- A school choice advocate argues for a student assignment proposal that no longer exists
A school choice advocate argues for a student assignment proposal that no longer exists
Greater Greater Education
By Natalie Wexler
August 11, 2014
An op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post expressed support for a "recently released proposal" that would shift DC from a system of neighborhood schools toward "a geographically broader school assignment process." But that proposal, which DC officials put forward in April, was abandoned months ago in favor of one that would keep neighborhood schools in place.
The op-ed, by the former chief executive of an education reform center in New Orleans, argues that neighborhood schools reinforce geographic patterns of racial and socioeconomic segregation.
The author, Neerav Kingsland, suggests an enrollment system similar to that adopted in New Orleans, where schools serving kindergarten-through-8th-grade students reserve half their seats for neighborhood kids. The other half are open to students from all over the city. At the high school level, all seats are open to all students.
As far as the DC boundary proposals go, Kingsland seems unaware that this particular train has already left the station. Yes, the advisory committee charged with revising the student assignment system did put forward proposals in April that would have shifted away from a neighborhood school system to one in which choice and chance play a larger role.
But, as anyone who has been paying attention to this issue knows, those proposals precipitated a huge outcry of opposition from parents. As a result, the committee released a new proposal in June that embraced the idea of neighborhood schools, albeit with some redrawn boundaries.
Perhaps Kingsland, who apparently doesn't live in DC, can be forgiven for his obliviousness to recent events here. But it's surprising that Post editors were equally oblivious, given that the paper has reported extensively on the controversy over school boundaries.
These days the threat to neighborhood schools comes not from the boundary proposals but rather from DC's burgeoning charter sector. Charter schools, which now serve almost half of DC's students, have fiercely resisted the idea of a neighborhood preference in admissions. Kingsland does refer in passing to that threat, although he sees it more as an opportunity.
On the merits, Kingsland's argument against neighborhood schools underestimates the very factor that induced the advisory committee to back down from its initial proposals: parent opposition. He mentions parents' concerns about the downsides of a non-geographic assignment system—a lack of predictability, long commutes—but says they must be balanced against the segregation inherent in a neighborhood system.
But if middle-class parents dislike a non-neighborhood system so much that they pick up and leave, as many were threatening to do in DC, Kingsland's New Orleans model won't work. Even allocating 50% of seats to neighborhood children wouldn't necessarily provide parents with the guaranteed slots many want.
So instead of achieving the kind of racial and socioeconomic mixing Kingsland envisions, we could end up with a school system entirely composed of those who can't afford to escape it. In fact, that's more or less what DC's public school system did look like until fairly recently.
Kingsland also overlooks the kind of segregation that can occur in an all-choice system, where students tend to sort themselves into different schools based on achievement. That's what seems to be happening in Chicago, which has adopted an all-choice system for its high schools.
Reasonable people can disagree, of course, about the pluses and minuses of neighborhood schools. What they can't disagree about is the fact that the specific proposal Kingsland is advocating for no longer exists.