Is demographic diversity the educational elixir for ailing schools? Many educators seem to think so, provoking contentious debates in school districts nationwide. At issue are school assignment policies promoting “diversity” – complicated formulas for determining the ideal racial and economic composition of schools. Having achieved such sublime heterogeneity, schools are thus poised for widespread academic greatness, or so the thinking goes.
There’s no denying the fact that the student-achievement gaps targeted by these policies are real. Nationally, white-black achievement gaps (.pdf) are roughly 10 points higher than they were even a decade ago, according to Education Trust. In North Carolina (.pdf), Latino and African-American students lag well behind their white peers in reading and math, according to the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
But manipulating school assignment policies isn’t the answer. When it comes to race, the U.S. Supreme Court agrees, ruling in June that school-assignment plans in Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington were unconstitutional since they employed racial criteria to determine where children could go to school. Louisville’s policies were intended to maintain integration following decades of court-ordered desegregation. Seattle’s plan used race as a “tie-breaker” when the number of applicants for a particular school exceeded available spots. In spite of their goals, however, these programs threatened, in the words of Justice Kennedy, “to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school’s supply and another’s demand.”
Following the Supreme Court’s decision, school districts will increasingly look to socioeconomic status as a proxy for race; indeed, numerous districts already have. According to the Century Foundation, 40 school districts already use family income to assign students to schools.
Assigning students to schools based on socioeconomic status won’t work in the long run, either. For starters, maintaining a static balance of rich and poor is impossible to do. Even the most prescient economic integration policies can’t forecast who will move into school districts, and when. In spite of its nationally-touted economic integration plan, Wake County’s percentage of poor students (.pdf) increased more than six percent between 2002 and 2006. Government-mandated economic diversity policies also can’t prevent dissatisfied families from fleeing integrated systems in search of shorter bus rides and neighborhood schools.
Nevertheless, many education officials won’t look beyond diversity policies to help schools improve. In North Carolina, the Orange County School Board has proposed merging two elementary schools – high-performing Hillsborough Elementary and poor-performing Central Elementary – to rectify socioeconomic imbalance. Board member Liz Brown has indicated that achieving full economic (and racial) integration for Central’s students is far more important than boosting their achievement. Indeed, last week she expressed a shocking disregard for performance outcomes, saying, “Whether or not Central is passing or failing its End-of-Grade tests doesn’t matter to me.” Fortunately, performance matters to sensible county parents, who have worked to table the merger while a committee evaluates other options.
What’s the alternative to heavy-handed student assignment policies? Let parents decide where kids go to school. Research on school choice indicates that it helps students academically, particularly minority children: noted researchers Jay Greene and Greg Forster report that random assignment experiments (.pdf) of school-choice programs in Charlotte, Dayton, Milwaukee, New York, and Washington, D.C. all showed “significant positive results, especially for African-American students.” Parental choice also contributes to racial integration, according to a 2006 Friedman Foundation report: data on private schools participating in voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C. found they were significantly less segregated than public schools.
School officials intent on manipulating student assignment to ensure demographic diversity would do well to take note. In the end, if research on school choice teaches us anything, it’s this: when it comes to picking the best schools for students, parents just may know a thing or two after all.