October 8, 2009

Neighborhood Schools or Diverse Schools?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 9:41AM

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Debates about integration and diversity in American schools have evolved a great deal since the early 1950s when it was still legal to segregate schools by race. In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, school districts instituted a variety of measures to integrate schools racially like forced busing across towns, the creation of magnet schools to draw children voluntarily into different schools and redrawn district lines.

As close observers of the interplay between race and public education know, the trends towards increased diversity and integration of American public schools came to a halt in the 1980s, and school segregation is again on the rise. This time, of course, segregation is not by law but rather by dint of the fact that white families have tended to move away from city environments, leaving behind high concentrations of minorities.

Just two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down efforts by two cities, Seattle and Louisville, to stem the rising tide of segregation in their school districts by taking race into consideration in assigning children to schools.

Which brings us to today, where election results in Wake County, North Carolina mark yet another slide for proponents of diversity in schools. Ever since 2000, Wake County Schools have been a bell-weather district for the use of socioeconomic status instead of race in assigning children to school. The wealth-based school assignment system is aimed at ensuring that low-income students have access to the same kinds of schools and school resources as their wealthier counterparts by actually placing them in those schools.

Has it worked? A recent report (PDF) produced by SAS, a leading research company engaged in value-added analysis of school achievement data, seems to indicate that it hasn't. The report found that the higher the concentration of low-income students in a Wake County school, the poorer the school performed in terms of assisting students in making academic progress.

And the report, for better or worse, was a driving force in Tuesday's school board election results, which witnessed the election of four anti-socioeconomic assignment candidates to the board, with one candidate declaring, "forced busing is dead." With a majority of seats now in hand, the opponents of Wake's current diversity plan will push instead to return children to their neighborhood schools, without regard for the socioeconomic makeup of the student body.

So that brings us to the ultimate question: If you were designing a school district from scratch, knowing the reality in virtually all large population centers today that affluent, white citizens tend to concentrate in certain areas leaving poorer minority populations to concentrate in others, how would you assign kids to schools?

Would you emphasize the value of neighborhood, and send children to the schools nearest their homes -- even if it means traditionally voiceless families and families with less access to the political process will find their children clustered together?

Or would you prefer the alternative, forcing children to get on buses that send them across town (or across the county)? And what if it turns out, as the SAS report indicates, that the busing doesn't necessarily help low-income students after all?

It's a thorny question, and no doubt one that will continue to raise blood pressures in Wake County and elsewhere. But for now, the people of Wake County appear to have spoken: neighborhood schools have triumphed over school assignments that attempt to further socioeconomic diversity.