from their regional Equity Assistance Center.

Let’s get started.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

Good morning, Sarah. Good to see you.

 

Sarah Diem:

Good morning.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

I'm here with Dr. Sarah Diem. We're going to talk more about Dr. Diem's work in just a few minutes, but it's just amazing to be with you this first business day of the new year to talk about some perpetual issues, but issues that you have a lot of experience working directly with educational leaders around, and of course, the policy background and history of education in the United States is something you bring tons of strength and knowledge around, Dr. Dean. So, thanks so much for being with us today.

For those who are listening or watching, I also want to emphasize that Dr. Diem has been a friend of the Equity Assistance Center program for a very long time, supporting Region III through expertise sharing and resource development across many cycles, several cycles of funding when the Region III Center was at Indiana University. So thank you so much, Dr. Diem, for continuing your contributions to the Equity Assistance Center program, and your long career, past, present, and future addressing issues of educational equity. So, with that, I'd love it if you'd just tell us a little bit more about your work, maybe some things you're working on right now that you're excited about, and then we'll jump into some conversation.

 

Sarah Diem:

All right. Well, thank you, Kathleen, and thank you for having me. It's always such a joy to do anything associated with the Equity Assistance Center. It's really been, as you said, core to my work and what I value, and I've been working with you all since I was an assistant professor, so I just…I've been so fortunate and lucky to work alongside you and all of the wonderful people at the Center. So just a little bit about me and my work. I've been looking at school desegregation since I was in graduate school, working on my Ph.D. And it was at that time when I was in school, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Parents Involved. It was the latest decision in school desegregation when they argued that race couldn't be the sole factor for school districts to use in their student assignment plans in order to achieve diversity. I became really interested in what the response was going to be from school districts as a result of this decision, so in my dissertation, I studied three school districts in three different geographic locations, different in size, different in the factors that they used in their student assignment plans to achieve diversity, and that really laid the foundation of my work moving forward focusing on what school desegregation looked like post-Parents Involved.

So, I've continued to do that work, but it's also kind of evolved into looking at, like you had mentioned earlier, what school leaders were doing, to try to make sure that the schools in which they lead are addressing inequities, and for a lot of my work with Anjalé Welton, looking at anti-racist leadership and policy decision-making in schools. So, we've worked with some schools around an anti-racist policy decision-making protocol that we developed so they could really walk through policies in their schools and make sure that they're anti-racist. So that's been, more recently, a lot of the research that I've been doing, and now I'm also engaged in a project with some scholars across the country on school boards and democracy. As you know, school boards have always, always played an important role in local governance and policy decision-making, but since the pandemic, we have really seen them be at the center of conversations, and so, we're really interested in looking at school boards and how they're pursuing equity and policy decision making.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

Thank you so much, Sarah. Yeah, there are a lot of resources you developed for the Region III Center that walked people through, whether it was professional development planning or understanding the relationship between integration and housing policy, getting down to that decision-making that happens every day in schools, and also more planned, sustained policy decision-making that is often made by or affirmed by school boards. So it's really this holistic approach you've always had to understanding contexts, and then the way that context is shaped by geography and identity and politics, absolutely.

So you alluded to this, certainly, we're in a time of major change, I mean, one being that the Department of Education looks nothing like it did even a year ago, and these are incredibly significant changes over time. So, the Equity Assistance Center program has been around since the early 1970s. It has been named within the Civil Rights Act in terms of technical assistance that is to be provided to school districts and state education agencies to support desegregation, particularly racial desegregation at the origin of the program. So I'd like to talk a little bit about desegregation and integration within school districts.

So there are many, many districts around the country, around the United States, who are continuing to strive for integrated schools, integrated along race, sex, national origin, religion, ability, etc. So for districts who are actively working to sustain or restore integration, which strategies. have proven most effective? What have you found in your work? And for those who are kind of newer, maybe newer to this work, there are a number of strategies that have been available to districts as they are, in some cases, ordered by the government to desegregate it, including magnet programs or busing… Some of us may be more familiar with that than other strategies. So, which strategies have proven most effective? What have you found in your work? Why don't we start there?

