- Catania seeks to shift school renovations, add at-risk funds
- Torture continues regarding D.C. charter school facility funding
- D.C.’s Roosevelt High to become international-themed school [DC International PCS mentioned]
- Loving charter schools to death: Column
- DC Schools: $29,349 Per Pupil, 83 Percent Not Proficient in Reading
- D.C. elementary school teacher reportedly gave students illicit help on standardized test
- Housing segregation is holding back the promise of Brown v. Board of Education
Catania seeks to shift school renovations, add at-risk funds
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 14, 2014
D.C. Council Education Committee Chairman David A. Catania is proposing to delay reopening the old Spingarn High School for several years in order to pay for renovations at existing schools, where parents have been advocating for improvements.
The move would allow Catania — a mayoral candidate who has made education a key issue in his race against council colleague Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4) — to give those parents what they’ve been seeking.
Catania (I-At Large) also wants other changes to Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s proposed spending plan, according to the committee’s draft budget recommendations. Dozens of schools would see up to $100,000 each in additional funds for at-risk students, for example, while a few charter schools would receive a total of $1.4 million to fill gaps in
summer-school funding.
The committee is scheduled to vote on the proposed changes Thursday before sending them on to the council for consideration.
The most dramatic shifts are expected to be in Gray’s school-renovation budget, which triggered protests from disappointed parents in recent weeks.
Spingarn, in Northeast, is not the only vacant building with a slated renovation that Catania would like to delay. Northwest’s Shaw Middle, which had been scheduled for a $50 million overhaul beginning in fiscal 2016, would have the bulk of its work pushed back to fiscal 2019.
The delays would allow for investments in existing schools, which parents say desperately need renovating. But the changes also would derail Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s plan to turn Spingarn into a vocational training center and a linchpin in the city’s efforts to revitalize career and technology education.
Henderson budgeted $62 million to renovate Spingarn during the next two years. But Catania and other council members have argued that the school system can accomplish its career-
education goals within existing high schools, many of which are not fully enrolled. The money would be better spent, they have said, on schools for younger children that are growing and improving but are housed in decrepit buildings.
Under Catania’s proposal, renovations would be moved up to 2015 at schools including Watkins Elementary on Capitol Hill, where modernization work has been pushed back three times in four years, as well as Marie Reed Elementary in Adams Morgan and Orr Elementary in historic Anacostia — two of the last D.C. schools saddled with the open-floor plans trendy in the 1970s.
Capitol Hill’s School Within a School also would see a boost to its renovation budget next year, as would Capitol Hill Montessori at Logan and Murch Elementary in Upper Northwest. Catania declined to insert money for Johnson Middle in Southeast, a priority of Education Committee member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), but he did include an important prize for parents — and voters — east of the Anacostia River: $8 million to begin planning for a new application-only middle school in Ward 7.
Wards 7 and 8 also stand to gain from Catania’s proposal to boost funding for about three-dozen schools that should have received more dollars for at-risk students under a law passed last year.
Gray (D) allocated $44 million for at-risk students in the school system, money that, according to the new law, was supposed to be distributed to schools proportionally, based on enrollment of those children.
But school system officials said it was not possible to comply with the new mandate immediately. They used the funding for Henderson’s budget priorities, which they argue are meant to serve at-risk students.
The Education Committee has identified schools that received less than half of the at-risk funds they were due. Those schools would receive either the amount necessary to bring them to that 50 percent mark or $100,000, whichever is less, for a total investment of $2.8 million. The city expects to pay tuition for fewer special-education students next year, saving a total of more than $5 million. The committee recommends using that money to bolster summer-school funding for some charter schools, which had faced cuts because summer-school funding is now supposed to be paid for out of funds for at-risk students. The rest of the tuition money would be redirected toward funding an expansion of subsidies for child care ($2.25 million); restoring funds to a popular community-schools pilot program ($500,000); establishing a new office of the student advocate, whose job is to help families navigate the public schools ($261,000); expanding services for adults with learning disabilities ($340,000); and hiring two new liaisons to help schools better serve homeless youth ($200,000).
Most of those funds — $2 million — would come from DCPS savings in “certain non-instructional spending,” according to the education committee, while another $800,000 would come from the line item dedicated to private-school tuition for special-education students.
