This is the latest roundup in our “Best Of” series,
spotlighting top highlights from this year’s coverage as
well as the most popular articles we’ve published each
month. See more of the standouts from across 2018
right here . (You can get all the latest features, essays,
and videos delivered straight to your inbox by signing up
for The 74 Newsletter)
2018 was a year that kept us on our toes. From
teacher strikes to student walkouts, Supreme Court
stunners, school shootings, and the midterms, it’s
been a nonstop churn of breaking news. And none of
that even touches upon the enterprise features and
investigations that have proven to be most popular
and evocative with subscribers.
So we thought we’d take a moment, before careening
into a new Congress and the next news cycle, to try to
draw a frame around the year that was. These were
our 18 most popular, most widely shared, and more
influential articles and videos from 2018 (you can also
check out our top 17 articles from 2017):
San Antonio, 78207: In America’s Most Segregated City,
a Radical School Integration Experiment Designed
Around Poverty, Trauma, and Parental Choice Is
Working
Integration: Over several months this past spring,
national correspondent Beth Hawkins tracked the
groundbreaking integration efforts of the 78207, the
zip code located on the west side of San Antonio,
Texas. It is the poorest neighborhood in America’s
most economically segregated city: 91 percent of
students in the San Antonio Independent School
District are Latino, 6 percent are black, and 93 percent
qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. As Beth
reports, into this divided landscape three years ago
came a new schools chief, Pedro Martinez, with a
mandate to break down the centuries-old economic
isolation that has its heart in the 78207. In response,
Martinez launched one of America’s most innovative
and data-informed school integration experiments.
He started with a novel approach that yielded eye-
popping information: Using family income data, he
created a map showing the depth of poverty on each
city block and in every school in the district — a color-
coded street guide comprising granular details
unheard of in education. And then he started
integrating schools, not by race, but by income,
factoring in a spectrum of additional elements, such
as parents’ education levels and homelessness. To
achieve the kind of integration he was looking for, he
would first have to better understand the gradations
of poverty in every one of his schools and what kinds
of supports those student populations require, and
then find a way to woo affluent families from other
parts of the city to disrupt these concentrations of
unmet need. Martinez’s strategy: Open new “schools
of choice” with sought-after curricular models, like
Montessori and dual language, and set aside a share
of seats for students from more prosperous
neighboring school districts, who would then sit next
to a mix of students from San Antonio ISD. Read
Beth’s immersive profile of the San Antonio
experiment.