Research suggests that diverse learning environments benefit all students and can improve student achievement, serve as engines of social and economic mobility, and promote school improvement, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote to Congress. But what if even the most promising evidence-based solutions to segregation in schools and universities become political lightning rods?
At the turn of the century, North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System rolled out a radical new model of integration: ignore race, emphasize class. By limiting the proportion of poor and below-grade-level students at each school, Wake County sought to end the cycle of neighborhood-based segregation without the legal fallout of race-based busing. The outcome? After a 2021 study by the University of North Carolina, students who had been repositioned under this policy saw small rises in math achievement and were suspended less often, without any sign of damage. More to the point: most parents stuck with their new assignments, even if they had the option to switch out.
But that’s where the tale turns. Despite national praise The New York Times called it “the next kind of integration” conservative pushback in 2010 led the Wake County school board to drop the income-based plan. The new model prioritized neighborhood schools and magnet programs, soothing some parents’ anxieties but, as local reporting revealed, leaving others perplexed by the ferocity of the opposition. The answer, as it turns out, is less about logistics and more about ideology.
Flash-forward to 2025, and the same ideological struggle is waged on a national front. America First Legal, a right-wing organization started by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, recently submitted a complaint to the Department of Justice against Johns Hopkins University’s new tuition policy. Thanks to the gift of $1 billion from Bloomberg, Hopkins now charges full tuition to families making under $300,000 and room and board to families earning under $175,000. Almost two out of three medical students are eligible. But America First Legal decries the program as a backdoor racial preference scheme, contending, “It is well recognized that race and ethnicity are inseparable from socioeconomic status. They are ‘intimately intertwined’ and, in terms of stratification, often determine a person’s socioeconomic status.”(original complaint)
It ain’t no shootout at the local saloon. Race-based affirmative action is on the bench for most universities in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC (the Court ruled that race-based schemes represent a denial of the Equal Protection Clause). The majority ruling, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, demanded, “The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.” The ruling did leave a thin reed of hope for race-neutral alternatives such as class-based affirmative action, holistic review, and more outreach to low-income students.
So do these class-based approaches work? The research is clear: Socioeconomic-based policies may advance diversity, but nowhere near as boldly as race-based affirmative action. Take California and Michigan, for instance: Scholarship there reveals that class-based and holistic admissions boost representation for some underrepresented students, but not close racial gaps particularly for Black and Native American students completely. Despite that, though, they provide a realist way forward, particularly within the context of increasingly race-suspicious legal culture.
Wake County’s tale, then, is something other than a regional pilot project a case study, as it happens, of the potential and political risk of class-based integration. The evidence records modest but genuine academic improvement, fewer suspensions, and no negative spillovers whatsoever (rerouted students scored better on state tests and fewer suspensions). But as resistance to both K-12 and higher-ed class-based diversity initiatives makes clear, the battle over who is offered an equal chance is as much political as it is policy-centric.
For teachers, parents, and policy experts tracking these debates, this is one thing that is sure: the search for fair schools and colleges is only starting, and the answers no matter how rigorously documented will require more than great data to withstand the politcal storms.
