Matt Zeitlin

Erin Dillon has an example of what happens when school boards try to integrate on a socioeconomic basis:

In Fairfax, kids aren’t being transported away from their neighborhood school for integration, but the school board did decide to change attendance boundaries to balance enrollments among schools, and took socioeconomic integration into account in its decision. Many of the parents whose children were assigned to South Lakes High School were not happy. South Lakes is under-enrolled by 700 students and has a newly remodeled facility, but it also has a higher percent of low-income students.

Parents filed a lawsuit to stop the school board, arguing, among other things, that the school board overstepped its bounds in trying to balance socioeconomics among the schools. After losing the lawsuit, parents have been requesting transfers to get their kids into their old assigned schools. Many parents are citing the lack of AP classes at South Lakes as a reason for their transfer requests.

As this situation makes clear, changing attendance boundaries is politically difficult, particularly when it increases socioeconomic integration. But this situation also illustrates why socioeconomic integration may be important – if these parents can raise $125,000 to sue the school board, they probably also have the clout to get more AP classes into South Lakes High School, and that’s the kind of parental involvement that improves the quality of education for all students.

This goes to show the dilemma inheriet in trying to create diverse, integrated schools that can stay below the 40% barrier and provide a good education to all students. It makes perfect sense, as a parent, not to want your kids to be sent to school with a higher proportion of low income students, for the sake of raising their educational achievement. Whatever you think of these parents personally (I’m quite sympathetic), it’s a systemic and consistent response to all integration programs, and one that liberals can not wish away. Carey points out that since these parents care so much about providing their kids a good education, they’re the ideal population for any school. They could be the ones whose personal campaign would bring AP classes and all sorts of resources to a school that used to be underfunded, and more importantly, had parents with neither the resources, time, energy, care or wherewithal to improve their school.

But even that – bringing more resources to the school to attract middle and upper middle class parents – is controversial. It’s not uncommon to hear complaints about tracking and that the white, middle class kids are leaving all the poor, minority students in the dust. Ron Ferguson, a professor at the K School, said in Emily Bazelon’s school integration article that, “poor kids have to be evenly distributed among classrooms and not just grouped together in the lowest tracks.” If that’s really the case, then school integration will never work. You simple can’t expect middle class parents to intentionally degrade their children’s educational options in hope of pursuing social justice. Thankfully, Ferguson doesn’t seem to be entirely right.

Fortunately, the evidence from Wake and Jefferson counties seem to show that simple having economic diversity within a school is enough to raise test scores for everyone. The way out of this dilemma, interstingly enough, may be that for kids with enough social capital and parental involvement, school may not matter that much, in which case, integrating kids by class may not have that negative an effect on the well-off kids:

In Wake County, test scores of middle-class students have risen since instituting income-based integration. Additionally, Kahlenberg points out that middle-class students are generally less influenced by a school’s environment because they tend to learn more at home, and that the achievement of white students has not declined in specific schools that experienced racial (and thus some class) desegregation

…

In a 2006 longitudinal study of an accelerated middle-school math program in Nassau County, N.Y., which grouped students heterogeneously, the authors found that students at all achievement levels, as well as minority and low-income students, were more likely than the students in tracked classes to take advanced math in high school. In addition, the kids who came into the program as math whizzes performed as well as other top-achievers in homogenous classes.

Of course, it’s going to be impossible to tell parents that their kids schooling (as opposed to the simple fact of their upbringing) isn’t particularly relevant to their sucess. One way to square the circle – besides praying that parents would be willing to sacrifice some quality for justice/diversity – is by making the schools in urban areas that have the highest concentration of poor students, more attractive. This means niche or magnet schools that would attract students (and their parents) and get more resources and committed families in the urban public school systems. Dana Goldstein has written about this type of model, which she calls public school choice, quite a bit. And she has well convinced me that this is a huge part of making schools better for low income students.