In the feature piece The New Segregation which appears in the November/December issue of the Washington Monthly, Carl Chancellor and Richard D. Kahlenberg use Montgomery County, Maryland as a kind of lab experiment to determine the answer to an age-old question: “If you are a low-income student, are you better off in a lower-poverty school that spends less per pupil or a higher-poverty school that spends more?”
The experiment was made possible by a 1974 law that created “inclusionary housing” throughout the county. The idea was simple. Developers were required to price “12.5 percent to 15 percent of [their] new housing stock” so that it would be “affordable to low-income and working-class families.”
Over the next thirty-five years this resulted in about 12,000 homes that housed lower income families whose kids were in majority-affluent neighborhoods and school districts. In other words, kids weren’t bussed from majority-poor neighborhoods into well-to-do school districts. They lived in proximity to more affluent people as well as going to school with them.
Montgomery County also developed a plan specifically designed to help the performance of majority-poor schools.
The most recent progressive approach involved the allocation of school resources. In 2000, the district superintendent, Jerry Weast, decided to spend a boatload of extra money—$2,000 per pupil—to help students attending the district’s high-poverty schools. The system provided all-day kindergarten, reduced class sizes, and investment in teacher development, among other improvements.
These two factors, higher than normal economic integration and extra funding for the poorer schools, allowed a comparison to be made. Who did better, the poor kids who got extra funding for all-day kindergarten and reduced class size or the poor kids who lived with and went to school with a majority of more affluent students?
The answer was that economic integration (a zoning regulation which wasn’t an education-specific reform) was more effective for improving student performance than more investment directly in the schools.
Chancellor and Kahlenberg bring more research to the table to demonstrate that it is the majority-character of a school that matters. So, a child from an affluent family will suffer academically if he or she attends a high-poverty school, but they will not suffer if they are attending an affluent school which brings in some impoverished students. The impoverished students do better without damaging the prospects of the kids who are already there.
Of course, it’s not easy to convince affluent parents that their kids won’t suffer some disadvantages by coming into contact with kids from poor families, but the research shows that they having nothing to worry about and may even benefit from exposure to different kinds of people from different walks of life. Kids from Latino backgrounds make excellent Spanish tutors, for example.
As the country changes demographically, more parents are seeking diverse environments for their children’s education as the best way to prepare them for life. The best solution may be to create artificially economically diverse communities rather than artificially racially diverse school districts. Poor kids don’t benefit from more racially diverse school districts unless there is more economic diversity as well.
Read the whole thing.
My district became accidentally economically integrated when a wealthy new neighborhood was built in it; now it’s about 30% students from working class/poor families.
The addition of the wealthier neighborhood seems to have helped the district, which used its new tax dollars to renovate all its schools and shore up programs. And so far, parents in this neighborhood seem happy to use the schools.
It’s rare these days, though. Seems like most schools are majority below poverty line or 90% above it.
Enforcing laws against racial segregation of housing and redlining of housing finance could go a long way towards racial diversity. That is a precondition for the economic diversity that affects educational outcomes. That is necessary but not sufficient.
Zoning changes to break up economic exclusive neighborhoods and subsidies for sale and rental housing have proven themselves. But the preservation of public schools and prevention of economic or racial resegregation through private, religious, and charter schools is also a requirement.
The other requirement is that it cannot happen through forced gentrification that brings in economically privileged student and eventually shoves out people who most recently lived in the community. Opening up opportunities for a better life honors the dignity of people, a value that has been shorted for the past three decades.
It works best when there is the opportunity for people to gain respect regardless of their economic background.
The policy situation of the moment is that it is the reverse of what leads to educational success for everyone. The current policy is to undermine public education in favor of various forms of sectarian or niche schooling. It is as if someone is afraid that there might be a shortage of uneducated people.
It was last winter that I got an unexpected knock on my door (unexpected because it was really damn cold outside). Some lady I didn’t know or recognize was there to tell me about the mayor’s plan to turn a patch of nearby woods into tracts for low-income housing.
It kind of turned into a big deal and neighborhood opposition killed the deal. I ended up signing the petition against the development, because they cut down another patch of trees about a mile away, and those lots are still vacant. So my logic was that there’s no point in cutting down the trees if nothing’s going to get built. The woods are gone; they’re putting medium-sized houses there now.
But I was conflicted about the opposition. Poor people need a place to live too, even if I’m not stoked about the decline in property values. It was disheartening to listen to otherwise left-leaning folks going all NIMBY on this kind of thing. But the issue of property value is real.
The results of that study correspond to both my own educational experience attending an extremely diverse (racially and economically) public high school in Houston in the ’80s and my professional experience teaching in Baltimore for 5 + years and working as a curriculum developer for Succcess for All for more than 10 years.
Schools in which most of the students come from families living in poverty have to overcome enormous hurdles (chaotic school environments, significant educational deficits, less involved parents)to deliver quality education. It can be done and Success for All has had great success (verified by years of research) in serving these schools. But it takes a high quality curriculum and model for organizing the school and a relentless effort on behalf of the school staff. Most schools serving poor students have none of these conditions in place.
Poor kids attending majority middle class/upper middle class schools benefit by being able to avoid most of the problems that come with majority poor schools.
And there is no question that the non-poor kids benefit with exposure to people outside their class/race. I know I did.
This is my county. This is where my kids went to school. I was a stay-at-home mom and volunteered in the schools when my kids were in primary grades, then worked in the school system as they got older. I can vouch for the benefits of having low-income kids in predominantly middle- and high-income schools. Especially, I can vouch for the efficacy of including low-income housing in the mix in every development. It’s good for all the kids. I remember looking around one of my son’s birthday parties and realizing he was the only white kid there. Then realizing that that had been the case a few months before at my other son’s party. And it wasn’t just a racially mixed group; there were kids whose moms were just scraping by, and kids with their own rooms decked out with TVs and computers.
It’s not just housing policy that encourages this kind of economic mixing. I was active in PTA, and sat on more than a few boundary committees. Keeping the mix economically and racially equitable wasn’t just a goal, it was a requirement.
I didn’t spend much time in classrooms; my job quickly became more administrative. But my school time was almost all spent serving at-risk students. I spent about 4 months at a school with a “high ed load” (jargon for a combination of # of students on free/reduced lunch, # non-English-speaking, transient, and learning disabilities. I think that’s all the factors). We really did have a lot more to work around, and a lot more challenges educating our kids. Even working with kids with little English, from war-torn countries with an interrupted education was easier at the more economically stable schools.
So yes, ” Poor kids don’t benefit from more racially diverse school districts unless there is more economic diversity as well.”