Segregation and Seattle Schools

You'd have to be very new to this district to not know we have a fairly regular pattern of segregation in this district.  I will continue to say that I believe it is mainly the result of redlining for decades in Seattle and yet, was probably helped by the district following along.

The district did trying busing in the '70s but my impression is that almost no one was happy.  Just as many high school parents are today arguing against long bus rides for their students because of not having friends in the community, after-school activities and family time, many families back then found busing to have that problem.

With all the flailing around about where HC high school students will go and drawing high school boundaries, there has not been much talk about segregation.  

There have been several new articles on this extended topic (bold mine in all cases). 

 The latest comes from Vox.
We can draw school zones to make classrooms less segregated. This is how well your district does.

It has an interactive element that allows you to see if how our district draws boundaries increases or decreases segregation (spoiler: increases).   The basic premise is if you draw regular type boundaries that largely resemble a box, you'll get more segregation.  Irregular boundaries will decrease segregation.

Also included in that article is the hidden story that charter schools are both increasing segregation within traditional districts and becoming more segregated themselves. 

AP News

Charter schools are among the nation’s most segregated, an Associated Press analysis finds — an outcome at odds, critics say, with their goal of offering a better alternative to failing traditional public schools.

National enrollment data shows that charters are vastly over-represented among schools where minorities study in the most extreme racial isolation. As of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily.

In the AP analysis of student achievement in the 42 states that have enacted charter school laws, along with the District of Columbia, the performance of students in charter schools varies widely. But schools that enroll 99 percent minorities — both charters and traditional public schools — on average have fewer students reaching state standards for proficiency in reading and math.

“Desegregation works. Nothing else does,” said Daniel Shulman, a Minnesota civil rights attorney. “There is no amount of money you can put into a segregated school that is going to make it equal.”

From an excellent column from Brookings by Andre M. Perry:

The Brookings report found that among the racially imbalanced schools, charters stood out as having a much higher representation of black students. Their imbalance rating is roughly four times that of traditional public schools. (You can see how your school compares through this interactive map). Charters didn’t cause segregation, but they sure aren’t helping matters.

We shouldn’t conflate insincere calls for diversity (read: making schools whiter) with demands to topple segregated schools. Schools should get the resources they need, whether middle-class white students attend them or not.

Our fascination with inclusion is inherently corrupt, because it is born of the misconception that whiter schools are better.

But education reform absent an effort to dismantle segregated schools is equally bad. 

To blame teachers, parents, and district bureaucracy (especially when they are black) is to ignore the history of how schools became depressed. 

To dismiss segregation is to accept structural inequality and the status quo.

From the North Carolina News Observer:

Charter schools in North Carolina are more segregated than traditional public schools and have more affluent students. 

Most charters have either a largely white population or a largely minority population, according to a News & Observer analysis. On the whole, charter schools are more white and less Latino than schools run by local districts. 

The original charter law was the product of a bipartisan compromise brokered by a House Republican and a Senate Democrat. The requirements for racial and ethnic diversity were the authors’ response to worries of charter opponents that the schools would cherry-pick the best students, said former Rep. Steve Wood, the Republican who negotiated the law. 

A federal district court judge has decided that Gardendale – a predominantly white city in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama – can move forward in its effort to secede from the school district that serves the larger county. The district Gardendale is leaving is 48 percent black and 44 percent white. The new district would be almost all white.

As in many other cases over the past two decades, the judge conceded to resegregation, speculating that if she stopped the move, innocent parties would suffer: Black students who stayed in Gardendale would be made to feel unwelcome and those legitimately seeking educational improvements would be stymied.
Simply put, the judge could not find an upside to blocking secessionists whom she herself characterized as racially motivated.

Darrell Allison, executive director of the pro-school choice group Parents for Educational Freedom, said comparing traditional and charter schools creates a distorted picture because charters don’t have the resources districts do to create diverse schools. 

Lack of transportation is an impediment to students whose parents don’t have cars or have work schedules that prevent them from driving their children to school.

