More districts use income, not race, as basis for busing

Note: Several friends have now sent this to me, and it seems very topical in light of our redistricting discussions, so I'm posting it even though it isn't about Amherst specifically.

November 1, 2009
By Jordan Schrader
USA TODAY

Struggling to improve schools that have large populations of poor and minority students and under legal pressure to avoid racial busing, a small but growing group of school districts are integrating schools by income.

More than 60 school systems now use socioeconomic status as a factor in school assignments, says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which studies income inequality. Students in Champaign, Ill.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; and Louisville have returned this year to income-based assignments.

"To the extent we can eliminate the highest concentrations of poverty or spread more thinly those concentrations of poverty, I think we make the environment a little less challenging for students and staff to be successful," says Kalamazoo Public Schools Superintendent Michael Rice.

School leaders, though, can encounter backlash from parents of children whose school assignments take them out of their neighborhoods.

Supporters of economic diversity policies hold up the school system in Wake County, N.C., as a national example, but voters who came out for a recent school board election turned against it.

The district's goal is for none of its 159 schools in Raleigh and its suburbs to have more than 40% of its student body eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

That's a goal a third of schools haven't reached in recent years, but Wake County schools still are more economically integrated than others in the state and nation, Kahlenberg says. Magnet schools pull some suburban children into the city; others' reassignments are mandatory.

But opponents of mandatory busing gained a majority on the Wake County school board in the Oct. 6 election.

Parents such as Joe Ciulla, who works for a technology company and lives in suburban Cary, say long bus rides harm children, and distance keeps parents from involvement at school. Low-income families are hit especially hard, he says.

"They take these poor kids who are struggling and do their very best to spread them around and create the appearance of healthy schools," says Ciulla, whose group, the Wake Schools Community Alliance, helped elect four candidates pushing for neighborhood schools.

Wake County bused students for decades based on race but switched in 2000 to considering income, one of the first in the nation to do so.

If the policy were ended, teacher Paulette Jones Leaven – who as a black child in the 1960s attended segregated schools until sixth grade – says she knows what would happen.

"We would return to segregated schools," says the in-school suspension coordinator at Carroll Middle School.

Jones Leaven notes statistics that show 96% of students go to school less than 10 miles from home as the crow flies.

Studies show low-income students do better in middle-class schools, Kahlenberg says. He says that's borne out in Wake County, where both poor and middle-class students have mostly outperformed their peers in other urban North Carolina districts – though scores have slipped lately.

He hopes Wake County will find a middle ground, perhaps like Cambridge, Mass., whose diversity plan offers a greater degree of choice for parents.

Assignment schemes in other communities vary. Champaign assigns children to elementary schools using individual factors such as parents' incomes and education levels, Assistant Superintendent Beth Shepperd says.

Prodded by a 2007 Supreme Court decision that limited how districts could use race, Kentucky's Jefferson County Public Schools moved to assignments that consider a neighborhood's economic status, minority population and adult education levels, says Sheldon Berman, its superintendent.

Either way, Kahlenberg predicts the Wake County election won't be a preview of backlash across the USA. Most areas don't have the explosive growth in student population that has made school reassignments in the county so common, he says.

Schrader reports for the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times.