Guiding Ideas

Our work is premised on a number of straightforward ideas. First off, 'separate but equal' has always tended to fail in practice while forty years of international research has continuously demonstrated that all youth tend to do better when they have access to schools dominated by peers from middle (or upper) class families. The data also illustrate that academic achievement is more directly related to the economic mix in a school than it is to the racial or ethnic mix. High achieving peers share knowledge, perceptions and aspirations informally with classmates all day long. Language development can serve as an example that demonstrates this point. Middle class students of all ethnicities come to school with twice the vocabulary of lower income children. So any given child, privileged or poor, 'white' or 'of color', is more likely to expand her vocabulary through informal interaction if she is granted sustained access to a middle class school.

At present, many youth in the Netherlands and around the world attend schools of the poor. As advocates of genuine public school choice, we believe that no youth growing up in a wealthy country like the Netherlands should be forced to attend schools dominated by children from poor families. All parents should, therefore, have the option of choosing a school with the type of social compositions that middle class parents tend to choose for their own youth.

Generating universal access to middle class schools is from this perspective a matter of simple fairness. A massive and growing body of evidence suggests that schools with 70% middle class students can successfully absorb 30% low-income students. In cases where such healthy socio-economic mixes have been achieved, it appears that the outcomes of students of non-poor families do not necessarily decline significantly (and in some cases actually go up) while the outcomes of students from poor families do significantly improve.

Add to this some common sense thinking about informal socialization processes, such as those that relate feeling part of the mainstream of a given society, and it becomes clear why we think that economic school integration based on authentic public school choice may represent a good way to reverse trends towards segregation, inequality, and instability in wealthy countries.