Giving Compass' Take:

• Mark Keierleber discusses the relationship between school and neighborhood segregation and how cities are successfully increasing integration. 

• How can funders work with local government to implement effective policies to increase integration? What can donors do without the help of government? 

• Find out why increasingly integrated neighborhoods have failed to produce increasingly integrated schools. 

Springfield, Illinois, is like a lot of places in America: Its neighborhoods are highly segregated by race, with minority residents predominantly clustered downtown and most whites residing along the city’s outskirts.

Something interesting is happening, however, in Springfield’s schools.

While schools in most cities are slightly more segregated than their neighborhoods on average, the opposite is true in Springfield. The difference comes down to the way the city drew its school attendance boundaries, according to a new report by the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Rather than follow the city’s segregated housing patterns, Springfield purposely set out to create more diverse schools.

In some cities, like Springfield, policies chip away at racial segregation inside schools — while those in other cities exacerbate it. Since most children attend campuses close to home, the prevalence of segregation in schools correlates highly with the racial composition of nearby neighborhoods. In fact, Urban estimates that 76 percent of the variation in school segregation between schools can be attributed to housing.

And although district policies that encourage integration are helpful, something more radical must be done to eliminate school segregation outright, argues Tomas Monarrez, an Urban research associate and author of the report.

“If you really want to destroy segregation — get rid of it and completely fix this problem — the only way to do that is to completely fix the problem of residential segregation,” he told The 74.

Read the full article about segregated classrooms and segregated neighborhoods by Mark Keierleber at The 74.