Torture continues regarding D.C. charter school facility funding
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
May 15, 2014
Here's a sample from today's article by the Washington Post's Emma Brown regarding plans for funding DCPS facilities:
"Henderson budgeted $62 million to renovate Spingarn during the next two years. But Catania and other council members have argued that the school system can accomplish its career-education goals within existing high schools, many of which are not fully enrolled. The money would be better spent, they have said, on schools for younger children that are growing and improving but are housed in decrepit buildings.
Under Catania’s proposal, renovations would be moved up to 2015 at schools including Watkins Elementary on Capitol Hill, where modernization work has been pushed back three times in four years, as well as Marie Reed Elementary in Adams Morgan and Orr Elementary in historic Anacostia — two of the last D.C. schools saddled with the open-floor plans trendy in the 1970s.
Capitol Hill’s School Within a School also would see a boost to its renovation budget next year, as would Capitol Hill Montessori at Logan and Murch Elementary in Upper Northwest. Catania declined to insert money for Johnson Middle in Southeast, a priority of Education Committee member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), but he did include an important prize for parents — and voters — east of the Anacostia River: $8 million to begin planning for a new application-only middle school in Ward 7."
$62 million for Springarn that may now be diverted to fix other buildings. More money for Capitol Hill's School Within a School, Capitol Hill Montessori, and Murch Elementary. $8 million for planning a new middle school. Even if the charter facility allotment does up from $3,000 per student per year to $3,072 as Mayor Gray has proposed, the school system that now educates 44 percent of all public school system can maybe afford, if it is both fortunate and determined, perhaps $20 million to renovate a dilapidated shuttered DCPS site. This figure is embarrassing in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars the regular schools receive.
For all the talk from politicians of school reform no one is even mentioning fixing the manner in which capital money is allocated. Instead of Ms. Bower stating that we need Alice Deal for all maybe her slogan should be Dunbar of all. The city spent $122 million fixing this building. Mr. Catania touts his legislative achievements, but in answer to my question about the inequity in spending he reminded me that charters do get the $3,000 per student.
Perhaps one day there will be a candidate for office who rewards charters for all the hard work they have done to raise academic achievement in this town at the same time they are continuously distracted from academics because they have to search endlessly for space. I guess that time is not now.
D.C.’s Roosevelt High to become international-themed school [DC International PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
May 14, 2014
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced Wednesday that she plans to transform Roosevelt High into an “international relations focused school” when it reopens, fully renovated, in fall 2015.
Roosevelt is one of several neighborhood high schools with poor test scores and high truancy rates that has struggled to attract students in recent years. Its relaunch is part of the school system’s broader effort to redesign secondary schools across the city.
“When we modernize our schools, we don’t want to just stop at the building. The modernization gives us a chance to take a look at what’s happening inside and outside,” Henderson said in a statement. “Our global economy is demanding so much more of our students — Roosevelt International High School will graduate students prepared to succeed in this competitive environment.”
The announcement came just hours before D.C. public schools officials were scheduled to meet with education activists in Ward 4, where Roosevelt is located, to discuss plans for middle and high schools. Ward 4 has no standalone middle schools, a sore spot for parents who have begun filling the ward’s elementary schools but say they see no clear path to stay in the system.
Parents at Powell Elementary, a thriving Spanish-immersion school around the corner from Roosevelt, have been particularly vocal about the need for viable neighborhood secondary schools.
Elementary schools that offer dual-language instruction are routinely among the city’s most sought-after academic options. Several dual-language charter schools have banded together to create a new secondary school, D.C. International, that will open in the fall, but the traditional school system has not until now offered a way for students to continue their language studies through 12th grade.
Henderson said detailed plans for the school will be worked out in conjunction with the community, but programming will range from career training to college prep and could include dual-language instruction, international travel, vocational education in areas such as international business and finance, and international culinary arts.
Loving charter schools to death: Column
USA Today
By Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane
May 13, 2014
This week, education reformers on both sides of the aisle are banding together to celebrate "National Charter Schools Week" in a bipartisan Kumbaya moment. President Obama issued an official proclamation stating that charter schools "can show what is possible — schools that give every student the chance to prepare for college and career, and to develop a love of learning that lasts a lifetime." House Majority Leader Eric Cantor tweeted a simple text picture stating "I support quality charters."
The comity is so strong the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to pass a bill Friday. The Success and Opportunity through Quality Charter Schools Act, (H.R. 10), is designed to provide federal funds for successful charter schools to encourage their expansion across the nation.
But before celebrating another expansion of school choice, there should be serious reflection from advocates for innovation in education about the compromises such expansion is requiring.
