Class of Diversity Gets Diplomas

"If you're going to have a discussion about slavery with just African American students, it's going to be a different discussion than if you have it with African Americans and Hispanics and whites and Asians," she said. "They bring different viewpoints."

Then again, Sneed points out, a school can be diverse without having many white students, and officials say that even among whites there can be a broad range of children who are mixed-race, for example, or from immigrant families.

Evidence on whether the racial makeup of a school affects a student's academic achievement is scant, and much of what does exist is fairly inconclusive.

A study by Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, analyzed the test scores of every Texas fourth- through seventh-grader in the late 1990s. Factoring out school quality and family income, Hanushek found that the greater the black population of a school, the more it harms a black student's scores -- particularly a higher-achieving black student.

The study, however, found no effects of school composition on the performance of students from other racial or ethnic groups.

Weast said that whether a school is racially proportionate to the county doesn't matter academically. "I think the biggest divider isn't race, it's socioeconomics," he said, and along those lines he and county officials have pumped extra money into the county's poorest schools -- which, in general, tend to have higher minority populations.

Michael Durso, principal of Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, which like Kennedy has gone from half to one-fifth white, said students are students. Looking at a school's racial and ethnic composition doesn't tell much of story -- least of all to its students, he said.

"It's probably a concern much more to adults than to students," Durso said. "I've never had a student say to me, 'What's the percentage of Hispanic students?' "