Giving Compass' Take:

• Neal McCluskey at Education Next argues that in order to make progress with school choice in America, we have to take a look into the history of segregation and address issues that are still dividing our societies. 

• How can funders work to ensure that people of all backgrounds have the opportunity to move into neighborhoods and school districts regardless of background? 

• According to this article, school segregation is a byproduct of population segregation. 

America is, rightly, having a reckoning on race. The nation’s history is scarred by its too-often horrific mistreatment of African Americans, from slavery, to Jim Crow, to discriminatory government housing policies that lasted into the 1960s. Righteous indignation can, and should, well up in one’s heart. Progress, though, depends on understanding that there are good people who see the same problems, but not the same solutions. It requires operating with the starting assumption that even those on opposite sides of the policy debate are animated by good intentions.

Journalist Amanda Ripley wrote an excellent article recently aimed at helping journalists cover controversial issues in our sharply divided society. After speaking with the likes of Righteous Mind author Jonathan Haidt, Ripley concluded that the key to productive interaction is to get to know your ideological opponents—learn about who they are, and why they believe what they believe—and to wrestle with their experiences and beliefs. Doing so often reveals our opponents to be decent human beings, and complexity—seeing the nuances of what they believe—causes us to “become more curious and less closed off to new information.”

It can often turn out that those with whom we disagree, even vehemently, also want to serve justice. But how they see justice is different.

Read the full article about segregation and school choice by Neal McCluskey at Education Next.