For example, in an upcoming report Erin will be running the same Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis for the city of Chicago. It will show that only a limited number of students there could benefit from the opportunity to transfer to other districts, particularly in high school. This is partly because of issues like capacity and distance. But it's also because Chicago was built next to a gigantic lake that contains no schools, good or otherwise. So while Chicago students might be able to travel north, south, or west to find better schools, they pretty much can't go east. These things matter.
The way school districts are designed also makes a big difference. Some states--Illinois is one--have hundreds of small districts. Marion County, Indiana, where I used to live, contains eleven separate school districts, including the traditionally urban Indianapolis public schools along with various large and small township school districts, including the tiny district of Speedway, which enjoys unusual wealth owing to its ability to levy property taxes on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where the Indy 500 is contested. Inter-district choice in Marion County would undoubtedly benefit many students.
On the other hand, many southern states operate large, whole-county school districts. The map below shows a low-performing school that happens to be located in the middle of the Polk County, Florida district, which encompasses over 2,000 square miles. It takes 45 minutes just to get to the county border from that school, much less find a better school on the other side. Inter-district choice isn't really an option there.
Some critics of the report have raised the issue of our school capacity assumptions. It's true, as Dianne Piche notes below, that some schools may have more capacity than they'd like to admit. But others have suggested that, absent any definitive empirical evidence of how much successful schools could theoretically expand to accomodate new students, we should have either (A) made no assumptions at all, which is methodologically the same as assuming that schools have infinite capacity to expand, or (B) treated all possible assumptions as equally valid. Frankly, that doesn't make much sense, and the map below shows why.
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. There are limits, and any responsible analysis of inter-district choice has to acknowledge that. Piedmont is, of course, somewhat of an extreme example, but that's why we ran the numbers for every single school in California (and Texas and Florida) using a moderate capacity assumption, to see how things play out in the aggregate.
2 comments:
I agree and disagree with both sides on this debate, but I know so little on this subject that my opinion , if its worth anything, is valuable only in regard to a broader point.
Given the diversity of educational realities in this big country, and the extreme proliferation of choice, the best approaches for helping kids tend to be "carrots" based on incentives not broad mandates.
The 20 minute distinction normally would not make sense considering that some poor and affluent children already commute for larger distances. But in many places, EVERYONE who understands the importance of excercizing their choices have already done so. An expansion of choices would improve the options of parents who are already benefitting from choice, but it is unlikely that it would greatly expand the number of families who excercise their rights to choose. The answer, of course, is not to condemn parents who have been trapped by circumstances. The answer is to help those parents do a better job of understanding the importance of education.
In some places, I suspect Kahlenberg is right. He wrote:
"But there are large benefits as well. According to a forthcoming paper by Amy Stuart Wells and Jennifer Jellison Holme (summarized here) , interdistrict programs aimed at promoting economic and racial integration can pay extraordinary dividends."
One reason why those districts are committed to integration, I suspect, is that they recognize that their logistical circumstances are not impossible. Why not provide incentives that would benefit districts where it is geographically and politically possible?
We are all smart enough to devise a whole range of options that would work far far better than NCLB-type accountability. And people respond better to carrots than sticks.
On the whole, socio-economic integration has far more potential benefits for increasing student performance than top down mandates. Then if you add in the moral and spiritual benefits of integration (and even if you discount the moral and spiritual costs of data-driven accountability)then integration is far better. But we can't pretend the "Big Sort" hasn't happened.
In fact, the self-segregation of the last few decades (as opposed to Jim Crow and discrimination of before) has been the result of choices, not coercion. We should fight this increased socio-economic segregation, as much as possible, by encouraging better choices.
Come to think of it, what am I saving? I guess I'm saying that the best way to improve education is by education, and to address our democracy's problems with more democracy.
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.
Call me if you'd like a bit more ground truth on this.
510-290-8535
Maureen Kennedy
Former Dep. Sec. for Policy, HUD, Clinton Admin.
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