Introductory overview followed by presentation of 3 community approaches.

Community A: Focus on Academics and Not Diversity
This community believes that schools should concentrate on academics, and views focusing on diversity as a distraction. It believes:

• students can learn just as well in a diverse class or with others that share their background.
  
• any school can succeed, including those whose students are largely lower income or minority
• it's wrong to use the lack of diversity as an excuse for poor student performance
  
• Therefore, community A is focusing on creating smaller classes, hiring better teachers and raising academic expectations.

Community B: Pursue Diversity Through School Policies
This community feels integration and diversity are too important to ignore, and is pursuing both academically successful and socially diverse schools.

• Community B is creating integrated magnet and charter schools, linking students from different schools through the Internet, field trips and class projects, and recruiting teachers from diverse backgrounds.
• It may also spread students around the district to make sure schools have children of different backgrounds.
• Its schools' policies aim to maintain diversity where it currently exists and increase diversity where it does not.

Community C: Pursue Integration and Diversity in the Community, not Through the Schools. This community views segregated schools as a societal problem not a school issue Segregation begins with adults, not with children. Encouraging diversity in the broader community addresses the problem at its roots, and leaves schools free to focus on academics. Community C is:

• working with religious and civic organizations to bring together different groups to ease the fears and misunderstandings that cause segregated neighborhoods in the first place.
• creating housing policies that encourage integrated neighborhoods, such as developing poorer sections of town to attract middle-class homeowners and offering incentives to create low-cost housing in middle-class neighborhoods.