From All Walks of Life: New Hope for School Integration is a powerful article on school integration and diversity by Richard Kahlenberg. If you are interested in Inclusion, then I think you'll find this enlightening.

Here are a few highlights:

1. Racial integration is a very important aim, but if one's goal is boosting academic achievement what really matters is economic integration.
2. Finland - often held out as an education success story - had the lowest degree of socioeconomic segregation of 57 countries participating in PISA.
3. The only educational intervention known to have a greater return on investment than socioeconomic integration is very high-quality early childhood education.
4. The KIPP model, which relies heavily on self-selection and attrition, reinforces the idea that the peer environment may matter a great deal.
5. Many families now believe - as do virtually all leading colleges and universities - racial, ethnic, and income diversity enriches the classroom.
6. In high poverty- schools, a child is surrounded by classmates who are more likely to act out, more likely to move during the school year, and less likely to have large vocabularies.
7. The major problem with American schools is not teachers or their unions, but poverty and economic segregation.