Commendable Commentary

This blog hasn't had comments for that long, and I'm hoping more people will use them as a chance for substantive dialogue that focuses on the topic of the post in question, as opposed to anonymous shot-taking and/or general complaint. In that spirit, let me heartily commend the second comment in this post, in which the author identifies herself by name and offers some intriguing new information and perspectives about inter-district choice and the example of Piedmont Unified School District in Oakland. I had written:

The starred school in middle is located in Piedmont School District, which is very affluent and literally built on a hill surrounded on all sides by Oakland Unified School District, a high-poverty district with rock bottom test scores that's been subject to state takeover in the past. There are four low-performing Oakland schools within a five minute drive of the Piedmont school and at least nine within 20 minutes. I think we can all agree that even under the rosiest of scenarios, the Piedmont school couldn't quintuple in size, or more, to accomodate transfer students.

To which she responded:

Hi: I live in Piedmont, which is now surrounded by very affluent areas of Oakland (including, I believe, the four top-rated elementary schools in Oakland, which sometimes SURPASS Piedmont's elementary schools in their API scores--Thornhill, Montclair, Joaquin Miller, and Crocker Highlands).

When Piedmont was chartered as a city 100 years ago, it was a dairy settlement way up above the city of Oakland, which at the the time was centered right next to the Bay. Over the past 100 years, Oakland has grown up and around pre-existing Piedmont. Home prices in Piedmont average about $300,000 more than similar houses across the line in Oakland. About $1.3 million compared to $1 million, for a typical 3/2 home in the three Piedmont zips and the corresponding Oakland zips (that is, Oakland and Piedmont are both in 94611, 94610, and 94618).

"Parcel taxes" for schools (because, of course, property taxes are strictly limited across the state by Prop 13) are now at about $1500/home above what a home in Oakland would pay (zero). Realistically, the PUSD would never open its doors in a serious fashion to Oakland residents, because the value of property across the town (3400 homes x $300K each = about a billion dollars) would drop by about a billion dollars.

But note that the big beneficiaries would NOT be high poverty communities, because surrounding areas are not high poverty. They are high-income--Montclair, Claremont Hills, Claremont Pines, Crocker Highlands, Ridgecrest, Piedmont Pines, Piedmont Avenue, etc.

Interesting! A couple of thoughts on this. As Erin notes below, some have critiqued the framing of our report, which estimates that "only" 10 - 20 % of students could benefit from inter-district choice, when that's in fact a lot of students and thus the findings could just as well be presented in more positive terms. Which is a fair point; realistically, improvement happens through the accumulation of multiple initiatives each doing their part.

But it's important to keep in mind that those numbers are a best case scenario given the assumptions we chose. That's the number you get if every single higher performing school opens its doors to out-of-district students and the maximum possible number of students choose to travel. As the comment notes, there are, in some communities, very powerful social and financial incentives for high-performing districts not to make that choice. That doesn't mean those barriers can't be overcome, but it's safe to say that commensurately large amounts of political and financial capital will be required to do so.

And that raises the issue, per Erin, of balancing costs and benefits. You can bribe high-performing districts to accept transfer students, but that by definition involves directing scarce resources to schools that likely have the fewest educational needs. Inter-district choice also creates signficant new transportation costs, born either by parents or the taxpayers, directing resources to activities that are fundamentally non-educational in nature. Connecticut spends something like $3,000 per student to bus Hartford kids out to the suburbs. That's about what some of the best urban charter schools spend above and beyond normal per-student allocations to extend the school day, provide extra tutoring, lower class size etc.

Inter-district choice can be a good policy for some students in the right circumstances. But it's not going to absolve us from the pressing need to build more, better schools, including more schools of choice, in the neighborhoods and communities where disadvantaged students actually live.

Technical Note: As I should have made clear in the original post, all of the schools on the Piedmont map are high schools. It's true, as the commenter notes, that there are some high-performing elementary schools in Oakland near the Piedmont border, and they're in an attendance area that feeds into a high-performing Oakland high school (the other star on the map). But there are still a whole lot more low-performing high schools in Oakland than high-performing ones, and the students there can't all transfer to Piedmont.