Balancing Act explores the racial imbalance of schools and neighborhoods across the nation, finding that the racial composition of schools often reflects the surrounding neighborhoods. It suggests that racially concentrated schools are the result of residential segregation and how school district boundaries are drawn to separate populations. The authors also posit that charter schools, which are freed from the constraints of traditional boundaries, can interrupt the school-housing relationship. Yet the report finds that charter schools are, on average, more racially imbalanced than other public schools. The report deserves credit for tackling the complicated relationship between school and housing segregation, and for bringing renewed attention to issues that are often considered separately. Still, a shaky grounding in the research and law, and in the methods that inform school desegregation, limits the report’s usefulness when it comes to policy and practice. Moreover, crucial methodological decisions, like how neighborhoods are defined or why metro areas are treated the same as rural ones, either are not fully explained or lack a research-based rationale. This weakness undermines the utility of the newly created database—which the authors view as a vital contribution of the report. In short, Balancing Act represents a missed opportunity to accurately explore the nexus between school and housing segregation.

The Integration Anomaly explores a “puzzling divergence” between changes in metropolitan residential and school segregation. Based on a review of existing literature, it argues that the best way to address rising school segregation is to decouple school assignment from neighborhoods through universal school choice. The report concludes with suggestions for how to structure school choice to achieve integration. On the surface, the report provides clear-cut, useful recommendations for addressing persistent school segregation. Yet the analysis of the empirical relationship between school and residential segregation relies on flawed methodological decisions concerning how to define segregation and divergent trends over time. Those problematic definitions, in turn, yield biased results and prompt the reader to incorrectly assume that housing integration policies will have little bearing on school segregation. Moreover, the report’s review of the literature on school choice is haphazard and incomplete, drawing conclusions beyond what the research supports. Perhaps most importantly, The Integration Anomaly ignores a growing body of literature finding that the very type of unregulated school choice it proposes has, in many instances, exacerbated racial segregation. The report presents arguments and solutions largely driven by ideology, not evidence, offering little value for policymakers or educators meaningfully engaged in the critical search for strategies to reduce school segregation.

A response from report author Benjamin Scafidi, and a further response from review authors Genevieve Siegel-Hawley and Erica Frankenberg follow.