I thought I had found a sliver of common ground.
Late last week, when I read the Century Foundation’s new report, “Housing Policy is School Policy,” it seemed the study made a compelling argument in favor of socio-economic school integration. Finally, I thought, an education issue upon which my friends in the progressive camp and I can agree. What a relief. It still feels strange to me to be locked in what seems like endless disagreement with people on the left.
So maybe we can agree on this. After all, one argument some local progressives use against charter schools and the brand of parental choice they represent is that they foster segregation. I don’t agree with that; but integration is a core value for me, so I appreciate the impulse to integration implied in the critique.
But now, after reading an article by a progressive blogger highly critical of the study, I have to wonder. More about that article below. First, a snapshot of the Century Foundation study. You can read a cogent synopsis of the study here.
If you don’t feel like clicking on a link, here is a 10-second summary.
The study examines Montgomery County, Md., an affluent suburban county adjacent to Washington, D.C. The county had the foresight in 1976 to pass an inclusionary zoning law, requiring new housing developments to include homes affordable to people of moderate means. It also required those developments to set aside one-third of the subsidized homes for the local public housing authority, opening developments to very low income families.
Century Foundation researcher Heather Schwartz examined seven years worth of longitudinal data for 850 Montgomery County students who live in that set-aside public housing. Schwartz found that in math especially, low-income students attending more affluent schools performed well enough to narrow achievement gaps considerably. Reading gaps narrowed as well, but did not reach statistical significance.
This study represents one of the most methodologically rigorous and compelling arguments for socio-economic school integration ever published. Montgomery County is not the perfect proving ground, because there are no very high poverty schools there. So the basis of comparison is how low-income students do in very affluent schools versus moderately affluent ones. Still, the data are compelling.
So when I read Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss’ piece dismissing the study, I felt depressed. What is Strauss’ beef? She has a couple. First, the study suggests that schools can play a huge role in mitigating the effects of poverty on student achievement. It’s a societal problem, Strauss argues, requiring a broader response. Don’t pin all the responsibility on schools. And second, she says, standardized tests are a lousy measure of student learning.
“It’s not JUST the school. That’s not to say that schools don’t matter. Of course they do. Kids who attend schools that are well-resourced, well-managed and well-staffed are bound to perform better than kids who attend schools that aren’t, and, the more troubled schools in our country are almost always found in high-poverty areas.
“And, of course, integration of neighborhoods and schools should be seen as rooted in the country’s core values.
“But the stubborn fact remains that without attacking the roots of poverty, we will never close the stubborn achievement gap. Putting poor kids in middle-class schools will help some of them, and that’s a good thing, but the real answer is alleviating poverty…
“We can build zillions of charter schools and give standardized tests to kids every day of the week and fire tons of teachers and close a lot of traditional public schools.
“Our problems won’t go away in education because we still will be ignoring the obvious.”
This is why it’s so hard to find common ground. We can’t talk about the issue in front of us, even an important one like the benefits of socio-economic integration, without someone twisting it back to a subject at best only tangentially related.
Yes, we should attack the root causes of poverty. But has there been a society in all of human history that has been successful in that endeavor? The answer, of course, is no. So doesn’t it make sense to make every effort to mitigate the effects of poverty at the same time we’re playing Sisyphus?
By the way, I’ve gotten mirror-image arguments against focusing on integration from people on the other side of the issue. “Well of course integration would be nice, in a fantasy world,” they say. “But since we now have some school models that prove high-poverty schools can succeed, why absorb the brain damage involved in trying to promote integration?”
Sigh.
In any event, formulating housing policy in and around Denver to promote school integration would be a huge uphill battle. Denver has had an inclusionary zoning ordinance since 2002, but it is watery gruel compared to the Montgomery County law, according to researcher (and former Albuquerque mayor) David Rusk, who has studied Denver and Montgomery County extensively. And the business community raised a major ruckus about even that relatively weak law.
Under Denver’s ordinance, Rusk wrote in a 2003, book-length exploration of school integration (or lack thereof) in metro Denver, income limits aren’t set nearly as low as in Montgomery County, there are no set-asides for public housing and it’s relatively easy for developers to buy their way out of the requirements. So its impact is minimal at best.
So yes, socio-economic integration is harder to achieve in Denver and Colorado than in some other places. A couple of reasons:
- In Colorado, open enrollment law allows parents to send their children to any school they choose, if space is available. That’s a good thing, and at the same time it poses challenges
- In cities like Denver and Aurora, there are so many low-income students that integrating schools to optimal levels (under 40 percent poor, research suggests) is impossible.
Despite those formidable obstacles, however, the state as a whole or individual districts could take a policy position that economically integrating schools works, and therefore should be a primary value and strategy, to the greatest extent possible. We may never even get close to the promised land, but we won’t know until we try. We need look only at the superb Denver School of Science and Technology, where a healthy economic mix is etched in stone, for some inspiration.
Other than DSST, though, no one around here is even trying. I believe district and state leaders are scared of the political blowback.
How sad.
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Thanks, Alan, for the thoughtful post. As you know, this Montgomery County study adds to a pretty broad literature that demonstrates positive achievement outcomes for lower-income student integrated into schools with more middle-income peers (without achievement drops for the middle income kids). How to implement and sustain that mixture – via housing policy, magnet schools, busing, etc – is the challenging part, and the part where other societal trends – independent suburbs, residential segregation, etc – make it difficult.
I do have to disagree with your paragraph that makes the extreme statement that no society has really addressed poverty – while it is true that poverty has never been eliminated, some countries are much better at reducing the effects of poverty (that is, you don’t go broke when you get sick, you get childcare, etc), and even in the US, perhaps the most successful policy in America social history is the vast reduction in poverty among the elderly, as a result of Social Security.