Charters were conceived as an alternative to underperforming public schools. This allowed educators and entrepreneurs space to create new schools and new teaching models. The fact that education dollars were now allowed to go to schools chosen by parents and children generated competition, better matched students' interests and needs, and gave teachers the opportunity to exercise their own judgment and be accountable for the results.
Slow to grow at first, charter school enrollment has doubled since 2006. Today more than 2.2 million K-12 students are enrolled in the 6,000 charter schools operating in 42 states and Washington, D.C. across the nation and the District of Columbia. Ninety percent of students in New Orleans, and 43% in Washington, D.C. are educated in charter schools. Enrollment in charter schools could reach 5 million by the end of this decade.
Objective analysis has also found charter schools to be successful, particularly with students from low income backgrounds. In 2013, researchers at Stanford University studied charter schools in 27 states and found that, on average, students in charter schools outperform traditional public school students in reading, and do about the same in math. Students below the poverty line and African-American students were both found to fare better in charter than in public schools when their standardized test scores were disaggregated.
This is the happy story part. But creeping bureaucratization and regulation are endangering the entire charter school movement.
Consider: of the eight schools that applied for charters in Washington, D.C. this year, not one application was less than 200 pages. The longest was more than 700. Creeping paperwork paralysis is one way public schools lost the ability to innovate.
In New York, South Carolina, Florida, Delaware and other states education leaders did not exempt charter schools from state-wide teacher evaluation systems promised to the Department of Education as part of their Race to the Top applications. Even though charter schools might be staffed differently or value different criteria, they still have to use the same measurements to evaluate their teachers.
In New Orleans, the city with the largest charter school market share, charter schools have been pressured to adopt a standardized discipline system, and a standardized enrollment procedure. That could be a big problem for "no excuses" schools with strict discipline and other innovative schools if they aren't able to select classes with the best opportunity to benefit from their unique approaches. In Washington D.C. advocates for "controlled choice" have put forward plans to engineer the racial and economic makeup of schools through the use of "weighted" admissions lotteries and de facto quotas.
In each of these cases, well intentioned central planners have tried to bring about their particular idea of efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness. But regulations tend to be a one way ratchet. Once in place, it is usually impossible to do away with them. These changes risk remaking the charter school as a new version of the very system it is trying to replace. In short, if this regulatory impulse is left unchecked, it's all too possible that the high achieving charter school of today could become the failing public school of tomorrow.
There is evidence that this is already happening. Too few charter schools actually take advantage of the autonomy they possess. They have the power and freedom to rethink the use of time, talent, and money, yet researchers have found that many charter school leaders behave like public school principals, and pay teachers like district schools do: by seniority instead of merit. Authorizers and regulators often overly rely on traditional and narrow forms of measurement — standardized reading and math scores — to determine if a school is "good," and therefore merits future funding.
It is crazy to think that the same worn out processes will all of a sudden produce new results. Public oversight for the use of public dollars is understandable and appropriate, but we must remember that if unchallenged, agents of "oversight" will inexorably bureaucratize charter schooling, morphing it into the same system for which it was envisioned to be a substitute. If we're unhappy with the way schools are performing, we should avoid trying to constrain charters the way we have hamstrung district public schools. It is time to try something different.
Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute where Michael Q. McShane is a research fellow in education policy studies and a former inner-city high school teacher.
DC Schools: $29,349 Per Pupil, 83 Percent Not Proficient in Reading
TownHall
By Terry Jeffrey
May 14, 2014
The public schools in Washington, D.C., spent $29,349 per pupil in the 2010-2011 school year, according to the latest data from National Center for Education Statistics, but in 2013 fully 83 percent of the eighth graders in these schools were not "proficient" in reading and 81 percent were not "proficient" in math.
These are the government schools in our nation's capital city -- where for decades politicians of both parties have obstreperously pushed for more federal involvement in education and more federal spending on education.
Government has manifestly failed the families who must send their children to these schools, and the children who must attend them.
Under the auspices of the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal government periodically tests elementary and high school students in various subjects, including reading and math. These National Assessment of Educational Progress tests are scored on a scale of 500, and student achievement levels are rated as "basic," "proficient" and "advanced."
In 2013, students nationwide took NAEP reading and math tests. When the NCES listed the scores of public-school eighth graders in the 50 states and the District of Columbia, D.C. came in last in both subjects.
