Integration, equity and school choice

In a rich new article in the New York Times Magazine, which may hold lessons for the school choice movement, Nikole Hannah-Jones recounts her decision to enroll her daughter in a segregated public school in New York City.

She also describes her own experience, growing up nearly three decades after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, when she rode a bus across town to a predominantly white, mostly affluent public school.

I remember those years as emotionally and socially fraught, but also as academically stimulating and world-expanding. Aside from the rigorous classes and quality instruction I received, this was the first time I’d shared dinners in the homes of kids whose parents were doctors and lawyers and scientists. My mom was a probation officer, and my dad drove a bus, and most of my family members on both sides worked in factories or meatpacking plants or did other manual labor. I understood, even then, in a way both intuitive and defensive, that my school friends’ parents weren’t better than my neighborhood friends’ parents, who worked hard every day at hourly jobs. But this exposure helped me imagine possibilities, a course for myself that I had not considered before.

It’s hard to say where any one person would have ended up if a single circumstance were different; our life trajectories are shaped by so many external and internal factors. But I have no doubt my parents’ decision to pull me out of my segregated neighborhood school made the possibility of my getting from there to here — staff writer for The New York Times Magazine — more likely.

Her experience suggests the potential benefits of a new approach to desegregation, which focuses on students’ economic status, rather than their race. It’s gained currency, in part, because courts have at times blocked race-based desegregation efforts, but mixing disadvantaged students with better-off peers seems to have real, positive effects.

The problem, which Hannah-Jones’ full article reveals, is an imbalance of power. When the number of well-off students in a school reaches critical mass, their disadvantaged peers often get pushed out, or shunted into segregated classrooms. For that reason, she calls for schools to set aside guaranteed spots for low-income students. Unless the power balance is addressed, any success at integration will likely be fleeting.

True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural. … Even Kenneth Clark, the psychologist whose research showed the debilitating effects of segregation on black children, chose not to enroll his children in the segregated schools he was fighting against. “My children,” he said, “only have one life.”

It’s worth recalling what Clark himself prescribed to relieve the persistent inequities in school systems that would continue to resist real, lasting integration.

He recommended creating “ realistic, aggressive and viable competitors to the present public school systems. … The development of such competitive systems will be attacked by the defenders of the present system as attempts to weaken the present system and thereby weaken if not destroy public education. This type of expected self-serving argument can be briefly and accurately disposed of by asserting and demonstrating that truly effective competition strengthens rather than weakens that which deserves to survive. … Public education need not be identified with the present system of organization of public schools.”

The ability to enroll their children in private schools was one of many advantages affluent parents in Hannah-Jones’ article seemed to enjoy. But simply giving more parents options outside the traditional public-school system may not solve the power imbalance on its own.

That’s why some charter schools are experimenting with admissions lotteries that give greater chances to students from low-income families, and why some New York City neighborhood schools are experimenting with “controlled choice” plans that give disadvantaged students a better chance of landing in their parents’ desired school. It’s also why many school choice advocates believe voucher programs should either be means-tested, so they give low-income parents access to private schools they couldn’t otherwise afford, or use weighted-funding approaches that put more money in the hands of disadvantaged parents.

The power imbalance is real. Giving parents more choices, and truly equitable access to them, may help correct it.


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BY Travis Pillow

Travis Pillow is Director of Thought Leadership at Step Up For Students and editor of NextSteps. He lives in Sanford, Fla. with his wife and two children. A former Tallahassee statehouse reporter, he most recently worked at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a research organization at Arizona State University, where he studied community-led learning innovation and school systems' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. He can be reached at tpillow (at) sufs.org.