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Making Public Schools Fairer

By Matt Zeitlin - Jul 31st, 2008 at 9:10 am

One of the more stark–and depressing–facts about American public schools is that schools where more than 40 percent of the students come from low-income families are almost universally low quality and produce sub-standard results. This one variable, more than racial composition, teacher union rules, or anything else, does the most to determine school quality. The one encouraging aspect of this relationship is that once you can get the percentage of low-income students below 40, achievement will go up–for everyone.

Emily Bazelon has a fantastic Times Magazine article that looks at Raleigh, North Carolina, where the Wake County school district has enacted a plan capping the percentage of impoverished students at a given school at 40. Although this seems like a Herculean task, it was actually pretty simply for Wake. The county is fairly socioeconomically diverse and large, and so it could simply mandate that students be assigned based on the geographic region in which they live so that every school falls below the 40 percent cap. The plan, which will surely be imitated after the Supreme Court’s ruling that explicitly race-based integration criteria are unconstitutional, has generally been acknowledged to be a success. Not only is achievement going up, but it’s going up for all students.

But the problem, nationally, isn’t knowing what works, but how to implement these policies.

After all, school districts are oftentimes drawn up so as to ghettoize poor people. So one gets a situation where major urban areas are made up of poor people and the wealthy who can afford to send their kids to private schools. The middle-class parents flee to the suburbs for better schools. And once poverty becomes entrenched on a large scale in a major city, parents become more and more wary of sending their kids to a school that’s teetering on the edge. This, of course, creates a vicious cycle whereby more and more affluent parents ditch the local school district, making its quality fall even more. Then every parent who can ditches the district, thus turning their local public schools into ghettos of poverty and under-achievement. And when you consider that Detriot, DC, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia all have school districts with low-income students concentrations higher than 60 percent, it makes Wake County-style integration programs look incredibly difficult.

The challenge lies in making urban schools more attractive to suburban parents who would otherwise send their kids to local public schools, or urban parents who would either move to the suburbs or put their kids in private schools. Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation sounds a hopeful note and points out that St. Louis and Hartford both have programs that allow urban children to go to good suburban schools, and that Hartford also has set up urban magnet schools that attract suburban kids. Also, if the federal government got behind those types of programs in a big way, we could see some real results, despite the entrenchment of poverty in inner city school districts.

So although Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum are right to be cautious about the scalability of class-based integration within school districts, there are still a wide range of things that can be done so that we get closer to achieving the goal of good public schools for everyone.

Tags: education, high school, inequality, race