I sympathize with the temporal question of whether we can improve schools before we resolve poverty. surely the problem is somewhat co-incident and requires multiple levels of soluations. That doesn’t mean we can’t address poverty, when we want to try. With American income/wealth inequality at all time high levels, almost at pre-income tax levels, poverty alieviation hasn’t been something we have tried much lately.
My paragraph about attacking poverty was inelegantly worded. Paul is, of course, correct that some societies and programs have done better than others in reducing poverty. I was trying to say no society has succeeded in eliminating poverty. What bothers me is the message I hear from Strauss in her blog post and others who say that we cannot fix schooling without eradicating poverty. I would love to eradicate poverty — who wouldn’t? But as a well-known world figure said over 2,000 years ago, “For you have the poor with you always, and whenever you will you may do them good.”
This study is potentially important not just because it adds to the existing research about the benefits of economic integration but because the effect sizes are very large and because the same study considered the benefits of economic integration in comparison to well-designed supports offered in schools with concentrated poverty. The study has not yet gone through peer review, unless I’m mistaken, but we should all be keeping an eye on this.
Alan,
As one of your “friends in the progressive” camp I would like to offer a few thoughts. First, not all charter schools are effective schools. You seem to assume they are a universal good, though maybe I’ve missed posting where you have expressed views to the contrary. I believe that the highest and lowest scoring schools on the CSAP in Denver are charter schools (or at least I read that on a men’s room stall somewhere). What seems key about charter schools is their autonomy, that’s what makes them different from most public schools (though other factors can come into play as well, like their ability to restrict enrollment to only certain types of students, which can make their work a bit easier). However, from my progressive point of view, I think that we should spend time determining what makes some charters effective and others less so. Then, we want to try and replicate the key elements of the effective model. I’m all for that sort of a charter school.
As for socioeconomic integration, I fully endorse your view, except that I question whether the logistics involved with creating such a school system (unless you have the foresight of the folks in Montgomery County) are quite a challenge. As such, I question the value of spending the time, effort, and funds creating a socioeconomically integrated school system. I’d rather direct that energy toward strategies that have proven to work. And again, I’d return to a study of effective charter schools to assess those aspects of their practice that seem to produce the most robust outcomes.
My goal is to create effective schools where all students achieve at high levels and where faculty and staff are treated respectfully and paid a fair salary. Socioeconomic integration may well promote that outcome, but I wonder if it’s worth the trouble.
Hi, Pat,
Good to hear from you. I have never suggested that all charters or even most charters are good schools or that they are a universal good. I’m agnostic on the topic. The schools I’ve seen that give me the most hope happen to be charters. And people who try to explain away the success of these schools (and I’m not putting you in that group, just to be clear) strike me as either disingenuous, defensive, cynical, uninformed or some combination of the above. As far as charters go, I’ll even go so far as to say that I find the majority of suburban charters to be pretty mainstream and uninteresting. The schools I care about move the needle.
Just want to quickly clarify that Colorado charter schools cannot “restrict enrollment to only certain types of students”. Somewhat off topic in regard to this conversation, but a point needed to be cleared up.
Of course they “cannot,” but we do know that they target particular populations and offer programs supposedly only attractive to certain populations. There are even staff hired with specific linguistic abilities and cultural relevance just for those certain populations.
It should be noted that segregation has been documented, in various studies, as harmful. The most recent is the UCLA Civil Rights Study Project. Coupled with the Harvard Civil Rights Study Project, Denver Public Schools: Re-segregation, Latino Style, the evidence is quite clear. An earlier study, conducted by the late Dr. Kenneth Clark using dolls that represented white and black children, revealed that segregation and racism had a profound effect upon self-images and self-esteem especially in black children. To be sure, housing patterns in Denver, in particular, make integration very difficult at best. Still, there are ways to mitigate. Studies (the Harvard study) also reveal that magnet schools are a more effective integration tool than charter schools. Before any progress can be accomplished, an honest, open community dialogue must begin. Perhaps, it’s beginning. Alan, don’t be discouraged. Valerie Strauss’ opinion and yours are closer than you may realize. Thanks for opening the dialogue.
I hate stepping out onto the ice with such intellectual heavyweights as yourselves, but one of my absolute favorite studies is the 1995 Meaningful Differences work by Risley and Hart. Lots of good stuff comes from that warhorse, but the most noteworthy to me is the statistic that kindergarteners from affluent/well-educated families start out with 6,000 more words in their vocabulary than their less-affluent, less education-exposed counterparts.
When you couple this with the Century Foundation’s basic premise, which seems to be that a rising tide lifts all boats, then we can see the profound effect that simple peer pressure and a raised bar can have.
I was talking to a Denver Montessori mom today, and she was telling me about the long division the kids in the school can do at very young ages. She went on to tell me that she owns a property management company, and her office staff report back about how a young child translated complex rental contract concepts into Spanish for their parents while renting a home around the corner from me. “Don’t tell me that Latino kids that have to assimilate complex concepts and translate on the fly aren’t ready for rigor, ” I told her. She agreed wholeheartedly.
I think Denver is ready to stop teaching to the lowest common denominator. This will also help our more affluent families keep their kids in district. This is a good thing for all.
Richard Kahlenberg, who supervised the Century Foundation report, has a thoughtful response to Strauss and also to Montgomery Schools Superintendent Jerry Weast, who apparently suggested that economic integration is not realistic in most areas of our country today:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/economic-school-integration-a.html