Posts about Diversity

DC is splitting into 2 separate school systems

For the past decade, more and more children who live in boundary for some traditional public schools, particularly west of Rock Creek Park, have wanted to enroll. The result has been a network of high-quality and popular local elementary schools—Janney, Key, LaFayette, Hyde-Addison, Murch, and so on—feeding into strong middle schools and ultimately into Wilson High School.

The Wilson boundary runs along 16th Street, next to the park that is re-dividing the city into the educational haves on the west and charter lottery applicants on the east. There are a few exceptions, like schools on Capitol Hill, or Ross Elementary in Dupont Circle, but even in these neighborhoods, most families leave DCPS after elementary school because they're not yet comfortable enough with the middle and high schools.

For decades, this boundary mattered far less as schools west of the park had spare capacity for many students east of the park in the out-of-boundary lottery. However, rising in-boundary enrollment west of the park will soon make bus trips across the park a thing of the past.

Wilson High was designed to serve 400 students per grade. Yet there are 750 4th grade students in the schools that feed into Wilson.

In much of the rest of the city, the local elementary school, anchor and civic space of the community, is too becoming a relic. As school closures due to under-enrollment eviscerate the institution of the neighborhood school, car and bus trips criss-crossing the city to charters are increasing in number.

Meanwhile, middle and high schools east of the park struggle to coordinate programming with schools in their feeder patterns as schools open and close and students come and go in droves.

These two public school systems are as separate as they could possibly be. Are they equal?

Is separation a problem?

Should we worry about this? Some, such as perhaps the Washington Post editorial board, might say there's not a problem. If one type of schools works well in some neighborhoods, but is failing in others, why not keep it where it's working and ditch it where it's not? Maybe we need a completely different educational approach for the poorest neighborhoods versus the richest.

However, even education experts still don't agree about whether a system of all charters will actually work better. Charter school critics repeatedly point to studies that show charter schools do not, on the whole, deliver better results than do traditional public schools. Of course, parents across the city know several charter schools that deliver amazing results.

The Public Charter School Board is supposed to address this problem by closing under-performing charter schools. However, they have been more likely to give charters extensions of time to improve. If that works, perhaps that is wise, but there's a real danger it just means more under-performing schools linger for years while doing their students a real disservice.

As out-of-boundary students get pushed out of the most desirable schools, many of them become less diverse. Many wealthier families choosing between public and private school cite diversity, both ethnic, income, and otherwise, as a major advantage of public education. And one of the best ways to help students with disadvantaged backgrounds is to include them in schools with many higher-performing peers.

Having 2 separate school systems could also create political problems. If there is one system that serves rich neighborhoods, and another service the poor neighborhoods, would well-meaning parents in the wealthier and more politically powerful neighborhoods lobby for more funding for traditional public education and inadvertently disadvantage less affluent areas? Or would politicians from the poorer wards of the District end up opposing DCPS's needs? A battle for resources between the haves and have-nots is not what we need, regardless of how it turns out.

From a transportation standpoint, it's not great to have most kids riding buses or being driven long distances to charter schools that might be nowhere near their neighborhoods, if there can be a good alternative nearby.

It's not like residents of the poorest wards want to abolish all of their neighborhood schools. Staffers for Councilmember Marion Barry explained that most of their constituents want neighborhood schools to stay open, to improve and succeed.

What can be done?

Both traditional public schools and charter schools clearly have important roles to play in our public school system. Few deny that. The question is, how do their roles fit together such that we don't end up with separate and unequal school systems?

For one, there needs to be leadership at a high level to reconcile these two systems. DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson will come in for the most strident and vocal criticism of the school closures. This is unfortunate, as she only controls DCPS.

It's difficult to fault Henderson for closing schools left under-enrolled by students leaving for charters. What is the alternative—keep many mostly-empty schools around?

The Deputy Mayor for Education and the DC Council are the bodies that should be thinking about the public school system as a whole, not Chancellor Henderson. Yet both bodies claim organizational impotence. The result is that no one is leading our public school system.

