School practices and climates that promote integration

An analysis of 18 reviews reveals six school practices associated with effective racial (and ethnic) integration: racial mixing and fairness, staff models and support, security, and multicultural exposure. In the present study, integration and educational outcome measures were regressed on measures of student perceptions of the six school practices, 13 aspects of school climate, and 16 control variables including sex, ethnicity, family intactness and socioeconomic status, and amounts of prior and present interracial experience in a sample of 1484 juniors randomly selected from desegregated high schools in three northeastern states. Partial correlations reveal many significant, small-to-moderate controlled associations of practices and climate with integration and education outcomes; school practices are moderately associated with integration attitudes and behavior when controlled for student characteristics and interracial experience.