Parental choice drives charter enrollment, he said. Some charters are mostly made up of black students because black parents seek out schools that are run by African-Americans, or those that employ black male teachers, Allison said.

“We have to take into consideration where we are as a society,” he said. “We talk to a number of families of color, where 70 percent or higher are single-parent. They are actively looking for good educational institutions. They are also looking for Afro-American role models, particularly for their Afro-American boys.”

Another troubling turn of events; schools within districts collectively wanting to secede from their  district. 

From Daily Kos:

In May, a report by released by UCLA's Civil Rights Project and Penn State University's Center for Education and Civil Rights confirmed that school segregation in the South is on the rise, with more black and Latino students attending intensely segregated, high-poverty schools than in the past several decades. 

It’s easy to assume this can be attributed to systemic inequality—the rise of charter schools, poor funding to the most needy schools, white flight to the suburbs, and increasingly segregated neighborhoods. All of this is true, but it can also be attributed to a rising phenomenon occurring all across the country: smaller communities seceding away from larger school districts in order to form smaller, wealthier, and whiter ones. In this way, school segregation persists, with white parents who have some financial means doing their best to create borders around their schools that keep poor black and brown students out.

This is how we know that America is truly an individualistic society. Rather than share resources to make sure poor kids get educated, wealthy parents in this country would rather wall themselves in to make sure their kids only mix and mingle with other wealthy kids.

This is not only damaging to poor kids’ well-being and future success, leaving them with no other options but failing schools, it’s also not good for wealthy kids in the long run. Studies show that there are tremendous benefits to socioeconomically and racially diverse schools—including the reduction of racial bias, increased college enrollment and lowered drop out rates, increased critical thinking and problem solving skills, and improved intellectual self-confidence. These are assets for students of all backgrounds and colors. 
  
Since 2000, 70 other communities have tried to secede from their district, according to [a recent EdBuild report.] Two-thirds of those of those secession attempts have been successful, and most of the other cases are still ongoing. [Rebecca Sibilia, from EdBuild who studies school secession] points out that some of these secession efforts are logical, like the one in California’s San Fernando Valley. But many of the proposed school borders are along socioeconomic lines, and they would further isolate poor children in segregated schools.

From Time

The breaking away of school districts is a related phenomenon, one that has frustrated the work of integration by appealing to smaller local concerns over grander public ones. More and more, parents see a school in the context of what it can achieve for their child: Education for all has lost out to Princeton for mine.

The Century Foundation concluded that only about “8 percent of all public school students currently attend school districts or charter schools that use socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment.” The report’s tone was hopeful, because while the number of districts around country that consciously practiced class integration was a paltry 91 out of more than 13,000, that’s more than double what it was in 2007.

The Supreme Court’s most severe blow since Milliken came in 2007, in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 case, in which it prohibited the use of “explicit racial classifications” in school admissions. Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." By conflating integration with discrimination, Roberts effectively reversed Brown v. Board.

But

There is another Jefferson County, in another Southern state, that has done things very differently than Jefferson County, Alabama. The one in Kentucky includes the city of Louisville and its proximal suburbs, and a school district that educates 100,000 children.

It does so in a rare big-city system that considers racial integration a crucial goal. And it has done so even after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in the Parents Involved case, which forbade Jefferson County from using race as the determining factor for school assignments. The system’s administrators came up with a formula that used socioeconomic status instead. While some students travel long distances on buses, the result is that the schools have remained racially balanced.

Donna Hargens, the system’s superintendent, told me the push for diversity has to be combined with choice, so that parents don’t feel as if they’re being railroaded into integration. Magnet schools are “absolutely essential,” she says, presumably because they signal a commitment to excellence; Hartford, Connecticut, also relies on magnet schools in its much-praised integration plan, which pulls in students from the wealthy white suburbs that surround the impoverished urban core. As a sign of enthusiasm for integration, Hargens cited the finding that 42 percent of parents do not choose the closest school for their children.