To the Editor:

David L. Kirp (“Making Schools Work,” Sunday Review, May 20) is right that school integration has done more to improve the life chances of poor and minority children than other known interventions. He is wrong to suggest that there’s no longer any way to achieve integration and to pit it against recent school reforms that also improve life chances.

A cornerstone of the new reforms is to replace failing schools with higher performing ones. If the new schools are integrated, as a number of civil rights and new-school groups have recently proposed, we can get the best of both worlds.

JAMES S. LIEBMAN

New York, May 21, 2012

The writer, a professor at Columbia Law School, is a former chief accountability officer for the New York City Department of Education.





To the Editor:

David L. Kirp addresses the one sure-fire policy to reduce the racial achievement gap: school integration.