What Future for School Integration? (Pt. 3)

Previously discussed in What Future for School Integration Part 2, today we provide another take on controlled choice school enrollment, not unlike the income-based controlled choice in the Cambridge Public Schools, can found in Berkeley, California.

The Berkeley United School District (BUSD) has a long history of desegregation efforts, extending back to the 1960s. Like Hartford, CT, Cambridge, MA and many other metropolitan areas across the U.S., Berkeley features a high degree of racial and income-based residential segregation.

Throughout the 1990s, the Berkeley United School District sought to desegregate through a race-based controlled choice scheme that divided the district into three zones and assigned students to schools to reflect the racial/ethnic distribution within each zone – much like the admissions program in place in Cambridge in the 1980s/‘90s. By 2003, the plan was under legal review, so the following year BUSD adopted a modified controlled choice scheme that took into account three factors: racial/ethnic diversity, socio-economic difference, and difference in the educational achievement of parents/guardians.

Under the 2004 plan, BUSD was divided into three zones, and then further subdivided each zone into neighborhood areas (for a districtwide total of 440). Neighborhood areas are assigned an aggregate diversity raking that is then used to find a composite, zone-wide diversity standard. The zones were demarcated to be broadly representative of districtwide diversity, and in this way enable BUSD to achieve greater racial/ethnic and socio-economic integration by structuring school enrollment to more accurately reflect the diversity of the district.

While this plan was designed to facilitate school integration, it was presented as open enrollment, an increasingly popular practice in school admissions. At the time of enrollment, parents and students are asked to rank the top three schools they prefer in their local zone – regardless of whether it is just around the block or twenty minutes away. Sorting software then determines final enrollment to achieve a student body at each school that deviates no more than five to ten percent from districtwide composition.

A review conducted by the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project found that BUSD’s enrollment plan has been largely successful at integrating the district while respecting parental choice:

• In 2009, only three of eleven elementary schools and one of three middle schools had a less than ten percent deviation from system-wide racial/ethnic composition.
• The same year, two of eleven elementary schools and no middle schools had a ten percent or greater deviation from the system-wide racial/ethnic composition.
• Year on year, nearly 80 percent of families receive their first choice school.

In a community where patterns of residential segregation would lead to extreme racial isolation in a system based on neighborhood schools, such diversity in student enrollment highlights the efficacy of artfully-designed  school enrollment policies in spreading educational opportunities evenly throughout communities and establishing greater school-site equality.

The Berkeley United School District’s modified controlled choice scheme, which accounts for neighborhood-based differences in race, income, and education, is well within constitutional limitations (and, indeed has withstood a number of legal challenges). And while it accounts for a number of non-racial indicators in determining school enrollment, it still produces more racially diverse, integrated schools.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that there are serious limits to such class-based, as opposed to race-based, integration efforts. The “economic integration movement,” with an explicit focus on class-based remedies to racial disparities, is insufficient. As New York Times author Nikole Hannah-Jones points out in a 2013 review of integration efforts, “ignoring race does not wipe away its effects.” While legal decisions of the past 20 years have limited affirmative action to its weakest form since the aftermath of Brown v. Board,academics and activists are well aware of the dire consequences that follow when class subsumes race as the sole consideration in attempts to address inequality – that is, when the world becomes color-blind.

Not only have we seen a regrettable shift in the public consciousness of what “the problem” is in (i.e. “it’s not about race, but class…”), but since, as Nikole Hannah-Jones points out, “poverty does not produce an equal opportunity burden across racial lines,” disadvantages and discrimination against people of color persist even after pro-poor policies have been put into place.

In the context of education, class-based enrollment plans allow schools to claim progress toward integration (since race and income are so tightly linked, right?!) while classrooms and schools remain as segregated as ever before. According to Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, “you simply cannot get race by using class.”

Notwithstanding this critique, Berkeley United’s enrollment plan is a particularly robust approach to school integration that accounts for race in such a way (i.e. as one of a number of factors) that is successful in advancing racial integration while conforming to the race-blind political pressures of the day. Along with similar enrollment plans in Cambridge, MA and elsewhere, BUSD’s successes at racial integration demonstrate movement on an issue that has been woefully neglected in recent years. This is to be lauded as we push ahead in the pursuit of new approaches to integrate our nation’s rapidly-resegregating schools.