D.C. eighth graders scored an average of 248 out of 500 in reading, and Mississippi finished next to last with an average of 253.
Only 17 percent of D.C. 8th graders rated "proficient" or better in reading. In Mississippi, it was 20 percent.
In math, D.C. public-school eighth graders scored an average of 265 out of 500, and only 19 percent were rated "proficient" or better. Alabama placed next to last with an average math score of 269, with 20 percent rated "proficient" or better.
Some might argue it is unfair to compare, Washington, D.C., a single city, with an entire state. However, D.C. also does not compete well against other big cities.
The Department of Education's Trial Urban District Assessments program compares the test results in 21 large-city school districts, including Washington, D.C.
In these assessments, the scores of students from charter schools were removed and the average reading score for D.C. public school eighth-graders dropped to 245. That was below the national large-city average of 258, and tied D.C. with Fresno for seventeenth place among the 21 big cities in the TUDA.
In math, minus the charter school students, D.C. public-school eighth graders earned an average score of 260. That was below the national large-city average of 276, and put D.C. in a tie for sixteenth place, this time with Fresno and Baltimore.
The NCES database indicates that in the 2010-2011 school year, Washington, D.C. public schools spent a total of $29,349 per pupil, ranking No. 1 in spending per pupil among the 21 large cities in the TUDA.
New York City Public Schools ranked second among these large cities, spending $23,996 per pupil. That was $5,353 -- or about 18 percent -- less than the $29,349 the D.C. public schools spent.
Table 236.75 from the NCES's Digest of Education Statistics compares per pupil spending among the states and the District of Columbia. It indicates that D.C. spent a little bit less per pupil -- $28,403 -- who enrolled in the fall in 2010-2011 school year. But that still ranks D.C. as No. 1, out-spending all the states.
How did the D.C. public schools spend $28,403 per student?
Among other things, they spent $10,584 per pupil on "instruction," which "encompasses all activities dealing directly with the interaction between teachers and students."
Then they spent $5,487 on "capital outlays," which includes "the acquisition of land and buildings; building construction, remodeling," etc.
Then they spent $2,321 on "operation and maintenance," which includes "salary, benefits, supplies, and contractual fees for supervision of operations and maintenance," etc.
Then they spent $2,124 on "interest on school debt."
Then they spent $1,613 on "instructional staff," $1,546 on "school administration," $1,404 on "student transportation," $1,208 on "student support," $866 on "general administration," $761 on "food services," $450 on "other support services."
Congress ought to give every family in Washington, D.C., a choice of whether or not they want a government school to spend this money on behalf of their children. The D.C. public school system should be required to provide every family in the district with school-age children with a voucher for each child that is worth every penny the district now spends per pupil in its public schools. Families should be able to use that voucher at any school they want, anywhere they want.
D.C. elementary school teacher reportedly gave students illicit help on standardized test
The Washington Post
By Robert McCartney
May 14, 2014
A fifth-grade teacher at a District public school allegedly stole a peek at part of a high-stakes standardized exam in April and used that peek to create an illicit study guide for her students so they’d perform well.
The incident at Plummer Elementary in Southeast Washington, disclosed here for the first time, led the school system to place Principal Christopher Gray on leave while an investigation is underway.
Gray, who has led Plummer for nine years, denies wrongdoing and fears that he is being made a scapegoat.
But the school system is right to be wary, given the school’s record. Plummer was one of four District schools where suspected cheating was reported during last year’s D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams.
The teacher will be terminated soon, when necessary paperwork is completed, according to a person with knowledge of the incident. The teacher said in a brief telephone interview that the allegations are not true.
“I can confirm that there is an instance of cheating at Plummer on the D.C. CAS [exam], and we have taken personnel action accordingly,” D.C. Public Schools spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said.
In one sense, the cheating is a disappointing reminder of one of the costs of contemporary education reform. The emphasis on using standardized tests to hold teachers and principals accountable has inevitably increased the pressure on educators to break the rules.
Under the system introduced in the District by former chancellor Michelle Rhee, standardized tests play a bigger role in determining teachers’ evaluations and bonuses.
This gives teachers an incentive to cheat.
I’m not excusing it. I’m just explaining.
Moreover, it’s not clear that the tests work. A new, large-scale study released Tuesday found little or no correlation between quality teaching and teachers’ appraisals based partly on student test scores.
In another sense, however, it’s heartening that DCPS moved quickly against the apparent perpetrator. That’s an improvement from the Rhee era, when administrators seemed slow to respond to cheating allegations for fear of discrediting the reform agenda.
