The second round of proposals issued by DC’s committee on student assignment backtracks from the idea of lotteries and returns to a system of neighborhood schools. But the new, less radical proposals may actually have a better chance of improving school quality, at least in some parts of the District.

The original impetus for revising school boundaries and feeder patterns was clear: it hasn’t been done since 1968. Much has changed. Some schools, particularly Deal Middle and Wilson High school, are seriously overcrowded, while many others are under-enrolled. Because of school closures, almost a quarter of DC students have the right to attend multiple schools.

But, to the mystification of some, the members of DC Advisory Committee on Student Assignment didn’t limit themselves to fixing overcrowding and correcting irrationalities in the assignment system. They also tried to promote diversity and address inequities in the school system as a whole, through policies designed to distribute middle-class students more widely and break down the isolation of high-poverty schools.

A frequently heard criticism of that now-defunct first round of proposals, and this one as well, is that they don’t address the underlying problem of school quality. But the committee wasn’t charged with addressing that question, and it’s not clear it has either the authority or the expertise to do it.

In fact, the more radical proposals floated by the committee may have been an effort to use assignment policies to jumpstart the process of improving school quality, and they didn’t go over very well.

Two ways to turn around a school

One way to turn around a low-performing school is to bring in a visionary principal, replace the teachers, and introduce partners and programs that will raise quality and test scores. The problem with that approach is that it takes a long time, and success is far from certain.

But another way to improve a school is to change its demographics. Not surprisingly, schools with more affluent students generally have higher test scores and other indicators of quality. And although the research is far from clear, there’s evidence that low-income students who go to school with affluent students do better.

The affluent students do no worse, at least if they’re in the majority. And both sets of students also benefit from going to school with kids from a different socioeconomic group.

While this kind of change sometimes happens naturally as neighborhoods gain more affluent residents, the committee apparently saw an opportunity to try to engineer some of it through its recommendations about student assignment policies. One model for that approach is the citywide lottery system adopted by San Francisco some years ago.

That’s an understandable and even laudable impulse, at least in my view. But perhaps it was politically naïve. Many DC residents made it clear that, dedicated as they may be to the ideals of diversity and equity, they’re more concerned about being sure their kids can go to an excellent school nearby, within walking distance if possible.

The committee, to its credit, listened to what parents were saying, disproving the accusations of skeptics who said it was all a done deal. (San Francisco is now having second thoughts about its system, too, because of complaints from parents.)

Back to original mission

So the committee has now returned to its original mission. The Deal and Wilson boundaries have been shrunk, which should reduce overcrowding. Ideally, the citywide, selective Duke Ellington School of the Arts would have been convinced to vacate its building in Upper Georgetown, allowing for a second neighborhood high school west of the park. But apparently the committee concluded that wasn’t going to be possible.

Many other boundaries have been redrawn, and the committee has made sensible recommendations about ancillary matters as well, such as the criteria for expanding and closing neighborhood schools. It has also called for much-needed cooperation between the traditional and charter public school sectors in planning for those kinds of decisions.

The committee members did not, however, entirely abandon their goals of promoting diversity and reducing inequity. They’ve recommended, for example, that low-income DCPS schools offer guaranteed preschool.

And they are still calling for set-asides for out-of-boundary students at certain grade levels, albeit more modest ones than in the previous proposals. In addition, low-income and other at-risk students would get a preference through the common lottery at schools with relatively few such students. That could ensure some measure of diversity at affluent schools and provide a safety valve for some kids whose neighborhood schools are struggling.

As for more fundamental change in school quality, the less radical proposals that committee members have come up with may ultimately do a better job than lotteries, which could have resulted in an exodus of middle-class families from the District. That would have left the school system with even fewer affluent students than it has now, likely resulting in fewer high-performing schools.

Even if some middle-class parents decided to take their chances with the lottery, it’s not clear how much that would have accomplished in terms of improving schools. To the extent that middle-class families can have a positive effect on the quality of a particular school, there need to be more than just a smattering of them.

High school boundaries

While this round of recommendations clearly won’t improve school quality across the board, it does stand a chance of increasing the number of desirable schools.

The new proposal calls for some high schools, notably Cardozo and Eastern, to undergo significant changes in their boundaries that could bring in more affluent students. Cardozo’s catchment area would move westward to include Adams Morgan, Dupont Circle, Foggy Bottom, and the West End.

And Eastern, located on the eastern edge of Capitol Hill, would no longer have a boundary extending across the Anacostia to the Prince George’s County border. Instead it would extend all the way west, across Capitol Hill to the Potomac.

If the affluent parents within these new boundaries begin to send their kids to these schools in significant numbers, we may well see some changes for the better. While there’s no guarantee that parents will choose to do that, it’s more likely when they know who else is in their catchment area.

When families have a guaranteed destination school, they can start forming alliances with other parents and working to improve the school even before their own kids are enrolled there. And if middle-class parents can foresee a critical mass of middle-class students attending a school, they may well feel more comfortable sending their kids there. The uncertainty inherent in a lottery system makes it difficult, if not impossible, for either of those things to happen.

It’s true that some low-income kids will be pushed out of these improving schools if more middle-class students attend, particularly at Eastern. But the low-income kids who remain will probably benefit.

It’s also true that the new boundary proposals won’t do much for schools east of the Anacostia River, where affluent families have yet to move in significant numbers. But assignment systems, by their nature, are limited in what they can do to improve school quality. For some schools and their students, the hope must lie in the more conventional, if slow and uncertain, path to improvement.

Natalie Wexler is a DC education journalist and blogger. She chairs the board of The Writing Revolution and serves on the Urban Teachers DC Regional Leadership Council, and she has been a volunteer reading and writing tutor in high-poverty DC Public Schools.