Dutch turn to U.S. for lesson in desegregation

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands — With immigration rapidly changing the face of Dutch society, some leaders are looking to confront rising racial and class divisions through solutions rooted in the American civil-rights movement.

In Amsterdam's diverse Oud West neighborhood, where roughly a third of students come from households where neither parent has the equivalent of an American high-school diploma, a pilot project is being floated to integrate increasingly segregated schools based on a model used in cities such as Boston, Seattle and Little Rock, Ark.

According to the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 19 percent of residents in the Netherlands were born abroad or had at least one parent born abroad, and 6 percent of the population is Muslim.

Nearly a third of residents in the country's four largest cities — Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague — are from non-Western ethnic groups.

There are large immigrant communities from former Dutch colonies of Suriname, Indonesia and the Dutch Antilles, and significant populations of Moroccans and Turks.

As these communities grow, they're becoming increasingly isolated from native Dutch residents. "Segregation is a big issue here, and it is getting worse," says Petra Coffeng, an education policymaker with the city of Amsterdam who supports school integration. A 2007 study by the Open Society Institute characterized 10 percent of neighborhoods in the four major cities as "concentration neighborhoods" disproportionately made up of minority populations. Oud West and its 3,200 children ages 12 and younger were a prime target for the pilot project. Opulent homes run along the neighborhood's southern border, the Vondelpark — Amsterdam's version of New York's Central Park — with poorer immigrant communities to the north and west. Three of Oud West's six primary schools are considered "concentrated schools."

Petra Toor, co-director at Het Winterkonikje, a Montessori school with 400 students ages 4 to 12, says that until recently the school served pupils from more than 50 nationalities. But in the past five years, that's changed. "From a well-mixed school, we are becoming a white school with more than 80 percent highly educated parents," she says.

The project targets such primary schools with an eye to implementing the "controlled-choice" model for integration developed by Michael Alves and Harvard professor Charles Willie, a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr. at Morehouse College. "We were convinced philosophically that diversity is a benefit in education," says Willie. "Without equity, excellence does not do you very much good. They complement each other."

In the controlled-choice setup, parents visit schools and rank their top four. The system then tries to give parents their preferences while balancing demographics such as race, class and parental education level in all the schools. Sometimes it factors in variables such as gender and proximity, and whether a potential student has siblings in the school.

Critics of controlled choice say it pushes middle- and upper-class students out of the targeted schools, further detracting from the overall quality of education. Another concern is whether the model is transferable from the American to the Dutch education system.