WASHINGTON — With a proposed $120 million in federal grant funding as an incentive, U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday in his ongoing push to make America’s public K-12 schools more diverse along lines of race and socioeconomic class.
“This is a pivotal moment in education,” King said during a Congressional briefing hosted by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.
King lamented the fact that, despite being more than 60 years removed from Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court that ordered the desegregation of the nation’s public schools, America’s students today are more racially and socioeconomically isolated than they were 10 or 20 years ago.
Indeed, a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that there has been a “large increase in schools that are the most isolated by poverty and race,” with the percentage of high poverty schools comprised mostly of Black or Hispanic students increasing steadily from 9 percent in the 2000-01 school year to 16 percent in the 2013-14 school year.
King used Wednesday’s briefing to tout the Obama administration’s proposed $120 million “Stronger Together” initiative, a voluntary grant program that would “support the development and expansion of new and existing, community-driven strategies to increase socioeconomic diversity in America’s schools.”
“Our goal is to support those creative solutions because the evidence is clear: students do better in those diverse contexts,” King said. “There is evidence from across the country that shows students who go to economically and racially diverse schools not only do better in K-12 but go on to success after graduation.”
Some education scholars said the Stronger Together proposal is worthwhile but may be too little too late for a lame duck administration to usher into existence in its final year in office.
