Why is education important?

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4 years ago

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.

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