 

Sarah Diem:

Okay. Well, I think, first off, I would just say that effective strategies for integration can't just be a one-off approach. I think they really need to be a blend of some of the strategies that you mentioned, as well as, I think, a big piece of it is continuously monitoring school district boundaries. So, as we know, the majority of U.S. public school districts, they use school attendance boundaries to determine which student addresses are assigned to which schools, and there's been copious amount of research that has shown how redrawing boundaries can be an effective policy tool for integration, for access and opportunity for historically marginalized students, and can even address transportation issues and distance to schools that children have to travel. So, I really think that when a school district is continuously monitoring its population growth and its community, where that population growth is occurring, demographic changes, and then responding to this via school district boundaries, they can work to mitigate the segregated effects of residential segregation that continue to exist, and in many cases, has worsened. And attendance boundaries, that was part of the Parents Involved ruling that I was talking about earlier, that that was offered as one of the ways that could be used to mitigate segregation. So I just wanted to start off with that.

But going back to some of these strategies that you mentioned, controlled choice plans that consider integration as part of their assignment process have long proven to be effective. Just as magnet schools and programs, inter-district transfers… And I was recently reading some research that has been done by Erica Frankenberg and colleagues that looked at dual language immersion programs in Los Angeles, and how they've had the potential to decrease school segregation and increase student enrollment it they’re appealing across all racial demographics. But they do mention that the key to that is to make sure that all students have access to these programs. I think that's still a major issue with the programs. So, I think this is just another example of school choice that can help desegregate schools that we need to keep monitoring and that we certainly need more research around.

I'll also go back to, which you mentioned, magnet schools, and magnet schools were historically designed to attract a diverse student body. And they've served as another strategy to achieve integration via voluntary school choice. While the current administration has really worked to defund the Federal Magnet Schools Assistant Program, this is a program at the federal level that gives funding to school districts that are working to, either establish or to work on already existing magnet programs. They're working to defund it. Some of the schools have lost money. They've had their grants pulled under the current administration, and some districts have sued in response.

There is… there's still, I want to emphasize, there's nothing about the current political environment that should deter magnet school leaders for continuing to pursue these efforts. And I think that's something, for me, and I've talked with you about this, that I've been thinking about, and that I have to continuously go back to in times like today. What is…what's still legal? What's in policy what we can still do to try to achieve or maintain integration in our school district communities?

I will also say, though, that to really develop and monitor integration, school districts need to have clear policies. They need to have teams in place and hopefully diverse teams that can help create these policies, monitor these policies. They need to work with their staff to train them to understand these policies. They need to have robust data systems that can monitor the policies, the delivery of them, and the outcomes. And they need to be in communication with their school communities about their efforts and outcomes, right? Because we need to have buy-in with these policies, too.

And I also think where our Equity Assistance Centers, why they are so important, because they can partner with these districts, and they can provide technical assistance that's needed to help them with these efforts. You know, for school districts that this may be new to them, or school districts that have been doing this all along, I think there's always room for some assistance in this process, especially when the political environment, especially now, is constantly changing. And I think the Centers are also really good at connecting school districts with each other, and they can learn from each other, learn from strategies that have been used, and maybe they could even partner in the future, with their efforts moving forward.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

Yeah, I love that idea about the cohort approach. Because often districts will feel like they're going it alone, and those structures don't necessarily naturally exist for school districts to be partnering in terms of their integration efforts. But we've seen that in the past, certainly with the current Region III Center for Educational Equity at the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, a cohort approach in some instances. So that's something that we want to remind any leaders who may be listening or watching today's conversation that the Equity Assistance Centers there are not only there to provide direct support and technical assistance, but to link you up into peer networks, and that's been a major role of the Equity Assistance Center program as well.

Thank you for that, that answer. There's tons of rich information there. I'd like to dig in a little deeper to a couple of the concepts, the tools that you talked about, again, because some districts may be new to this process, especially voluntary integration. And so, you've talked about the difference between involuntary and voluntary. You talked about controlled choice. Maybe we could explain a little bit more what that means, so that's a little defining. And then I also wondered if you can talk with us a bit about communicating and building buy-in or support for some of these approaches. In that, if we look at attendance boundaries, for example, that impacts families. It impacts families, school communities change, you know, which school their children goes to may change. It impacts, like you said, transportation. There may be different transportation issues. When we're looking at policies that we know are successful or can be part of a successful holistic approach to integration but that do require families to change for the sake of integration, what do you have to say to school leaders who are leading that process? And how to plan a process that really emphasizes the importance with a compelling rationale, right? And also provides families the support for a transition, which could certainly be a significant transition for some families to a new school?

