The Politics of School Integration: A Response to Time Magazine’s Andrew Rotherham
by Richard Kahlenberg
My friend Andrew Rotherham has a column in Time Magazine today that acknowledges the educational achievement benefits of socioeconomic school integration but questions the logistical and political feasibility. The column nicely captures the paradox of integration: there is a consensus on the part of educational researchers that allowing low-income students to attend middle-class schools raises academic achievement and also an unfortunate political consensus that there is not much we can do to encourage the practice. But might that enduring political belief be outdated?
Rotherham’s column, “School Integration: Can’t Use Race, What About Income?” takes as its starting point The Century Foundation’s recently released study finding that in Montgomery County, Maryland, low-income students who had a chance to live in low-poverty neighborhoods and attend low-poverty schools cut the achievement gap with middle-class students by one-half in math and one-third in reading over the course of elementary school. (About two-thirds of the positive effect was due to schooling; one-third to neighborhood.)
Rotherham doesn’t question the findings, noting “it’s well documented that, in general, as the level of poverty increases in a school, academic achievement suffers.” Indeed, research finds that on the fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress in math, low-income students in more affluent schools are two years ahead of low-income students in high poverty schools. The Century Foundation Montgomery County study, authored by RAND researcher Heather Schwartz, is especially powerful because it involved random assignment of students, thus addressing the concern that only the most motivated low-income families end up in middle-class schools
But Rotherham nevertheless raises three sets of objections to efforts to integrate schools by socioeconomic status. Let’s take each one in turn:
1. There are logistical difficulties to connecting low-income students with middle class schools.
Rotherham worries that there is too much distance between low-income students and middle-class schools to make school integration feasible, citing a 2008 Education Sector study suggesting that at most 20 percent of students could transfer from struggling urban schools to better performing suburban ones. But the Montgomery County study involved a policy (housing integration) that directly addresses that concern, by allowing low-income students to both live in middle-class neighborhoods and attend middle-class schools. Moreover, the Education Sector study has been roundly criticized for making arbitrary assumptions about space constraints in middle-class schools. (See here and here) A forthcoming Century Foundation report by University of Texas researchers Meredith Richards, Kori Stroub and Jennifer Holme finds that inter-district choice would increase access for students in failing high-poverty schools quite substantially.
Longstanding experience suggests that low-income students in cities such as Boston, Hartford, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis are willing to endure even long bus rides if what’s at the end of the ride is a superior education. Indeed, some of these programs have lengthy waiting lists of students, whose families sign up when the children are born. Will socioeconomic integration work everywhere? No. But in a middle-class country, we could do much, much more to maximize the number of low-income students attending majority middle-class schools.
2. There are political difficulties to socioeconomic integration.
Aside from logistical concerns, Rotherham questions the political feasibility of socioeconomic integration. He writes: “Parents who are paying high property taxes that often accompany high-performing public schools are zealously protective of access to that amenity.” Of course, this argument violates the education reform movement’s mantra (“it’s about the kids, not the adults.”) Moreover, we’ve learned a great deal about how to integrate schools since compulsory busing in Boston circa 1976. Programs now rely not on mandates but incentives to encourage voluntary integration: special magnet programs to lure middle-class students into schools in low-income areas; and financial incentives for schools in suburban districts to accept low-income transfer students. In St. Louis, for example, Republican suburban legislators have supported a cross-district school integration program because suburban schools receive extra funding when urban students transfer.
Today, 80 school districts nationally use socioeconomic status as a factor in assigning at least some of their students to integrated schools. These districts educate more than 4 million students.
3. Middle-class schools sometimes fail to educate low-income students well, particularly when low-income students are tracked into less demanding classes.
Finally, Rotherham argues that even though low-income students generally do better in more affluent schools, these schools are not “consistently effective at educating low-income students.” pointing to gaps in achievement between different demographic groups within affluent schools. He notes, “students can be segregated within schools as well as between them.” But Schwartz found that in Montgomery County, students were generally tracked into lower reading and math groups and nevertheless they performed at .4 of a standard deviation higher in math than low-income students assigned to higher poverty schools with lots of extra educational programs – smaller class size, extended learning time, and professional development for teachers. Typical educational interventions yield .1 of a standard deviation result or less.
Rotherham points to high performing charter schools as a better solution for low-income students, but themost comprehensive study, funded by pro-charter school advocates, finds that charter schools are twice as likely to underperform comparable public schools as to overperform them. And even the stars – like the Harlem Children’s Zone charters and KIPP – shine much less brightly under closer scrutiny.
Rotherham concludes that “America has spent decades trying different strategies to bring low-income students to good schools,” and now it’s time to “double-down on the most promising efforts to bring good schools to students who need them.” But that formulation has it exactly backwards. We spend all our time trying to make “separate but equal” education work when a long history of experience suggests that separate schools for rich and poor are in fact inherently unequal. The narrow nature of today’s education debate needs to be broadened so that creative – and research-based – efforts to break down barriers between rich and poor schools are put back on the table.
Unfortunately, low-income kids tend to be poorly disciplined, lower-achieving, disruptive and even violent. Therefore, it's only rational that middle-class people with good values would do anything they can not to have their kids mix with these kids.
Fortunately, school enrollment tends to be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, who indeed are "zealously protective of access" to their good schools, and quite capable of foiling the most head-in-the-clouds zany schemes of the anointed liberal philosopher-kings. Happily, we can be sure that liberal integrationist schemes will remain pie-in-the-sky for the foreseeable future, now that the Supreme Court once again reflects the will of the people rather than the will of Ivy League law faculties.
One book says more than a thousand hectoring liberal policy papers: Weissberg, Bad Students, not Bad Schools
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Students-Not-Schools/dp/141281345X/
Posted by: JasonM | October 30, 2010 at 01:07 AM
If we were to really listen to what Jason is saying we would hear bigotry, loud and clear. Did he grow up in a segregated neighborhood of concentrated poverty that made it difficult for his family to provide him with positive role models, safe playgrounds and adequate schools? If not, he should step back and admit that he is unwilling to help those who need it the most - kids that are unlike him. Which type of violence is worse - that of low-income kids, or that of intolerant middle-income adults?
Posted by: MLS | October 30, 2010 at 03:00 AM