What Future for School Integration? (Pt. 2)

While the regional open enrollment plan helped to achieve greater racial integration in Connecticut schools, this approach may not be suitable in all cases.

At smaller scales, such as within a single district, constrained options and limits to school enrollment largely preclude the positive effects of school-of-choice: not every student can attend the “best” school(s) in the district, leaving many to attend less-desirable schools. This not only condemns some students to learn in a low-achievement environment, but provides no guarantees of greater racial integration within each school building or across the district.

Cambridge Public Schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts, faced this set of constraints when developing an admissions policy to promote integration in the late 1970s and early 1980s. CPS enacted open-enrollment (district-wide school-of-choice) in 1979, but according to a district report, few students took advantage of this and the schools within the system remained highly-segregated.

To better facilitate integration, CPS adopted a “controlled choice” enrollment plan in 1981. Like school-of-choice, controlled choice departs from the notion of “neighborhood schools” and adopts district-wide open enrollment. However, it goes one step further than traditional school-of-choice by tying enrollment percentages in each grade to racial distributions within the community. For example, if the community is 50% White, 40% Black, 5% Latino, and 5% other race/ethnicity, then enrollment in each grade level in each school across the district had to reflect this distribution. In the Cambridge Public Schools, each grade level was mandated to fall within a 10% rage of district-wide percentages (though, this window has varied in the 30-plus years since controlled choice was established).

In 2002, CPS switched from race as an indicator for admissions to the percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunch. This was done in response to growing concerns of an impending challenge to the constitutionality of race-based school admissions. The results, as reviewed in a Civil Rights Project report, are impressive. Since 2002:

• Racial diversity in schools have increased;
• Test scores among low-income students have increased;
• Graduation rates for low-income students at CPS have risen to a rate of 9 out of 10; low-income students in nearby districts have a 65% graduation rate.

The successes of controlled choice at CPS, including greater racial integration and academic performance, provide evidence of the possibilities that exist to achieve greater racial diversity in schools despite the prohibition of race-based school admissions promulgated by the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle judgement in 2007.

In light of the close relationship between socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity – a function of hundreds of years of overtly and covertly racist policies and practices – basing admissions off of some type of socioeconomic indicator (in the case of CPS, the percentage of free and reduced lunch recipients, district-wide) can be, as we see in the case of CPS, quite effective at advancing racial integration in a constitutionally-permissible manner. A school enrollment plan that accounts for socioeconomic representation and integration in the classroom is a proven tactic in the struggle to achieve greater racial integration in America’s schools.