Salmanowitz praised the people at Plummer who went up the chain of command with suspicions about the illicit study guide.
“In this instance, we are pleased to see that the safeguards and protocols that we have in place work,” she said. “We commend the staff that were courageous enough to report concerns.”
The incident began April 1, the first day of CAS testing at Plummer.
After a student handed in a test early, having completed the math portion conducted that day, the teacher took the booklet aside. She wrote notes while reviewing the reading portion to be administered two days later, according to three people familiar with the incident.
The next day, the teacher handed out a two-page study guide based on her sneak peek of the reading exam — which teachers as well as students are forbidden to see in advance.
She didn’t get away with it.
Others at Plummer reported the suspicious study guide on the day it was handed out. The teacher was put on administrative leave that evening, although she later returned to work pending disciplinary action.
The students’ test results will be invalidated.
The teacher denied wrongdoing in a short conversation with me. But she reportedly admitted the offense when school system authorities questioned her, according to the people familiar with the school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Gray, the principal, was put on leave Monday. He has not been formally accused of anything but suggested in telephone interviews that authorities suspect him of trying to conceal testing irregularities.
He said he was not given a reason for being put on leave after what he described as hostile questioning from DCPS officials.
“I feel like I am becoming the scapegoat in the situation when I have done nothing wrong and had no part in this cheating incident,” Gray said. “I did not do anything to attempt to cover up any cheating.”
Gray also said he had “absolutely no involvement” with last year’s cheating incident. He said he reported the recent one as soon as he heard about it.
“Once the incident of possible cheating was brought to my attention, I immediately followed DCPS protocol and notified my supervisor and contacted the DCPS central office,” Gray said.
The principal shouldn’t take a fall for the sake of public relations. But DCPS needs to pursue this fully and to the end, and it deserves praise for its aggressive first response.
Housing segregation is holding back the promise of Brown v. Board of Education
The Washington Post
By Emily Badger
May 15, 2014
Since the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of American schools 60 years ago this week, the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education has yielded parallel progress and disappointment. Black student achievement has increased, but the minority achievement gap has persisted. Resources spent on black and white children have narrowed substantially, but their educational outcomes have not. Researchers have learned much more about why truly integrated schools matter. But since the 1970s, such schools have actually been disappearing, as low-income black children have watched the promise of Brown recede.
The landmark ruling declared that there could be no "equal" education in racially segregated public schools. At the time, Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case before the court, believed we would see full integration in American schools within five years.
That true school integration has not yet come to pass even 60 years later speaks to a complicated reality that has evolved far beyond the reach of traditional education policies: It’s that much harder to integrate classrooms when the communities where children live are still so segregated.
Since the Civil Rights Era, residential racial segregation across the U.S. has steadily declined. But segregation among school-aged children has startlingly lagged behind this progress. In the communities where they live, black and white children -- as well as the poor and non-poor -- are more isolated from each other than adults in the U.S. population at large.
That graph, drawn from an analysis by Rutgers University Professor Paul Jargowsky, shows the “index of dissimilarity” between whites and blacks, whites and Hispanics, and the poor and non-poor in the U.S. The index measures the extent to which two groups are isolated from each other – a score of 0 reflects total integration, a score of 1 total segregation. That graph illustrates that black-white segregation is particularly high for Kindergarten and Pre-K children in the U.S. compared to the non-school-aged population. The same remains true of how poor children are separated from non-poor children.
How is it possible that school children would experience residential segregation at higher rates than the rest of us? Think about who lives in the changing neighborhoods of Washington, Philadelphia or Brooklyn. Whites have begun to move back into urban neighborhoods – but, for the most part, they are not yet moving back with children. Young singles, childless professionals and empty-nesters are returning to cities that were abandoned by the white middle class decades ago in large part because of their struggling schools.
These demographic changes will be key to whether we can achieve more integrated public schools in the coming years. But today, black children in high-poverty urban neighborhoods in particular remain deeply separated from the peers, teachers and resources of high-performing schools. And rising income inequality is making residential segregation by income even worse.
This residential isolation of the most disadvantaged children – a product of migration patterns and economic trends that have occurred since Brown -- points to one set of strategies that’s been given little attention over the last 60 years. What if we made a more concerted effort to integrate schools by integrating neighborhoods? What if we tried to improve the educational prospects of low-income minority students by breaking down barriers to affordable housing in the communities where good schools exist? What if we wielded zoning laws and housing vouchers as levers of education policy?
