Giving Compass' Take:

• Segregation persists in schools across the country. Without a concerted effort, it will never be eliminated.

• How segregated are schools in your area? How can policies be restructured to overcome the community segregation that often creates school segregation?

• Segregation is getting worse in some areas. Learn about what happened when a high school in Alabama resegregated.

While they learned about the history of segregation, a group of Brooklyn 11-year-olds took a good look around their classrooms and realized their schools weren’t so different from the photos in their textbooks.

So Matilda and Eliza Seki paired up with their friends Noa and Benji Weiss — two sets of twins — and decided to do something about it. They launched a petition on Change.org calling on the city to integrate its schools.

“We learned about separate and equal in the civil rights movement, and that it was not equal,” Eliza said, referring to the “separate but equal” legal doctrine once used to justify segregation. “And since there are schools with people of only one race, and it’s all separated, it cannot be equal.”

Across New York City, adults have debated how to spur integration in the country’s largest school system — and one of the most segregated. According to one recent analysis, the city’s most selective high schools enroll 84 percent white and Asian students, even though those groups make up only 30 percent of the city’s student enrollment.

Read more about school segregation in New York by Christina Veiga at Chalkbeat