What’s The Deal About School Choice?
We’re having a conversation in our neighborhood this week about picking a public school. The meeting is entitled, “Public School Choice: Navigating Choices Within Dallas ISD”, and I was struck by how the idea of ‘navigating choices’ when it comes to public schools comes with subtext and implicit messages that parents quickly pick up.
The conversation about school choice is largely framed around making public schools more attractive to parents who have the agency to make a choice. And the common perception that drives the need for choice is that many of our traditional neighborhood schools are failing. This message is reinforced by sites like GreatSchools.org that do little more than take standardized test scores and spit out a ranking on a 1–10 scale.
But what is too often missing in these conversations is frank, honest conversation about the role of race and class on white parents decision making processes regarding schools — even when parents aren’t even fully conscious of it.
Two threads on Twitter recently really accentuated this point, and I think they are both worth reading and considering in the context of talking about school choice.
The first was written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer for the New York Times and recent recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant. Hannah-Jones writes nearly exclusively on the impact of segregation on our public schools, including a great profile of her own process of picking a school for her daughter. Hannah-Jones was also featured on one of the best This American Life episodes that I’ve ever heard.
The second thread was written by Dana Goldstein, who is an education reporter for the New York Times. She has been covering the efforts by the relatively new New York City Schools Chancellor, Richard Carranza, to desegregate what some call the most segregated school system in America. Carranza, who was formerly the Superintendent of Houston ISD, has been very outspoken over the last 6 months about his desire to change how students qualify for magnet school as part of a larger effort to create more opportunity specifically for black and Latinx students. Goldstein profiled these efforts in a widely shared article, and her Twitter thread was in response to comments she got from readers and parents.
If parents are engaging in conversations about school choice, I hope they take into account the larger context of the system they are navigating, because it isn’t just our own kids who are impacted.
From Nikole Hannah Jones’ Twitter thread, September 5, 2018:
Yesterday, I tweeted out @DanaGoldstein compelling profile of @DOEChancellor and the battle for integration in NYC. If you haven’t read it, you should read it and this thread. But I think it is critical to emphasize — segregation is not, and never has been, about test scores.Test scores today function as a convenient proxy for race (and poverty) that give convenient cover to white, middle-class parents who in reality simply do not want to enroll their children in schools with lots of black children. The evidence on this is pretty clear. White parents say test scores (as proxy for a school’s academic strength) are the most important thing, but research shows that the race of the kids at the school — particularly percent black — actually trumps test scores in their decisions of where to enroll their kids. A study of white parents using web sites to research schools show they reject out of hand heavily black schools or schools located in black neighborhoods, even as they deny that race matters in school selection. As research shows “race overwhelms other factors.” Here is the ugliest truth — in my book research I’ve found arguments against desegregation before and immediately following Brown were about test scores and how integration would hurt the intellectual growth of white children. They ARE IDENTICAL to the arguments white parents make today. The truth is, race is actually the proxy for school quality, not test scores — because white parents correlate even a 2 percent increase in black students with a decline in school quality. All the facts on how integration does not harm white kids won’t do a thing about that. This is why it’s hard to believe this problem — of segregation, of unequal educational opportunities for black children — will ever be solved. Even the most progressive, supposedly believing-in-racial-justice white folks don’t want their children in school with a lot of black kids. And they’d put their kids in an objectively inferior school to avoid having their child in a school with a lot of black kids. There’s reason why the only wide-scale desegregation we’ve seen in the US has been forced. It’s doubtful wide-scale desegregation will happen in NYC voluntarily, either.
From Dana Goldstein’s Twitter thread , September 5, 2018
I’ve gotten a lot of emails and comments on my piece published yesterday, many of which want to debate the relationship between desegregation and student achievement. I want to share some facts and some thoughts. Nobody who has studied this issue believes there is something magic about seating white/middle-class kids next to non-white/poor kids. But advantaged children come with: PTA funding, the political power and social connections of their parents, and effective teachers. Effective teachers often avoid the highest poverty schools, which tend to suffer from high administrative turnover, lack of resources, and other endemic problems. Comment section of the piece features an old saw: parents saying they wouldn’t let their own children’s test scores suffer by sending them to a school where scores are low. Every piece of evidence suggests your kid’s test scores wouldn’t be low if they went to that school.Why? An effective school will grow the achievement of most kids, whether they start out low, middle, or high scoring. Good teaching DOES make a difference. But the *overwhelming* contributors to student achievement are family and neighborhood factors. Research shows those factors include family income, neighborhood demographics, parental educational attainment, educational expectations within the home, books within the home, and home language. If you’re a parent, how should you look at test scores? Look for growth — is the school moving different demographic groups forward? Kids who qualify for free lunch and those who don’t? White and non-white? Disabled and non-disabled? My colleague @nhannahjones has pointed out that lack of knowledge about research doesn’t drive resistance to integration — racism does. Still, even after doing this job for 12+ years, I want to keep sharing these facts, hoping they help at least some revisit assumptions. I don’t feel romantic about desegregation. I attended desegregated schools with loads of problems and internal tracking. In my job, I talk to folks regularly who feel passionately that segregated schools give kids of color more respect, voice and cultural affirmation. But I’m a reporter and I have to call it like I see it. I travel all over America, from Des Moines to rural N.C. to suburban Arizona, and rarely see systems as segregated as the one we have here in my hometown, NYC. I’m a parent and will never take lightly the decision of where to send my child to school. Neither should you. But I hope we can at least examine how these choices are made, who has a choice, and what impact our choices have on others.
If you are interested in learning more about the topic of integration, I suggest looking at IntegratedSchools.org as a resource. The organization was started by a woman named Courtney Mykytyn, who I read about in an article that was published by CityLab. She’s encouraging parents across the country to start local chapters, and I’m in the early stages of starting the Integrated Schools Dallas chapter. If you are interested in getting involved, you can find the Facebook page here.
