Years after a Landmark Court Decision, Connecticut's Solution to School Segregation Shows Promise: Can It Inform Action in Baltimore? The Abell Report. Volume 26, No.5

As of summer 2012, there are 31 interdistrict magnet schools in the Greater Hartford region of Connecticut, including those at The Learning Corridor (a 14-acre compound with roughly 1,570 students in attendance among an elementary, middle, and two high schools), enrolling about 13,000 students and supported by a mix of state, local, and philanthropic funds. (Four more are scheduled to open this fall.) Another state-funded program, called Open Choice, enrolls about 1,700 students and provides transportation for children who live in Hartford to attend suburban schools. Students who live in Hartford's suburbs can also transfer into Hartford through this program, though only a few dozen have chosen that option in recent years. In the larger national public education context, where entrenched racial and economic segregation is the norm, the purposeful integration effort that has taken root and blossomed here is undoubtedly an outlier. But it is an educational anomaly that may be instructive for other racially and economically stratified regions. Created in response to a 1996 state court ruling, the schools and programs in and around Hartford have not only substantially reduced the share of students of color in high-poverty, segregated schools, but they have also engendered a broad array of innovative educational options that have proven appealing to families of all racial and economic backgrounds and resulted in promising outcomes for the students who take part. How did all this come into being in of all places, Connecticut, one of the nation's wealthiest and most economically unequal states? The story of what emerged in Connecticut--and why--is instructive, not just for Baltimore, but also for the numerous metropolitan areas across the country beset by segregation and educational inequality. This story is presented in this edition of the Abell Report. A second article provides a salute from the Abell Foundation to Emerging Technology Centers (ETC), an initiative of the Baltimore Development Corporation, a nonprofit technology business incubator that works with early-stage Baltimore-based technology entrepreneurs.