“Basically, housing policy is school policy,” says Jargowsky. “It’s just so much easier to think about making schools work better if we don’t have these neighborhoods with high levels of poverty.” This doesn’t mean, he adds, that we should give up on investing in high-poverty neighborhoods. “But unless we take seriously the idea that we can’t have so many of these neighborhoods,” he says, “we’re always going to be trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom as the tide is coming in.”
How housing patterns perpetuate segregation
When the Warren Court struck down the idea of “separate but equal” schools in the 1950s, segregation largely occurred within school districts, as public schools in Tuscaloosa or Atlanta or Alexandria separated black and white students living just miles or blocks apart. Today, however, white and minority students, wealthy and low-income ones are more often separated across school districts, municipal boundaries and property tax lines.
As the middle class migrated to the suburbs – often fleeing what families perceived as worsening schools – they left behind urban school districts with higher poverty, more concentrated minority enrollment and declining property tax revenues. They also moved beyond the reach of legal busing or school-assignment policies that have traditionally been used as levers of integration.
"That’s why housing policy has to be part of the solution," says Rucker Johnson, an associate professor at the University of California Berkeley who has researched inequality in education. The traditional tools of schools policy can't reach from Washington's classrooms into the suburbs, or from a high-poverty black neighborhood in Baltimore into an adjacent school district with better-paid teachers and higher test scores.
The story of whites moving away from court-ordered integrated urban school districts has been a story of housing patterns. And so it follows that solutions to the unequal education landscape we have today would be at least in part about housing, too.
Trace back the achievement gaps of low-income children, Johnson says, and you'll find opportunity gaps in the places where they live. You'll find school districts that receive fewer property tax dollars and schools that have a harder time retaining and paying good teachers. You'll find classrooms where turnover is high among low-income students whose families must move more often. You'll find classrooms where special needs are more common and where involvement among single parents more scarce.
You'll also find neighborhoods where crime is high, preventing children from playing outside, and where environmental hazards are high as well, resulting in elevated rates of asthma that keep children out of class. You'll find neighborhoods short on primary-care doctors, jobs and mentors.
Integrated schools matter for all of these reasons: not just because they enable low-income children to sit in AP classes with middle-class peers (or because they enable white children to encounter other backgrounds), but because the access to teachers, resources, other parents and expectations changes, too.
Now what if we created a home for a disadvantaged child in an integrated neighborhood with a strong school, and he could benefit not just from all of those opportunities at school, but from the neighborhood, too.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t also invest in struggling schools, or pursue school vouchers that give a child a chance to attend an integrated school outside of her high-poverty neighborhood. We should probably do all of these things at the same time.
“The trap that people get into is this short-term need to enhance education for kids who are struggling in poor schools,” says Philip Tegeler, the executive director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council. “That becomes such an important short-term priority that the longer-term priority of breaking down racial and economic segregation is put off for another day.”
What housing policy could look like
How, then, would you begin to change housing patterns? Racial and economic segregation do not exist across U.S. metropolitan areas today by accident or coincidence. Segregation persists as both a legacy of overt historic discrimination (including by government agencies and banks) and as a reality of more subtle housing policies.
“Just because the Fair Housing Act was passed didn’t mean that people now have more choice to live in more integrated communities,” says Corianne Payton Scally at the University at Albany, “because their choices are limited by the choices that other people make, and by active barriers and incidents of discrimination.”
Today, many communities have zoning ordinances that actively keep out affordable housing, and the kinds of families who might live in it. Zoning codes that set minimum lot sizes -- meant to ensure the construction of large-lot single-family homes -- make it impossible to build smaller, more affordable housing. This type of “exclusionary zoning,” which may also limit multi-family housing or higher-density development, is ubiquitous in American suburbs.
The more drastic solution would be to limit such zoning policies at the federal or state level, or to withhold federal resources from local communities that pursue them (a tactic George Romney once tried unsuccessfully as head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development). The more politically palatable solution lies in what’s called “inclusionary zoning,” ordinances that mandate the construction of some affordable housing alongside market-rate homes in new developments.
One of the best examples of such a policy exists in suburban Washington, in Montgomery County, Md., where researcher Heather Schwartz has found direct links to educational outcomes for low-income children. Since the 1970s, Montgomery County has required developers to set aside 12-15 percent of homes in new developments for affordable housing, and the local public housing authority has the right to buy and operate a third of those units.
