Racial and ethnic diversity in education have had a positive impact on students, according to the results of a new study performed at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School.
The study results, released yesterday in Cambridge, are from the first of seven studies done by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project in urban schools across the country. The whole study to look at student opinions in relation to diversity in schools.
“This is a study that showed overwhelmingly positive effects,” said Gary Orfield, Co-director of the Civil Rights Project and a professor of Education and Social Policy at Harvard University. “This study goes beyond math and reading scores; it looks at the judgment of what the actual students think of their experiences.”
The Project chose CRLHS for its high diversity and urban setting; the school is 31 percent Caucasian, 18 percent African-American, 10 percent Latino and 4 percent Asian-American.
“This program has recognized the true richness of what we have here,” said Cambridge Mayor Michael Sullivan.
The study, conducted last year, focused on CRLHS’s 379 twelfth grade students and surveyed their experiences by means of a Diversity Assessment Questionnaire. The DAQ surveyed 70 items in several areas including student learning and peer interaction, democracy and citizenship and goals, opportunities and access to higher education.
“Cambridge has done better than all the other schools surveyed,” Orfield said. “There are some very important models here. Cambridge’s decision to reach issues of economic as well as racial segregation is very good.”
The positive results of this study are released at a time when, according to Orfield, several schools, including Boston Public Schools, are “re-segregating” due to conservative judicial movements that curb programs attempting to increase diversity.
Cambridge is one of few city schools in the Boston area that rejected the inclination toward re-segregation, according to Orfield.
“We really know that diversity is good and positive, we know that it is the best starting point for learning,” said CRLHS interim Principal Leonard Solo. “When Jesse Jackson came to speak here a couple months ago he looked out at the audience and said that this school is Martin Luther King’s dream come true.”
“It is very important on the student level that all this is going on,” said CRLHS junior Emma Lang. “The students really believe in these numbers.”
Alice Wolf (D-Middlesex) and former mayor of Cambridge, agreed with Lang.
“We have been a model around the country for this kind of activity,” he said. “We have it from the students that this diversity is very important in their lives.”
Although CRLHS ranks highly in areas such as teacher support and comfort among people of other races, the results of the study were not perfect for the school. According to the study, CRLHS came up short in the percentage of minorities registered in more demanding classes such as Advanced Placement math and English.
“We have a lot more to do,” Wolf said. “This news is good today but it might not be good tomorrow so we’re going to work hard to keep it good. I hope that this is a harbinger for the future of all our schools.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
