Shaker Heights Offers a Lesson in the Limits of Integration

The failure of the suburb's efforts to achieve education equity has more to do with class differences than racial ones.

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The school system in Shaker Heights, Ohio, has long been integrated, but—as a recent book details—Black students still achieve at levels far below their white peers. To understand why, it’s important to untangle the factors of race and class.

In Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity, Laura Meckler, a national education reporter for the Washington Post, has written an engaging, nuanced account of race relations in the Cleveland suburb where she grew up, with a particular focus on education. What emerges is a portrait of a place that has earnestly and repeatedly striven for equity—but, for reasons that remain unclear in the book, hasn’t achieved it.

Although Shaker began as a wealthy white enclave in the early twentieth century, Black families began moving in during the 1950s. By 1964, the high school student body was 7% Black. But, Meckler notes, “as Shaker schools grew more diverse, the district developed and expanded its system of sorting children into academic buckets called levels.” As time went on, Black students were increasingly funneled into lower levels, or tracks, and white students into higher ones.

In 1970, the community endorsed voluntary two-way busing at the elementary level, a move that an expert quoted by Meckler calls “incredibly rare.” In the late 1980s, school boundaries were redrawn to achieve racial balance. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, with the student population about equally divided between Blacks and whites, Black students constituted only 7% of the students in the top 20% of the class and 90% of the bottom 20%.

Some 20 years later, with no meaningful progress, the goal in Shaker—as in many other places—had become “equity.” Critics pointed to systemic racism, called for an increase in teachers of color, and lobbied for culturally responsive teaching. Black parents seemed less interested in integration than neighborhood schools and higher levels of achievement for their children.

In 2020—in the midst of the pandemic—a new superintendent ended the longstanding system of tracking, beginning in fifth grade. By many accounts, including that of some Black community members, the move was not a success. Parents and teachers feared that the need to accommodate students who were less prepared was lowering standards. All students were supposed to be taught at the “honors” level in high school, but literature was now read aloud in class instead of being done as homework, and teachers were advised to assign less writing because some students struggled to produce it.

Race And Socioeconomic Status

Like many accounts—and like most news reports based on data from standardized tests—Meckler frames education inequity primarily as a racial issue. The subtitle of the book, for example, refers to “the quest for racial equity.” But her thorough reporting reveals a strong undercurrent of socioeconomic tension, which she fully acknowledges. Anyone interested in our lack of progress in achieving educational equity—and especially anyone who believes racial integration holds the answer—would do well to read her fascinating book.

The first Black families to integrate Shaker were solidly middle class and often highly educated. But over the years, due to a variety of factors, the Black population became predominantly low-income. That shift alarmed not just affluent white parents but also Black ones. “If I live next door to a high school dropout,” said one of Shaker’s Black pioneers, a dentist, “his experiences after dropping out are far different than mine, and can I have great hope that his aspirations for his children are the same as mine? No, I can’t have any great hope.”

Affluent Black families began migrating to private schools, partly because—according to one Black father—they feared their kids would be “lumped in with lower-income Black kids.” Others moved from Shaker to suburbs that were newly open to Black residents. The result was that eventually almost all Black students in Shaker’s schools were low-income, and almost all low-income students were Black, blurring the lines between race and class. As Meckler notes, Shaker’s challenges are now “driven by economics as much as by race, as well as by the complex intersection of the two.”

But despite the complexity, it’s important to try to identify which factor is primarily responsible for the academic struggles many students experience. The way we define a problem determines how we try to solve it. If we see the root of the problem as racial, we’re likely to blame racism. If we see it as the result of income differences, we’ll blame poverty. Both racism and poverty are undoubtedly powerful forces, but there are limits to what schools can do to eradicate them—and society as a whole has been trying to eradicate them, without much success, for a long time.

If we focus on another significant factor that often overlaps with race and classs—level of parental education—it becomes clearer what schools to promote equity even as they fight racism and poverty: they can systematically provide the knowledge and skills that children of more highly educated parents are likely to acquire at home. And even some of those children need more explicit instruction than that typically provided in American schools.

Sixth Graders Who Can’t Write A Sentence

There’s a telling quote towards the beginning of Meckler’s book, when the adoptive white mother of four biracial or Black children—one of whom was Meckler’s first best friend—explains why she pulled some of her kids out of Shaker’s schools to send them to Catholic school. “At the end of sixth grade,” she tells Meckler, “I had three daughters who could not write a simple sentence. The Shaker schools were wonderful,” she adds, “for a motivated kid like you.”

Meckler wonders why Shaker schools couldn’t help her friend succeed even if she was less academically motivated. It would also be interesting to know what the Catholic school was doing that Shaker wasn’t.

Most likely, the school was providing far more explicit instruction, not just in writing but across the board. And it may well have been offering greater and more systematic exposure to academic knowledge and vocabulary. The standard approach in the U.S., which has been resisted by Catholic schools and a handful of others, has been to put children in charge of their own education as much as possible and to focus on supposed skills like “making inferences” or “thinking critically” over systematically building their knowledge.

But that approach conflicts with what the evidence tells us about how children learn, including the finding that those kinds of skills can’t really be acquired or applied in the absence of knowledge. It’s particularly ineffective for students from less highly educated families, regardless of the color of their skin, which in our society are also likely to be lower-income. That helps explain not only disparities in educational achievement but also in motivation. If school isn’t providing you with what you need to meet its academic expectations, it’s natural to lose your motivation.

In Shaker, it seems the teaching methods that left Meckler’s friend unable to write a simple sentence decades ago are still in place. In 2021, Meckler observes a fourth grade classroom where—thanks to recent reforms—the white kids no longer get pulled out for “enrichment.” Instead, literacy specialists work in the classroom with kids who need extra help. The assignment is to write a research paper, but one boy—working with a specialist—struggles to compose a sentence.

If Shaker and other school systems are serious about achieving equity, they need to first abolish a tracking system that begins in kindergarten, under the widely accepted practice of “leveled reading,” and adopt a curriculum that gives all children access to “enrichment.”

That doesn’t mean expecting all students to magically understand how to write research papers or do honors-level work. It means laying the groundwork for those things by giving children access to the sophisticated vocabulary and syntax of written language, initially through read-alouds and discussion, while systematically building their knowledge of the world. Kids at all grade levels also need explicit instruction in writing, beginning at the sentence level.

That kind of shift won’t entirely eliminate educational inequities, but—as evidence is beginning to tell us—it can go a long way to unlock the potential of all students without lowering academic rigor. And while schools should do all they can to do diversify their faculty and ensure their curricula are culturally responsive, if they don’t also fundamentally change their instructional approach, they may find—as Shaker has—that their other efforts only result in failure.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com in a somewhat different form.