Neighborhood Schools, Diversity, and Upward Mobility

A new elementary school will open in my city next fall, and the boundary option hearings were heated and contentious. I discovered in the December issue of Population Research and Policy Review that advocacy for “neighborhood schools” is often in tension with efforts to maintain desegregation effects in public schools. The article pointed to San Francisco, which took the unprecedented step of taking a citywide vote on whether to start prioritizing neighborhood schools. The ballot measure was defeated by less than 1,000 votes, and so the city’s policy continues to maintain a strong focus on integration, at least for now.

Parents in my community of Montgomery County, MD, are as deeply divided as the voting population of San Francisco. Both areas also share a great deal of racial diversity. Montgomery Country has been majority-minority since 2000, and poverty doesn’t fall neatly along racial lines. But wealth is the new fault line for family inequality, with inequality increasing and prospects for upward mobility decreasing.

Building a new elementary school requires that the attendance boundaries be redrawn. The PTA at my daughters’ school sent around an email advocating for community: keeping neighborhoods together and maximizing the numbers of children who could walk to school, thereby enhancing participation in school life.

Although those are laudable goals, I was taken aback by the email because it arrived while I—a PTA member—was preparing a testimony for the next hearing in which I took a different position. I’m a social science researcher who knows that lower-income students benefit from attending low-poverty schools. Work done on our own county indicates that low-income students attending schools where less than 20% of students are eligible for Free And Reduced-price Meals (FARMs) had substantially higher math test scores after just three years of attendance than low-income students attending schools where poverty was more concentrated. Low-income students accrued an advantage more slowly in schools where the FARMs rate was less than 25-30%, and there was no performance difference at all between low-income students attending schools with less than 35% of peers eligible for FARMs and up to 85% eligible.

Just over 20% of students in my daughters’ elementary school are eligible for Free And Reduced-price Meals, and our PTA was backing a boundary option that would drop the FARMs rate at our school to 7.5%.

The authors of the San Francisco study performed a spatial analysis of the voting for the 2011 ballot measure. This allowed them to describe the characteristics of census tracts that had favored “neighborhood schools” and those supporting desegregation efforts. It is hardly surprising that those in higher-income census tracts and those in tracts close to quality schools favored neighborhood schools. Similarly, tracts with high percentages of Latinos voted to preserve more integrative student assignment. But tracts with high percentages of African Americans were not more likely to vote against promoting neighborhood schools, an effect that authors surmise might be linked to a movement trying to establish quality schools in all neighborhoods.

My interpretation of these voting patterns is that, all else being equal, everybody would choose neighborhood schools for their convenience and for the sake of community—but all else is not equal because poverty is not equal across neighborhoods. What to do about it is far from clear: some parents that would be disadvantaged by geographically-based student assignment want to keep an integrative policy, while others seem to want to change the consequences associated with residential inequality by promoting school equality (investing in quality schools everywhere). Although the evidence supports the idea that quality schools are not enough—that there are additional benefits to low-income students attending schools where the bulk of their peers come from more advantaged backgrounds—I understand why the father sitting next to me at the hearing didn’t want his child to ride the bus past two good elementary schools to get to a third good elementary school “just for the sake of balancing the FARMs rate.”

I came down on the side of stacking the deck in favor of low-income students, i.e., having them attend schools with 20-25% of low-income peers whenever possible. But I don’t think my community-advocating neighbors are a bunch of elitists who didn’t want their property values to go down because a higher FARMs rate typically correlates with a worse rating at greatschool.org. Instead, the San Francisco research helped me see them as a group of parents who advocated for the advantages associated with natural boundaries—parents who likely assumed that socioeconomic diversity was a relatively unimportant issue in an area as diverse as ours. It is hard to understand why socioeconomic integration matters more than the length of bus rides in our already diverse community.

The authors of the San Francisco study viewed the narrow defeat of the measure that would have prioritized neighborhood schools as evidence that shifting demographics will make promoting socioeconomic inclusiveness difficult—even in a city with a historically progressive schooling policy. I think they are right: in Montgomery County, the Board of Education ultimately adopted a boundary option that prioritized neighborhood schools over socioeconomic inclusiveness. The FARMs rate at my daughters’ current elementary school will drop as a result, and that means that a school that was doing a good job of serving low-income students will serve fewer of them in the future. As a family researcher, I find that depressing because one of the more promising avenues for upward mobility for low-income children is for the poverty in their schools to be less concentrated than the poverty in their neighborhoods.

Laurie DeRose is a Research Assistant Professor at the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland at College Park, where she has served since its inception in 2001. She is also Director of Research for the World Family Map project.

Editor’s Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.