I’ve told this story before.
When I was a region superintendent in Houston, we had to decide where boundary lines would be drawn for a new elementary school. My staff spent months studying the data, making sure the new elementary school and the established elementary school close by would share an equal amount of middle class and lower-class students, along with an equal distribution of African-American, Hispanic, White, and Other young learners. When our work was complete, we felt really good about the recommendation we were going to make to the school board regarding boundary lines between these two elementary schools.
A few days before the school board meeting, the general superintendent called me into his office, and along with the school board member representing the two elementary schools, proceeded to tell me that his recommendation to the board would follow the wishes of the school board member and not the recommendation we made based on economic and racial data.
The school board member’s recommendation was to basically keep the middle class, White and Asian kids in the established elementary school, while sending lower class African-American and Hispanic kids to the new school.
Because of this board member’s racist views, instead of integrating these two schools, we segregated them.
This was 2007.
Desegregating schools has basically been an unmet goal over the past 70 years. And a recent report suggests in some states, segregated schools have become more of the norm than the exception.
The 74 reported this week that,
“New York state’s traditional public schools are the most segregated in the nation, with children of color often shut out of coveted schools…”
“The ‘And Stay Out!’ report, released this month by the education reform nonprofit Available to All, builds off UCLA segregation research from 2014. The new report found overlaps and similarities among dozens of redlining maps from 1938 with school attendance zones in New York City, Long Island, Westchester County as well as upstate cities, such as Albany, Buffalo and Niagara Falls.”
“The state’s laws and regulations make it ‘one of the strictest systems of residential assignment in the country,’ the report said, adding it limits a family’s opportunity to take advantage of open enrollment – a practice that allows students to attend public schools outside their assigned district.”
“’There’s this paradox of New York, where it’s run by progressive politicians, it’s a very democratic state,’ said Tim DeRoche, founder of Available to All, ‘but it’s the most segregated.’”
“Across the United States it’s common for sections of the same town or city, neighborhoods and streets to have communities that look vastly different from one another because of historical government-led housing segregation.”
“Redlining, the practice of drawing boundaries around neighborhoods based on race and denying mortgage assistance to areas considered ‘hazardous’ or ‘undesirable’ typically housing people of color, was outlawed more than 50 years ago. Despite this, many public services, including public education systems, still perpetuate inequitable access to resources and opportunity based on housing.”
“While school districts themselves are drawn through legislative processes, districts are often given autonomy when drawing attendance zones for schools. Both boundaries, the report said, ‘carry on the legacy of redlining in New York.’”
Or in Houston, Texas.
The move toward increased school choice should lessen the educational damage incurred by “redlining” where kids can attend school. But today, middle class kids and their families have way more opportunities to practice school choice than poor kids and their families. Poor kids and their families, many of them, are trapped inside sucky schools, unable to escape.
A move away from school choice, which depends on the location of a physical building, to “learner choice,” which embraces anytime/anywhere learning, might be the way to offer poor kids and their families greater opportunity to build quality, individualized learning plans. Those plans should focus on learner growth, strong relationships with adult learning leaders, learning anytime/anywhere, empowering young learners to define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning, while embracing technology designed to support an individual learner’s growth.
I’ll be away (watching basketball) until Monday, March 23rd. Til then, may your March Madness brackets provide plenty of wins over the weekend. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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