Initiating, Monitoring, and Sustaining School Integration Projects: Toolkit
This toolkit is a step-by-step guide for initiating, monitoring and sustaining school and district-level integration efforts. [Footnote 1] Developed for NYSED’s New York State Integration Project (NYSIP) in partnership with the Center for Public Research & Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia University, this toolkit is organized around the elements of CPRL’s Leading Through Learning framework, a cornerstone of CPRL’s approach to supporting equitable educational outcomes. Since 2018, NYSED and its partners have supported NYSIP, a program to help school districts create more diverse schools as a mechanism for increasing student achievement in Title I schools. Through the NYSIP grant, District leaders and their partners have been working to create more diverse schools based on race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, learning ability, English language learner status, and other student identities relevant to districts’ local contexts (e.g., immigrant status or experiences with temporary housing or homelessness). Efforts to create more inclusive and culturally-responsive schools rely heavily on NYSED’s Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework.[Footnote 2] While the toolkit is focused on NYSED’s integration efforts through its NYSIP grant, leaders can use the toolkit when implementing any school or district initiative. The toolkit also contains three case studies of districts that participated in NYSIP.
The toolkit can be used to guide both integration strategies (also known as composition strategies) and strategies for the development of culturally-responsive and sustaining (CR-S) education environments. You can find resources on integrative composition strategies here and resources on CR-S here.
[1] Integration refers to initiatives aimed at diversifying and supporting student populations based on subgroups such as race/ethnicity, economically (dis)advantaged, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners.
[2] New York State Education Department (NYSED). (2020). NYSED’s Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework. Retrieved from: Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework
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