Second, these leaders need to think about this problem and explore ways to address it. For the more successful schools, they could consider a "controlled choice" system, which Michael Petrilli mentioned when interviewed for a recent Washington Post article, and which David Alpert discussed in a series of articles this year.

A related idea on the other side, which Councilmember Tommy Wells has been pushing and I previously discussed, is to give children who live near a non-specialized charter school a preference to attend. Charters would set aside some percentage of their spots for in-boundary families.

This would engage charters in the struggles of their community. While many charters will object that they need parents who are committed to their program, these objections miss the point of charter autonomy. Autonomy is supposed to be autonomy from the bureaucracy and red-tape of DC Public Schools, not autonomy from the educational challenges that students in one neighborhood present.

Ideas such as these for aligning and situating our two public school systems for the good of the entire system come up periodically from isolated councilmembers, advocates, and in the press. It's time for someone to rise to the moment, and forestall a return to separate and unequal school systems in the nation's capital.

Raleigh found that the 35% threshold was a good one to include many kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who could benefit from being a part of a school with more privileged kids, but not so much as to create overconcentration and diminish the outcomes for the highest-performing students.

Should DC set a similar goal?

There are essentially 2 ways to include out-of-boundary, poorer children in the most exclusive public schools: make the schools bigger, and entice some in-boundary families to go elsewhere.

The old status quo was essentially that not enough families felt the school was "good enough" and therefore opted out of public education, making room, but that's ending.

One option is to add more school capacity, creating new space for out-of-boundary kids. Mary Cheh has secured funding to expand Deal Middle School, and is pushing for a new middle school in Ward 3. If there were more and larger schools to fit more kids, then there would again be out-of-boundary spaces.

Some argued, when Wilson High School was being modernized, that it was good to keep the school smaller. In part, the reason was to avoid having a huge high school that could become impersonal, but there was another oft-cited reason: if not all families who want to go to Wilson can, some will go to others, like Eastern, and in doing so make that a better school. Eastern, at Stadium-Armory, does not yet have many well-off families sending kids there, but that is poised to change.

There might be ways to avoid just having another Ward 3 school draw the well-off families from Capitol Hill; for example, DC could dedicate some of the new capacity explicitly to kids in the free or reduced-price lunch program. This would resemble Raleigh's program of explicitly fostering income diversity.

Should specialized or magnet programs migrate eastward?

The second possibility is to create programs that woo families from exclusive schools to go elsewhere. Specialized schools and magnet programs might do this. What if a new technology-focused graduate program at Saint Elizabeths also included a high school component, either at the campus or in one of the nearby schools? Montgomery Blair's nationally-known science and technology program is in Silver Spring, and at one time, Silver Spring was not quite the highly desirable place it is today.

Some of DC's current specialized programs are actually located in some of the most desirable locations. Hardy, in Glover Park, has a specialized arts program. Duke Ellington is an arts-focused high school and is in Georgetown. School Without Walls is in Foggy Bottom; that's because it's affiliated with GW.

Should any of these programs move? When Michelle Rhee reassigned Hardy principal Patrick Pope, the initial objective was to create an arts-focused middle school somewhere else that could draw from the entire city, and let Hardy evolve into more of a neighborhood school.

Should Ellington always stay in Georgetown? Most of its students aren't from the immediate area, and it's not the most transit-accessible location. Could Ellington go into an undersubscribed school building, boosting that school and getting the school closer to more of its students, and making room for a school west of Rock Creek to relieve Wilson?

Certainly, DC already has some of this. McKinley Technology High School is in Eckington. Phelps Architecture, Construction and Engineering High School is in Carver-Langston. However, these haven't (yet, at least) created such demand to uncrowd the upper Northwest schools.

Magnet programs could explicitly include kids from the area

If some of the most desirable programs were located in less privileged parts of the District, having the eastward draw would inherently free up space in competitive schools. DC could also consider ensuring that at least some (perhaps about a third) lower-income kids from the surrounding area can go to the competitive school.

Columbia University created a specialized school which included many children of faculty, and quickly became in high demand. However, Columbia also set aside a number of spots for kids living in the immediate neighborhood, which around Columbia are very diverse.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the top magnet school, Booker T. Washington, is in the worst part of town. It draws from all sections of the city, but also has an extra preference for kids from the 2 feeder schools in that area, whose students are almost all lower-income. Not every kid from those feeders gets in, but more do than if the admissions only looked at test scores.

What steps do you think DC could take to foster diversity while also maintaining and even increasing the educational quality of its schools?

Creating a community that crosses racial and class lines is no small feat and nobody would claim that Wilson has completely succeeded in that effort, but it is at least a place where everybody is present and there is an ongoing effort to do so. If we are ever going to overcome our divisions, we need to do just that—try. And, if we don't do it in our schools, the odds of doing it at later stages of life can only diminish.

Social scientists no doubt can offer measurements of how education in a setting of diversity enhances learning, but for us, the proof is in our kids. Their mix of friends and acquaintances. Their ease with people from different backgrounds. Their excitement about the culture and various cultures at their school. They clearly savor and take pride in their experience and have learned very important things from it.

Candice Santomauro wrote in EdExcellence.net about sending her white child to a school that was otherwise entirely African-American:

Every day after school, as she'd happily bound into my office, blond hair streaming, confident, I'd ask the obligatory, "How was school today?" although what I really wanted to ask was, "Are you OK with being the only white kid?" She seemed either not to notice or not to care. Having grown up myself in an ethnically, culturally, and socio-economically diverse Los Angeles suburb, I hoped she would have a similar experience. I wasn't sure though, if this was pushing it a bit. Finally after a few weeks, I had to ask. She responded, "Mom, we're all just kids." Oh, right. Out of the mouths of babes.

In previous parts, we talked about how the peer group can influence a student's performance. For lower-performing kids, going to school with others who perform better can make a positive difference. Teachers might set higher standards and push kids to achieve more, and their peers would encourage success instead of mock or bully those who work hard.

Therefore, besides the value wealthier parents might find in sending their kids to a diverse school, lower-income kids benefit from the arrangement as well.

Is diversity ephemeral?

Look at the trends in DC public schools, however, and diversity doesn't look so likely.

In the most high-performing schools in the wealthiest neighborhoods, public schools are becoming "good enough" that many parents want to send their kids there, but that means no more spots for out-of-boundary kids.

Mary Cheh has introduced a bill to redraw the school boundaries. That will almost surely shrink the boundary of popular schools like Deal Middle School. Wilson High's enormous boundary, which covers almost all of DC west of 16th Street and even much of Southwest, will probably get smaller as well.

The boundary isn't the only factor determining who goes to a school. DCPS also has a system of "feeder" schools, where all kids from elementary school can go to the same middle school, and so on for high school. It's possible some elementary schools will stop feeding Deal; Bancroft in Mount Pleasant and Shepherd in Shepherd Park are geographically most distant of Deal's feeders. But this would only exacerbate the segregation if Ward 3 middle and high schools become primarily places to educate Ward 3 residents.

Hardy Middle School in Georgetown is still very diverse racially, but not as much on income; some have charged that the former principal was deliberately trying not to attract local families, but also trying to weed out poor children. There are many schools on the cusp of drawing residents who might otherwise move or send kids to private school, often in gentrifying neighborhoods.

Diversity also often seems short-lived. At Ross Elementary in Dupont Circle, for instance, the school is about one-third white, one-third black, and one-third Hispanic, but that doesn't mean every class is an even mix; the younger grades are far whiter, the older grades far less, as the school's rising reputation drew more of the local residents and their kids. Incoming classes, with no space for out-of-boundary kids, are the least diverse.

As for charters, we already can see that charter schools almost entirely serve people from the eastern side of the District. This makes sense, as some charter programs like KIPP have demonstrated greater success with lower-income kids than other approaches. But is the end of this road one where wards 7 and 8 have no neighborhood schools at all, just charters?

Do we want a world where DCPS is a system that caters only to upper-income neighborhoods, and a totally separate charter system serves DC's poorer neighborhoods? Where some schools are entirely filled with students from well-off families and other schools only serve the poor, where despite going to school in a very diverse city, few children actually interact with anyone from a different background?

How important do you think diversity is in schools? Should DC try to foster greater diversity?