Expanding Educational Opportunity Through School and Housing Choice

Many Twin Cities schools are segregated. Segregated schools harm children, communities, and the metropolitan region. Segregated schools intensify the region’s segregated residential patterns, concentrating poverty and magnifying its harms. This isolates the most disadvantaged children from educational and economic opportunity. To help integrate schools, and ensure equal access to opportunity, affordable housing should not be concentrated in racially or economically segregated areas, and decisions to site units should be coordinated with an expanded school choice program so opportunities are available for families to live near their children’s schools in places where job opportunities also are more abundant. In addition to describing the harms of growing regional economic and racial segregation in the Twin Cities region, this article encourages integration through expanded school and house choice. The research on which this article is based was supported in part by the senior author’s appointment as the 2005–2006 Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota.