The Trouble With School Integration

A little while back I was getting very excited about racial and economic integration plans as a way to improve school performance. Evidence suggests that kids do better in integrated schools, and a lot of cities have come up with clever schemes to ensure a reasonable degree of integration. The trouble, as Sara explained to me, is that given the actual patterns of residency in the United States an extremely large proportion of poor and minority students live in places where you couldn't possibly make this work. As Kevin Drum says today "No amount of busing, magnet schools, charter schools, carrots, sticks, or anything else will reduce the number of low-income students in each school below 40% when the entire school district is 80% low-income."

Comments

The problem - at least in the East/Northeast, is residential segregation. I am a caucasion mom of three African-american children, and after I started adopting, moved to New Mexico, where residential INTEGRATION is much more the norm. I did NOT want my children growing up in segregated towns.

Posted by Kathleen | July 24, 2008 2:59 PM

Matthew,

This is probably the weakest logic I've seen from you (or rather Sara) since I've been reading your blog or Sara when she was at Ed Sector. Yes, Sara is right that residential segregation between districts needs to be addressed (moderate-income housing in suburbs, anyone?). But there are plenty of places in the country where economic desegregation is feasible, and what you've written here suggests that you (or Sara) might be thinking that we should give up on it where it's feasible because it's not feasible in other places.

This reminds me of some of my heterosexual friends who refused to marry out of solidarity because same-sex marriage wasn't possible. As my spouse put it, "So you're going to deny yourself benefits because other people can't enjoy them, for reasons outside your control?"

Posted by Sherman Dorn | July 24, 2008 3:03 PM

there are plenty of places in the country where economic desegregation is feasible

Are you talking about equalizing school funding? That, to me, seems like the best explanation for kids performing better in integrated schools: it's not that sitting next to someone of a different background makes one a better student, but rather that one of those kids is likely going to a school with a higher tax base and thus a better-funded school than in their home neighborhood.

Posted by Notorious P.A.T. | July 24, 2008 3:29 PM

The research on whether poorly performing non-white students really do better in integrated schools is decidedly mixed. To the estent they do better, it is because the integrated schools have more resoeuces. If segregated schools were given adequate resources, in terms of skilled teachers, tutoring help, books and supplies, it would be possible for non-white students to improve without integration. But the problem is that way too few people are willing to pay to educate other people's children.

Posted by Mimikatz | July 24, 2008 3:30 PM

Sherman,

I thinking you're projecting too much on to Matt's argument.

My reading is that there's an interesting idea (i.e. economic integration of schools). A few places implement it with promising results (Wake County, Louisville, etc.) There are major structural hurdles, however, in other locations that might not make this is a one-size-fits-all solution.

He's not saying to walk away from the broad goal of reducing the effects of poverty. He's just saying that geography and context matter.

The implied point you also miss. Some folks advocate a wholesale abandonment of race-based affirmative action. Economic affirmative action has been suggested as a replacement. The evidence, however, (as Matt suggests)is that economic AA is NOT a replacement of economic AA in many places.

Hank

Posted by Hank Porter | July 24, 2008 3:33 PM

There is a vicious cycle here: richer parents prefer better-performing schools, and richer residents make for better-performing schools, so the preference for better-performing schools leads to economic segregation.

There is an obvious solution, however: much bigger districts, as in the size of entire metropolitan areas (or bigger). To put it in Drum's terms, unless the entire metro area is 80% low-income, a metro-size district can't be 80% low-income.

Posted by DTM | July 24, 2008 3:40 PM

I can speak to this knowledgeably: I work in an urban school district where the vast majority of the district is poor, with the exception of a neighborhood or two (I think something like 90% of the students in the district qualify for free or reduced lunch). The district is a third black, a third white, a third hispanic. There is bussing. But I don't see the point -- it just makes for more travel time for everyone, more transportation costs (money the district could well use for education instead), since all the schools/neighborhoods have similar socio-economic statistics, and almost similar ethnic ratios. It's a non-solution to a problem that the entire district is experiencing.

And the stupidity of this "solution" points to a larger problem: urban school districts are poorly administrated. But part of that is the responsibility of NCLB and state mandates: our school district has such poor results that every year it comes up with some new reconfiguration in response to threats from the state to have funds withheld. The next year it's a different threat to a different problem, so there's a re-shuffling over the summer, and on and on it goes, instead of trying something for a while to see if it works. It's chaotic and catastrophic to run schools this way.

A related rant: Every year, I get more and more depressed and cynical that things are ever going to get better. And more and more burnt out. It's impossible to teach in chaos, it's impossible to learn in chaos. It's no surprise to me that so many of my students have openly verbalized their preference for jail (where many of them have already been) to school or jobs. They have no internal structure, so they need it imposed from without. Schools usually fail to provide that structure (so many outside forces, including politics, government, laws, family, neighborhoods), so many students turn to crime knowing they'll have a square three meals and some order in their lives. And they don't have to be able to read.

Posted by cnnr | July 24, 2008 3:43 PM

Bigger, bolder, broader, Randi Weingarten, community schools/centers.... The rest is noise, noise, noise.

Posted by elle loco | July 24, 2008 4:03 PM

Mandating that financially strapped school districts spend ever increasing amounts on diesel fuel? Sounds like something Bush\Cheney would endorse.

Let's give up on the crap local & state levies school are dependent upon, implement per capita funding equality and see where we stand.

Posted by Huslter | July 24, 2008 4:23 PM

Which is why economic diversity is much more important than most of the things public policy people talk about when it comes to urban planning.

Brookings has done some excellent work on this topic and it was in the news some after Katrina, but it's mostly faded. Matt might think of doing a post on the subject - it's a hugely important one.

APS

Posted by Ape Man | July 24, 2008 4:57 PM

What you fail to realize is that it is the poor who ARE the problem.

Posted by Reg | July 24, 2008 6:11 PM

Just a word about the difficulties in the sticks. Lived many yrs in Southern Appalachia. Dtrs & GrandKids still there. County consolidated school system. One Middle--High School, two elementaries. 48 % of adults in county without HS diploma. Biggest town in county has two stoplights. The HS kids sell light bulbs and candy to pay for chemistry lab.

We paid for my Grandson to go to private school until we could help them relocate to a bigger town with better school system.

An unrelated note: My hat is off to Ms Kathleen. May you have long life and prosper in all you do.

Posted by JohnMcC | July 24, 2008 9:10 PM

JohnMcC,

That is why I ultimately think we should have at least statewide, and preferably nationwide, funding for public schools.

Posted by DTM | July 24, 2008 9:18 PM

dtm: As the inner-city school teacher, who also worked for five years in a poor rural school district: I'm with you.

Posted by cnnr | July 25, 2008 12:01 PM

Exactly.

For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District has 700,000 students in it and buses kids all over the landscape, but it's notorious nationwide for poor performance.

The most obvious policy implication of this fact is that we should stop importing so many poor, undereducated illegal immigrants. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 26, 2008 5:50 PM