At a basketball game this spring, the opponents of the T.C. Williams High School where I teach let loose with a unique cheer: “Se-gre-ga-ted, Se-gre-ga-ted,” they chanted as they pointed in unison to our cheering section across the court. What brought on the chant was the fact that about 200 white T.C. students dressed in white T-shirts were packed together to one side of the stands and the black students to the other.

That was not exactly the image a school that prides itself on its diversity wants to project. (T.C. Williams, in Alexandria, Va., is 43% black, 25% Hispanic, 24% white and 7% Asian Pacific Islander.)

Remember the Titans, the hit movie in 2000 starring Denzel Washington as the black head coach, was based on the true story of how our racially divided football squad eventually came together as a team and won the state championship in 1971, and at the same time helped to integrate our student body.

But the scene at the basketball game, and others like it, raise a troubling question: What does integration mean for a school, or any other institution, if the diverse racial and ethnic groups it brings together under its roof self-segregate whenever they get the chance?

My answer is that just bringing students from diverse backgrounds together in the same school provides them invaluable lessons that they will carry long after they have left school. What graduates of T.C. tell me is that going there made them comfortable with “other” kids. White kids do not fear blacks the way graduates of all-white schools might, and black kids realize that white kids can’t be stereotyped as a bunch of snotty, rich preppies.

At a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is considering the legality of integration plans in Louisville and Seattle, and other states are considering whether desegregation programs are still necessary, the benefits of diverse schools cannot be overlooked.

Echoing our society

Idealistic educators who bemoan the self-segregation that students fall into should ask themselves this: How many weekend social events that they attend — including church — have a good mix of individuals from different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds?

The likely answer in most cases: Not a single one.

T.C. senior Shep Walker, who is white, says it doesn’t matter that blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians don’t all hang out with each other during lunchtime or on the weekends — or sit together at basketball games, for that matter.

“I can’t think of any place where kids or adults from totally different backgrounds socialize (together) on a regular basis,” says Walker. “Still, at school there are instances of daily interaction among kids from amazingly different backgrounds. It’s another facet of my education — getting to know people I would not normally be around. … I would never have gotten that education had I stayed in private school.”

Senior Jamel Frazier, a linebacker on our football team and one of four black males in my AP English class, says, “I may not hang out with white guys on the weekends, but when I see them in the store or at a restaurant there is a connection from being in classes together or playing sports.”

As exaggerated as Remember the Titans was, it did strike the right chord about diversity. No matter what their backgrounds, kids in high school, not unlike adults in the workplace, create bonds of respect and friendship by working together toward a common goal.

A ‘black girl’ sport

When Liz Johnson, a recent graduate of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, was at T.C., she starred in two “white girl” sports — field hockey and soccer. But Johnson, who is white, says her greatest experience at our school was playing basketball — a “black girl” sport.

“It wasn’t like being with all the white girls I grew up playing soccer with,” Johnson says. “It was the first time I had to work to be accepted, but once I was, there was a natural growth of friendship, not some phony ‘I’m going to find a black friend’ thing.”

Johnson learned some things as a teammate of black girls that she could never have known otherwise. “I was exposed to the covert racism the black players always faced,” she says. “When we went to play white schools, everyone was afraid of us because we had so many blacks on the team. It was the ‘I’m not a racist, it’s just that these girls are dangerous’ kind of attitude.” This understanding of what her black teammates routinely encountered made her feel especially close to them.

Letichia Epps, who is black, had an experience similar to Johnson’s when she tried out for the crew (rowing team), the ultimate white sport at T.C. “At first it was difficult. I played basketball and had always hung around black girls,” says Epps, a senior. “At first I didn’t feel accepted, but once the white girls saw how strong I was (and that) that could make a big difference in their boat, we became so close I hardly noticed color anymore.”

Students are not the only ones to gain from being in a diverse school. Over the years, teaching immigrant kids — many of them on refugee status from Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Cambodia and other trouble spots — has given me an understanding of the world that I could never have gotten from even the best news reports from those countries.

I have had Central American students in class whom many white adults would see as stereotypical gangbangers, when in fact they had family values that would shame most Americans. Some worked eight hours a day after school and sent their earnings back to relatives in their home countries. I have witnessed black students born with a load of social disadvantages excel academically and end up in Ivy League colleges.

But the more diverse a school is, the more challenges it will face. Schools in predominantly middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, whose property values freeze out the poor, generally have fewer serious discipline problems than ones with a large number of low-income kids. Furthermore, due to the national obsession with test scores, diverse schools are pressured to focus on low-income kids, whose test scores are most likely to give those schools a bad reputation, while paying less attention to middle-class students who often breeze through the tests. The more diverse schools are often more concerned with the racial and ethnic composition of classrooms than with the academic needs of students.

Despite those challenges, the value of attending a diverse school is enormous. For minority kids, learning to feel at ease with whites is more than a matter of enrichment. It can be essential to their success or failure in life. America is still a white-dominated society, and the way up eventually leads out into the white world. For whites, the experience has its own special value.

A ‘richer’ life

“My life is so much richer through all the black friends I made playing football at T.C.,” says Mike Sharkey, a graduate of Georgetown University’s medical school who is now a surgeon. “If I hadn’t gotten to know those guys, I would be so ignorant about people, about American society, about life in general. I know I am a better physician because of all the different types of people I got to know in high school. Kids who don’t get that kind of experience are really missing something.”

High school, unfortunately, is the best and often last chance for young people from diverse backgrounds to get to know and understand each other. In college, racial and ethnic groups often stick to themselves. And however much colleges brag about their diversity, on the whole, they can’t touch the economic diversity of high schools such as T.C. Williams.

As Shep Walker said, diversity cannot be forced. But when it is present, kids who embrace it receive an education no amount of money can buy.

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Patrick Welsh is an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., and a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors.