Decades of research show that students are best served in diverse and equitable schools. Diversity enhances learning environments, inspiring reduced racial bias, increased student creativity, better developed problem-solving skills, and higher average test scores for students in integrated schools. 1 These well documented benefits, however, are often stymied when schools achieve only numerical diversity without truly taking steps to maximize relationship building across racial and economic difference.
Social science research demonstrates the importance of meaningful and sustained face-to-face contact for youth of different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. This research consensus first became apparent in the oft-overlooked amicus brief submitted by psychologists and other social scientists in the case Brown v. Board, which highlighted how the injustice of segregation stunted the development of democratic values in children by teaching white children to “gain personal status in an unrealistic and non-adaptive way.”