 

Sarah Diem:

Yeah, that's a really good question, and I hope I have some answers to it, but I'm always reminded, when a new school is being built, or a new school is being built, and boundaries are having to be drawn, and how hotly contested it is, and we see town halls and school board meetings with people that are really passionate about it, because like you said, it impacts their families and their children. Something I also think about too is about school closures and how that happens, how it can go terribly wrong when you're not informing the community of the decisions that are being made and why, and when it's done at the last minute. So, I think that what school leaders can do to get that buy-in is you have be in constant communication with your school community, and you have to do that through a variety of ways, right? So, whether it’s having town hall meetings, or it's communicating through newsletters, or emails, or et cetera, it's that constant communication, and it's also getting feedback from your school community, and making them a part of the process as well, so that community engagement is so important. And are you designing committees or task force that have as part of the membership, parents or families, and even students being part of that, too? I think we often, when we're making these changes, we don't get the voices from students in this process, and I think they have a lot to say when it comes to school integration and equity and diversity and what their values and beliefs are around that. So, I think that it's constant engagement at all levels of the process. That's what I would say for the leadership piece.

I was also reading a recent report that was done by the Learning Policy Institute, and they looked at district leadership for racial equity, and they found—and I wrote this down because I think it's important—they found that in order to advance this work, that five things are essential. That you have to create a strategic plan for equity, you have to build adult capacity, commitment, and accountability. You have to use data to drive the progress toward racial equity, so I think with that community engagement piece, also showing that data to the community is important. Acquiring and allocating resources equitably, and sustaining leadership efforts over time. And I think that's part and parcel to the community engagement piece and being a leader who want to advance racial equity in their school, in their school district.

So, that's that leadership piece, and I don't know if you want me to go back to the kind of defining some of these strategies. So, controlled choice plan: these have been really effective, particularly because we live in, particularly now, in an environment where school choice is very important. I mean, I think it's always been part of the public education discourse, but right now, with privatization and marketization choices, we're hearing it a lot more, I would say.

And controlled choice is effective because it's still providing families choice on where they want to send their children to school, but it's under, you know, a controlled system. So whether a school district is taking their district and drawing, um, they have different zones in the district, and if your student is in Zone 2, you can pick from six schools in that zone where they want to go to school. But within that, the district is still trying to ensure that there's diverse representation in each of the schools, right? And I think a really good example of a controlled choice plan that there's been a lot of research done on it is the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina. And they've partially been successful in their efforts; they've used socioeconomic diversity and achievement as part of their efforts as well, and so…you know, again, going back to the Parents Involved decision, being in compliance with the decision, they haven't used race, and so I think that's why a lot of their efforts have been successful. More districts are using controlled choice because, again, it's balancing giving families the opportunities to choose from a number of schools within their catchment area, or their zone, or etc. But still trying to maintain some sort of diversity within the schools as well.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

Yeah, thank you. There's a lot there. Like, really concrete approaches that you're suggesting for us, so that idea of constant communication in multiple forms. If there are to be any—whether they're small or substantial—changes in a district's functioning having an uninformed community, a community that's not feeling that a district leadership is being transparent about the motivation and the reasons behind, including the data in terms of how segregated schools are not good for communities, for lots and lots of reasons. So that idea of messaging and also which data inputs, like, which data are we presenting to our school community and asking of our school community? And how are those being communicated regularly over time in multiple formats? Super important. And not necessarily always the case, right? That kind of communication, very thoughtful communication is occurring. So that's certainly something an Equity Assistance Center can support with. A lot of the Equity Assistance Center programs over time, have worked with districts and school boards to engage in very intensive strategic planning processes. So, those processes exist, and for folks looking for support for strategic planning across multiple constituents, that's certainly something that an Equity Assistance Center can help with as well.

I also really appreciated your points around socioeconomic status. I won't go into the weeds on this, but school funding formulas as well, have a connection with that. Socioeconomic integration, I should say, was one of the priorities of the federal administration a few administrations ago. Alongside race, sex, national origin, and religion integration, socioeconomic integration was a priority of the then-acting Secretary of Education. Will you say just a little bit more about how socioeconomic status has been leveraged and consideration of SES being important in terms of successful integration efforts? And then we'll move to kind of a bit of a different direction after that.

 

Sarah Diem:

Sure. And I think we have to have a caveat that sometimes people think that socioeconomic status can be used as a proxy for race, and I don't think that it should. I think you have to have a very nuanced understanding of socioeconomic status if you want to try to get at race without using race as a factor, right? So, it can't just be what school districts have used, right? They’ve used poverty levels, economically disadvantaged percentages in their school districts. It needs to be…when you're doing a student assignment plan, it's looking at, okay, what's the average household income of a census tract? It could be looking at, what are the home values in that community, too, right? So, it's looking at socioeconomics from a number of different vantage points, and not just poverty, which is important, but it has to be one of many factors. When school districts look at it in a more nuanced way, I think that's when they can be more successful in achieving diversity along race, along class, along language, etc.

