In an article on CNN.com titled "Divided court rejects school diversity plans," CNN is reporting that the US Supreme Court in Washington DC has rejected public school plans that consider race in forcing diversity. "The 5-4 ruling rejected programs in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington."
The programs in question used race to determine school assignments in an effort to increase diversity. "The cases from Kentucky and Washington revisit past disputes over race and education, stemming from the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.
"Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again -- even for very different reasons," Roberts wrote."
One of the different reasons for this type of profiling of students was to equalize poverty across a school district as opposed to having clearly high poverty schools and low poverty schools creating a disparity.
Justice Kennedy was quoted as saying, "A compelling interest exists in avoiding racial isolation, an interest that a school district, in its discretion and expertise, may choose to pursue."
But he added, "Crude measures of this sort [as illustrated in this case] threaten to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school's supply and another's demand." Sounds familiar.
Justice Thomas stated that, "Simply putting students together under the same roof does not necessarily mean that the students will learn together or even interact," he said. "Furthermore, it is unclear whether increased interracial contact improves racial attitudes and relations." I wonder if this applies to socioeconomics? I would guess that it does considering Louisville and Seattle were looking at race because in their communities minorities tend to be the ones to live below the poverty line. So, with that logic, by moving minorities around, a school district could equalize poverty across the entire district.
The article went on to comment that "those on both sides of the issue, as well as the Bush administration, had hoped the Supreme Court would clarify when and to what lengths state and local officials can go to promote diversity in K-12 education." Without clarification, schools that are becoming segregated based on where families settle cannot promote diversity without risking litigation over racial segregation. People tend to live where others like them live whether it be race, culture, or economics. How to keep the communities within communities from creating islands of isolation is a challenge when the goals of public schools are to create and promote diversity of all kinds. Another problem is moving a small group of students from their neighborhood community and possibly isolating them in a "foreign" school community where they may not be welcome and the affects on the achievement of all students involved.
One parent in Louisville commented on that districts plan to have at least 15% and no more than 50% minority population in their schools, "We are here not because we didn't get our first choice, but because we got no choice," said Meredith shortly after the ruling. "I was told by the school board that my son's education was not as important as their plan. I was told I should sacrifice his learning in order to maintain the status quo."
In Seattle, the plan is that families can send their children to any school in their district. When the population nears capacity, race is used as something of a tie-breaker. When a school has a population of say Asian-Americans at only 10%, priority would be given to student applications from Asian-Americans. 200 parents sued the school district because their children were not the priority and would not be able to attend the schools nearest their homes. "The Bush administration supported the parents bringing suit against the choice plans."
Early in the Long-Range Facilities planning process, Dr. Heilmann commented that the district would be watching the outcome of these cases. I wonder what will be discussed now that the Federal Supreme Court has ruled that racial profiling is wrong in public schools. I wonder if socioeconomics will become part of the greater discussion in those school districts with integration plans as it is in ours. Maybe the Supreme Court can figure out a plan to solve the poverty problem in our society so public school districts can concentrate on teaching all students and stop worrying about what each students' gross annual income is in comparison to other students.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Supreme Court Shoots Down School Diversity
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3 comments:
For all the mistakes Bush has made it looks like his leagacy may be his Supreme Court appointments. Will this finally stop Karen and Amy and their liberal agenda? I doubt it.
The only way to stop the idiot twins and entourage is for Oshkosh to get off their lazy damn asses and vote!
I'm sick of all the complaining by those that sit home with beer in hand and refuse to DO anything.
A few seconds with a ballot would go a long way to solve everything. 12% voter turnout is disgraceful and sends the message that people who are elected to stroke their own egos and don't give a rat's ass about the community can keep right on stroking.
All you lazy idiots better enjoy higher taxes, illiterate and unprepared students, and megaschools because that's what not voting gets you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/education/15integrate.html?pagewanted=print
July 15, 2007
School Diversity Based on Income Segregates Some
By JONATHAN D. GLATER and ALAN FINDER
SAN FRANCISCO — When San Francisco started trying to promote socioeconomic diversity in its public schools, officials hoped racial diversity would result as well.
It has not worked out that way.
Abraham Lincoln High School, for example, with its stellar reputation and Advanced Placement courses, has drawn a mix of rich and poor students. More than 50 percent of those students are of Chinese descent.
“If you look at diversity based on race, the school hasn’t been as integrated,” Lincoln’s principal, Ronald J. K. Pang, said. “If you don’t look at race, the school has become much more diverse.”
San Francisco began considering factors like family income, instead of race, in school assignments when it modified a court-ordered desegregation plan in response to a lawsuit. But school officials have found that the 55,000-student city school district, with Chinese the dominant ethnic group followed by Hispanics, blacks and whites, is resegregrating.
The number of schools where students of a single racial or ethnic group make up 60 percent or more of the population in at least one grade is increasing sharply. In 2005-06, about 50 schools were segregated using that standard as measured by a court-appointed monitor. That was up from 30 schools in the 2001-02 school year, the year before the change, according to court filings.
The San Francisco experience is telling because after the recent United States Supreme Court decision restricting the use of race-based school assignment plans, many districts are expected to switch to economic integration plans like San Francisco’s as a legal way to seek diversity. As many as 40 districts around the country are already experimenting with such plans, according to an analysis by Richard D. Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy research group.
