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Friday, September 8, 2023

Can district school choice help desegregate?

Spoiler alert: probably not.

The answers come from a piece of research by Rachel M. Perera, Deven Carlson, Thurston Domina, James Carter III, Andrew McEachin, and Vitaly Radsky and published way back in March of this year.

The paper has some limitations, the largest of which is that it's a study of a single school district, the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina. 

The team, in a layperson write-up for their work on Brookings, suggests there are three big takeaways from their study.

Finding #1: Residential segregation significantly constrained WCPSS’s desegregation initiative

In other words, it's hard to beat the segregation-by-housing that defines a community. When Wake schools started out by assigning students a "base" school--basically the neighborhood school that geography pointed to-- the result was segregation.

Not a new insight--a lot of our school segregation problems are simply the result of tying school attendance areas to housing. That has gotten worse as districts gerrymander both their own borders and the borders of attendance areas. Wake's system for desegregating didn't really escape this issue.

Could a district set up a system that scrubbed the ties to housing? Perhaps, though such initiatives often result in complaints about letting "those kids" into "our schools."

Finding #2: Most families enrolled their kindergartners in their assigned base school

Other research has shown that families have a tendency to favor geographical convenience over most other factors. There's the issue of convenience, the desire for a neighborhood school. There's fact that choosing the default option doesn't turn school selection into a major undertaking. 

Some choicers have long held the dream of families researching and carefully weighing their options by studying their market options. But the fact is that lots of people don't like studying their market options, especially if they have neither the expertise or time or confidence to do so. 

Researching market options for anything can be a part time job all by itself. That's particularly true when you're bucking asymmetric information--the situation where the people vying for your money have far more information than you do, and are not sharing that information but are instead flooding the area with marketing. It's enough to make you throw up your hands and mutter, "Whatever. Just give me the default."

But the  interesting finding here is that the majority chose their default base school even Wake tried nudging the process by redrawing the lines of assignment of base schools, suggesting that choice was not the most critical part of desegregation, but was useful as a way to "soften" the re-assignment ("If you hate your new base school, you still have some other choices.")

Finding #3: If you give families segregating options, they’ll take them

Here, again, is one of the central problem of school desegregation-- lots of people like segregation, as demonstrated by uncounted vast numbers of shameful incidents and policies. School choice got its first big boost as a tool for segregation. District lines have been drawn to create segregation. The list goes on and on.

In this particular study, the researchers found that the more Black students in a base school, the less likely Asian or white families would choose those schools. Black and Latino families' decisions were unrelated to schools' racial makeup.

Segregation is bad for us as a culture, a society, a nation. School segregation is made even worse because it is so commonly accompanied by a segregation of resources-- it's not that we have Those Peoples' Children pushed into that school over there, but that we then make sure that school has fewer resources, less funding, less support. 

Choice over where to live. Choice over where to draw neighborhood lines. Choice over where to draw district lines. Separate but equal has always been a lie, and versions of "choice" have always been used to perpetuate that lie. This study is just one more data point in a familiar picture. 

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