And again, I keep going back to the Parents Involved ruling, because it was such an important ruling. Even before that ruling, a lot of school districts were kind of seeing the writing on the wall in terms of where other court rulings were going before the Supreme Court ruling, in terms of desegregation and being able to use race and student assignment policies. So, they had started using socioeconomic status, and so I think that's why when you were talking about a few administrations ago, that was important to them as well, right? Because it's still a legal option that you can use in your student assignment plans.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

Yeah, and thanks for reminding us of various ways of thinking about socioeconomic status of a community and of individual households, absolutely. All right. So we talked about this, we've mentioned it a couple of times, but we've had some pretty significant shifts at the federal level in terms of the Department of Education, and I guess one of the manifestations of those shifts are the reductions in civil rights enforcement capacity. And so, for those who aren’t familiar with this, we know there's an Office for Civil Rights that's under the Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Education, which does receive complaints. and investigate complaints and then work with school districts or other public educational agencies to remediate when civil rights, student civil rights have been found to be violated. So at this point, we've seen, just numerically, a reduction in the regional offices, or, at least, I think at this point, 7 of the 12 regional offices have been eliminated, and hundreds and hundreds of staff across the Department of Education more broadly, but certainly a major impact in staff reduction with the Office for Civil Rights. Yet, there’s still legally required to be an Office for Civil Rights, and the investigation and remediation of civil rights is still required under the Civil Rights Act in a number of titles or sections of law that exist at the federal level related to civil rights.

So, we've seen this reduction in capacity, which, in talking with district leaders, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of uncertainty for what districts are obligated to do, to monitor, to report on related to civil rights. So, what's your advice? Essentially, what's your advice for district leaders, amidst this uncertainty, what steps can they take now to interpret and apply obligations that continue to exist?

 

Sarah Diem:

Yeah, and Kathleen, I'll also say: they had to bring some of the staff members that, they had let go back in December because…

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

Yes, I saw that. Yes.

 

Sarah Diem:

… of the overload of cases that they have, and so…

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

Yes.

 

Sarah Diem:

We'll wait and see what happens with, you know, if we're gonna have another government shutdown, and what's gonna happen with those people moving forward, but…I mean, my advice to leaders: I think if you value equity and if you are anti-discrimination, you keep doing the work, and you report on the cases that, if you see discrimination happening, or, you know, that you still, you still do what you're doing, right? Because, like you said, we still have federal laws in place that say you can't do this. I will say, though, that back in December, the Department of Justice published this final rule removing protections against disparate impact discrimination, you know, from its implementing in the regulations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. So, that's very worrisome, but I think we still have to keep fighting if we believe in civil rights, if we believe in equity. So,I know school leaders that I work with that believe in this, this doesn't deter them. They're still doing the work that they think is important for their students and for their school communities. That would be my advice. I know, I know we're because we're all living in this state of uncertainty right now, but we can't just not do what we know is the right thing to do.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

To underscore that point, the right thing, certainly because leaders believe in this work, but also in terms of the law. Not only is this all required under law. It's legally defensible, right? Because we have federal civil rights law that requires that we're monitoring students’ access to participation in and outcomes of public education. Right? And so, all of this work, focusing on integrated schools, focusing on equitable access or outcomes for different student groups on the basis or in relation to race or sex, for example. Those are required. That's required that all students have access to the same opportunities, the same educational, high-quality educational opportunities. And so, all of this work is legally defensible. I want to be really clear with district leaders, you are obligated to do this…

 

Sarah Diem:

Mm-hmm.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

…and it is defensible to do this. You have federal law backing those kinds of decisions and commitments, and just to be really clear that none of that has changed. What we are seeing changed is the capacity to monitor; what is required to remediate; perhaps how in-depth an investigation may be around civil rights violation. We may be seeing—and this happens across each administration, every federal administration, so we're not even just speaking about this particular administration—that how the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights under the Secretary of Education interprets…

 

Sarah Diem:

Yeah.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

…federal law is reflected in guidance that then is pushed out from the Office for Civil Rights to school districts. So you have a sense for what may be investigated more than other things, or how, for example, Title IX may be interpreted. We’re gonna, there's lots of resources you can look for around that.

 

Sarah Diem:

Mm-hmm.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

But the federal law has not changed in terms of civil rights obligations, so you’re galvanized. I want to just remind leaders that they're galvanized by that.