Many of these experiments are modest, involve small districts or have been in place only a few years. But the experiences of these districts show how difficult it can be to balance socioeconomic diversity, racial integration and academic success.
Only a few plans appear to have achieved all three goals. Others promote income diversity but not racial integration while still other plans are limited and their results inconclusive. Those who have studied them say a key to that outcome is how aggressively a plan shifts students around and whether there are many schools that can lure middle-class students from their neighborhoods into poor ones.
“Systemwide programs are more effective than piecemeal programs,” said Mr. Kahlenberg, who has studied plans like these.
The purpose of such programs is twofold. Since income levels often correlate with race they can be an alternate and legal way to produce racial integration. They also promote achievement gains by putting poorer students in schools that are more likely to have experienced teachers and students with high aspirations, as well as a parent body that can afford to be more involved.
“There is a large body of evidence going back several years,” Mr. Kahlenberg said, “that probably the most important thing you can do to raise the achievement of low-income students is to provide them with middle-class schools.”
Economic integration initiatives differ from each other, and from many traditional integration efforts that relied on mandatory transfer of students among schools. Some of the new initiatives involve busing but some do not; some rely on student choice, while some also use a lottery. And so it is difficult to measure how far students travel or how many students switch schools.
The most ambitious effort and the example most often cited as a success is in the city of Raleigh, N.C., and its suburbs.
For seven years the district has sought to cap the proportion of low-income students in each of the county’s 143 schools at 40 percent.
To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children, the district encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from home. Suburban students are attracted to magnet schools in the city; children from the inner city are sometimes bused to middle-class schools at the outer edges of Raleigh and in the suburbs.
The achievement gains have been sharp, and school officials said economic integration was largely responsible. Only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight in Wake County, where Raleigh is located, scored at grade level on state reading tests in 1995. By the spring of 2006, 82 percent did.
“The plan works well,” said John H. Gilbert, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who served for 16 years on the county school board and voted for the plan. “It’s based on sound assumptions about the environment in which children learn.”
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, North Carolina’s largest, has also tried an economic integration plan, but with less success.
Students were once assigned to schools in Charlotte and its suburbs based in part on achieving racial balance, but that system was struck down in federal appeals court in 2001.
The school board then created an assignment plan based on income and choice; a low-income student could transfer to a middle-class school if he came from a high-poverty, low-performing school. But such transfers could occur only if there was room, and there seldom was. “There are not a whole lot of seats available and so there is not a lot of choice available,” said Scott McCully, the district’s executive director of planning and student placement.
Within several years, said Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, “the schools became markedly more segregated.”
In the smaller school system in Cambridge, Mass., children apply to the city’s 12 elementary schools and socioeconomic status is an important factor in ultimate assignments. The system has been phased in gradually since the fall of 2002.
Last year, 75.8 percent of Cambridge’s low-income third graders were judged to be progressing toward reading proficiency. That was higher than the statewide average for low-income students, 71.3 percent, and better than the rate in more than a dozen other cities in the state.
Other districts have not seen such results. One district in San Jose, Calif., switched to using family and neighborhood income instead of race for assignments two years ago, giving a preference to students in low-income areas who try to transfer to schools in higher income areas, and vice versa.
But in the first year, the number of students switching schools declined significantly and has only begun to recover in the last year.
San Francisco had been under a court order to desegregate for more than 20 years, with no school allowed to have a majority of students from one racial or ethnic group. But after Chinese-American parents whose children were kept out of certain elite schools sued, the district switched in 2002-03 to a plan that sought socioeconomic diversity.
Students apply to the schools they want to attend, and the district uses a “diversity index” for assignments when a school is oversubscribed. The index considers the language spoken at home, whether a child qualifies for free lunch or is in public housing, a child’s academic performance and the quality of a child’s prior schools. But it has not resulted in racial integration.
“We were hopeful that the diversity index would work,” said Stuart Biegel, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was the district’s court-appointed monitor. “No one was rooting against it. But it didn’t work.”
Officials say one problem is that many students apply to neighborhood schools, which do not recruit enough students from outside their area. Another problem is demographics. Mr. Biegel said public school students in San Francisco were relatively low income over all, whatever their race or ethnicity, so the diversity index produced less mixing than hoped.
The wide ethnic diversity in San Francisco’s schools, which are about one-third Chinese, also introduces calculations among parents that make it easier to get income diversity without racial or ethnic diversity.
At Willie L. Brown Jr. College Preparatory Academy, a fourth- through sixth-grade school in the predominantly black neighborhood of Bayview, 75 percent of the students are black. Most are poor.
Tareyton D. Russ, the principal, said students from other neighborhoods did not seek to go there so the diversity index did not even apply. “Poor Chinese kids don’t want to go to school with poor black kids,” Mr. Russ said flatly.
Conversely, one white parent interviewed as she dropped her child off at summer school said some white parents avoided schools with a heavy Chinese concentration, like Lincoln, believing they would be too high-pressure for their children. She declined to be quoted by name.
David Campos, the general counsel to the school district, said the resegregation was so disappointing that the school board might try to test whether Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in the recent Supreme Court case left open the possibility of using race if other methods of integration fail.
“We stopped using race at some point,” Mr. Campos said. “And then for a number of years we have tried to use a number of race-neutral factors to achieve racial diversity, which methods haven’t worked. Should the board decide to use race, and they may or may not, we are a very good test case.”
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