That program has created about 14,000 affordable housing units scattered in neighborhoods throughout the county. Some of the homes are in multi-family developments. Some are single-family homes in subdivisions. “That’s kind of the beauty of it -- it’s whatever the market demands,” Schwartz says.
In 2010, she released a widely discussed study that found that low-income students who were able to attend better-performing local schools thanks to the inclusionary zoning program performed better on standardized math tests than low-income students who attended higher-poverty schools – even though those higher-poverty schools had received additional resources from the district.
Schwartz’s research can’t easily tease out how much of the effect was due to the neighborhood versus the school itself (standardized tests are also an incomplete metric of student achievement). But her finding is frequently cited by advocates who argue that we might change the educational outcomes of low-income children by changing how we build housing.
“There’s no decision that you make that has more consequences for the people around you than the housing that you build,” Jargowsky says. “Housing that’s built today will stay there for the next 30 to 50 years.”
Inclusionary zoning will clearly not work as an education tool in communities that aren’t growing as rapidly as suburban Washington (and even there, the progress is incremental). But there are demand-side solutions, too. The federal government could reform – and better fund -- housing vouchers that enable low-income households to move to high-opportunity communities. Currently it’s difficult to transport those vouchers across municipal lines, from an urban neighborhood into a suburban one. It’s also legal in most states for landlords to refuse to accept vouchers.
As an alternative, the government could encourage housing authorities to work regionally instead of locally, while coaching families to leverage vouchers in search of good schools.
Can we leverage a tectonic demographic shift?
The kind of neighborhood integration that people like Jargowsky are talking about may sound even more politically unpalatable than classroom integration. HUD last year was barraged with angry public comments on a proposed rule governing a seldom-used part of the Fair Housing Act that requires the government to “affirmatively further” fair housing in pursuit of integration.
The prospect of a government interest in diverse communities still makes many Americans uneasy (it’s also not likely to be championed by a Supreme Court that keeps insisting that race doesn’t matter any more). But consider the alternative, from an education point of view. If we wanted to improve the outcomes of those most disadvantaged children living in high-poverty neighborhoods in a holistic way, we’d need to invest in prenatal care for their mothers, in family support and early childhood education before kindergarten even begins, in smaller class sizes and good teacher salaries, in high-quality after-school care, in good summer programs, in regular pediatric care.
Richard Rothstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, has calculated that we would need to make a $300,000, 19-year investment in each child to help overcome all of the disadvantages these students face. That’s more than $15,000 a year.
“It’s politically difficult to accomplish any of these things,” Rothstein says of the housing solutions. “But what people conclude from that is that they should do something that is equally politically difficult, if not possible, and that is to try to solve the problem without integration.”
In fact, while the politics may look grim, there is one other piece of this puzzle that does not: demographics. This fall, for the first time, white students will make up less than half of the enrollment in public schools in America. And just as the country – and its youngest generation – is becoming more diverse, we are witnessing what Amy Stewart Wells calls a moment of “trading places” across American cities and suburbs.
Middle and upper-income whites are starting to move back into cities. And suburbs are rapidly growing more diverse, as a first destination for immigrants and as a home for lower-income families who have been pushed out of cities. Historically, neighborhoods and public schools in flux rapidly turn over from all-white to all-minority as existing residents perceive property values and the quality of education to decline.
“It’s this vicious self-perpetuated cycle of self-fulfilling prophesies,” says Wells, a professor at the Teachers College at Columbia University. Now, however, we are entering another era of widespread demographic transition, and it’s a moment we might leverage to create the kinds of communities and schools that have evaded America since classrooms began re-segregating.
“There’s this massive tectonic shift of people in metro migration patterns and immigration from other countries,” Wells says. Suburban and urban neighborhoods alike are becoming -- at least for now -- more diverse. “But if you don’t do something to sustain that, then they start to become lopsided in one way or another.”
Middle-class residents moving back into the city are not yet bringing children in droves. But all those young professionals will have children soon.
“Things are so much in flux right now and changing that if we had some vision of what our goals are here around changing demographics in education and neighborhoods,” Wells says, “we could really make some awesome diverse public schools by the time those Millennials have their babies -- in the city or the suburbs.”
Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, perhaps this is a new chance, although it’s one that requires us to think in some very different ways about the role of diversity in what constitutes “good schools,” and the types of policies that will get us there.