 

Sarah Diem:

Right. Yeah, and I will say, too, advice to leaders right now, with this administration, wanting to push everything down to the state level, that if you haven't already, making sure that you’re connecting yourself or working with someone to connect you with your local representatives, your State Board of Education, your state education department. Who are the people that you're talking to in your state, that you're being connected with, that you're, like you said, that you're providing feedback, that you're giving comments about what's happening, right? Because they represent us, too. And if this is going where the current administration wants it to go, we need to have really good partnerships and relationships with the people at the state level.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

The state. Mm-hmm. Absolutely, yes, yes, great. Thank you, Sarah.

 

Sarah Diem:

Mm-hmm.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

Alright, so as we wrap up, we talked a bit about this, certainly, about community engagement and really the political durability of integration work. But we're certainly in, in my lifetime, it feels anyway, a more politically divisive environment than I've ever seen. And having done this work a really long time, district leaders are navigating very politically divisive contexts where information is, you know, being shared on social media, and often circumventing or undermining long-standing communication processes that have existed in communities. So, we talked a bit about engagement and messaging for district leaders in their communities. But can you say a little bit more about forms of stakeholder or constituent engagement you've seen? And also, how district leaders may prepare for and address conflict that essentially inevitably emerges when talking about racially or even socioeconomically integrated schools?

 

Sarah Diem:

So, I think what I've learned as someone who does this work, and who has worked with school leaders who do this work, too, is that we can't do this work alone. Something that I thought about when you said when conflict arises... Push back to this work has always existed, right? There's always been conflict, there's always been people that claim that we don't need to be doing this work. So, I think when we have teams, when we're working together in partnership, that really helps us push this work forward. So I would say, first and foremost, to make sure that you have a good team in place in your school district that wants to do this work, too. And there are, even though we are so politically divisive right now, I think the majority of us, um, this is really important to us, and I see that every day. Whether you see people out protesting, for democracy or just talking in your local community about, you know, people asking, “Well, what can I do to support your efforts in education?” I think almost a year ago, when the dismantling of the Department of Education started happening, I can't tell you how many people were like, “Well, how can I help? What can I do?” You know, and so I think there are people out there, but like we had talked about earlier, how are we doing that coalition building in our communities around this work? I think when you do that, that then helps with when conflicts come up, when you're wanting and needing to get that buy-in for the messaging that you're trying to get across. I think that that still exists, and I think that, yes, it's different right now, but I don't think, I don't think it's any different than what's happened historically. Oftentimes it's two steps back, you know, and then one step forward, and we just have to keep on it if we think this is important ultimately for children, students, right? Because I think we lose focus that's why we're doing all of this work, right? Because we want to build new generations of young people that will continue this work moving forward when we're no longer here.

So that's what I think of, and that's what I think partnerships, relationship building, as someone who works, you know, in a higher education institution, I think research practice partnerships are so important, and they make me a better scholar and a better person when I'm working with practitioners that are, you know, doing this work every single day. And I know that, at least with the people that I've worked with, I hope that it's been mutually beneficial, and it's not something that once we work on something, we never talk to each other again. I know one district leader, we talk all the time about if an issue is coming up in their school and they just need some advice, or vice versa. So it's those kind of relationships, I think, that you need to build, that can help sustain you in this work as well.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

Yeah, thanks for reminding us that the network is bigger sometimes than it seems. And also the importance of shared governance structures in school districts and structures where school leaders are intentionally inviting broad participation across multiple identities, belief systems, experiences, roles within the community. Those kinds of practices are crucial for any Democratic public institution. And especially, they're necessary in times of uncertainty or more perceivable public conflict around issues of equity and fairness in public education. So that's a really important reminder for district leaders, for state leaders: who is your team? How is that team intentionally cultivated across multiple perspectives and lived experiences? That's an essential foundation for really any and all democratic work in our public institutions.

So, Dr. Sarah Diem, thank you so much for your time and sharing your expertise, and also reminding us that research is still important as well. The function of our higher education system and partnering between scholars who… many of us educational scholars have histories, you know, whether it's in the classroom or in school leadership at the local, or that even the state or national level, so thanks for that. Good reminder as well. And again, your Equity Assistance Centers have a strong relationship with scholars who do this work.

Thanks for all of those reminders, and also really concrete ideas.

 

Sarah Diem:

Thanks, Kathleen.

 

Kathleen King Thorius:

Take care, thank you.

 

Ruthie Payno-Simmons:

Thank you for listening to Integration Now.

These conversations remind us that advancing integration takes critical reflection, partnership, and action. If you’d like to continue the conversation or explore how the Region III Equity Assistance Center can support your work, we invite you to connect with us at maec.org. Until next time.