Students Say Diversity Improves Education

Students at Cambridge’s public high school say they interact with students of many different ethnic and racial backgrounds and feel this diversity holds educational benefits, according to a report released yesterday by the Harvard Law School’s Civil Rights Project.

The report shows “overwhelmingly positive effects” of diversity that are often ignored in current discussions on education policy, said the report’s chief author, Gary A. Orfield, professor of education and social policy at Harvard and parent of a Cambridge Public School graduate.

“Most discussion on education is on math and reading scores. We didn’t create public schools for math and reading scores,” Orfield said. “Our study goes beyond math and reading scores. It is about life, about community, and about experiences.”

The report on the Cambridge Ridge and Latin School (CRLS) was the first to be released in an ongoing Civil Rights Project study of racial and ethnic diversity in several school districts across the country.

Nearly all of the CRLS seniors surveyed for the study—95 percent—indicated that they were “comfortable” or “very comfortable” working with students from other groups. And the results were consistent across all racial groups.

Compared to responses from the study’s other school districts, which the authors will not identify until reports on those districts are completed, Cambridge students showed more interaction with and acceptance of people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds.

“Cambridge has done better than almost any of the other cities we looked at,” Orfield said.

But the study found academic “achievement gaps” existed between students of different racial backgrounds—a problem that starts even before high school. Students enter CRLS with unequal levels of academic achievement, the researchers found.

At the report’s unveiling yesterday, researchers and school officials said they consider diversity an important educational priority.

Superintendent of Schools Bobbie J. D’Alessandro said that the study highlighted the importance of a new elementary school choice plan that includes family income as a factor in elementary school assignment.

Students in Cambridge are assigned to elementary schools according to a desegregation plan that lets parents list their top three elementary school choices but enforces a system of racial quotas. Under the new plan passed earlier this month, students will also be assigned on the basis of family income.

According to D’Alessandro, because the Civil Rights Project report shows educational benefits to racial diversity at the high school, the new plan for including income in elementary school choice will increase diversity and improve education at the elementary level.

“At the high school we have all the social and economic classes,” D’Alessandro said. “It would work well in elementary schools.”

But at least one researcher says there is no connection between the report, which studied only racial and ethnic diversity, and the new income-based elementary school plan.

“We were not trying to provide evidence for or against the new plan. It just turned out that in their minds it supported it,” said John Yun, a Civil Rights Project research associate.

—Staff writer Stephanie M. Skier can be reached at skier@fas.harvard.edu.