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In Plain Sight: Simple, Difficult Lessons from New Jersey's Expensive Effort to Close the Achievement Gap
Gordon MacInnes,
Century Foundation Press,
1/9/2009
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Improving On No Child Left Behind: Getting Education Reform Back on Track
Richard D. Kahlenberg,
Century Foundation Press,
10/15/2008
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America's Untapped Resource
Richard D. Kahlenberg,
Century Foundation Press,
1/14/2004
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Public School Choice vs. Private School Vouchers
Richard D. Kahlenberg,
Century Foundation Press,
9/24/2003
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Can Separate Be Equal? The Overlooked Flaw at the Center of No Child Left Behind
Richard D. Kahlenberg,
The Century Foundation,
4/23/2004
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Divided We Fail: Coming Together through Public School Choice
The Century Foundation,
Century Foundation Press,
9/18/2002
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All Together Now
Richard D. Kahlenberg,
Brookings Institution Press,
2/15/2001
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A Notion at Risk
Richard D. Kahlenberg,
Century Foundation Press,
9/15/2000
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A Response to Richard Lamm
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Richard D. Kahlenberg,
The Piton Foundation,
11/1/2002
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Governor Richard Lamm has provided important insights and leadership on a range
of public policy issues over the years but his criticism of The Piton Foundation's
proposal for economic school integration is off the mark in several respects.
I take each of his objections in turn.
I. Politics
Governor Lamm suggests the proposal for economic school integration may not
be politically viable because it represents "busing all over again." But advocates
of integration have learned a great deal since the busing controversies of the
1970s. The primary insight is that parents must be given a say in the matter
of where their children attend school. The current system of neighborhood school
assignment gives no say to poor parents (who can't afford to move) just as surely
as involuntary busing did. Instead, most advocates of economic integration propose
a form of managed public school choice to achieve their goals.
In systems employed in Cambridge, Massachusetts and many other jurisdictions
throughout the country, every school becomes a magnet school, with something
attractive to offer to particular parents. A small school may be just what a
parent with a shy child would like. Another family might prefer a school that
uses a Core Knowledge curriculum, while another likes the Montessori teaching
approach, and yet another wants a French immersion school. Parents within a
given geographic region rank their preferences, and then school officials honor
those choices with an eye to ensuring a strong middle class presence in every
school. The key is to give at least some parents an incentive to want to have
their children attend a public school beyond the one in their (economically
segregated) neighborhood-a quality program at the end of the bus ride. A 1998
Public Agenda poll found that while 76% of white parents oppose involuntary
busing, 61% support a system of managed choice, where the district honors parental
preferences with an eye to integration. Governor Lamm himself has recognized
the appeal of public school choice in a nation where "we can choose among 100
breakfast cereals, 200 makes of automobiles, 300 different religious denominations."
Some say the "economic integration" will never happen. But the number of students
attending economically integrated schools has jumped from about 20,000 in 1999
to more than 400,000 today. Others say public school choice will never take
place across school district lines. But 300,000 students attend public schools
of choice across such lines every school day. By contrast, publicly funded private
school voucher programs, which dominate much of the debate over education today,
educate just 14,000 students nationally.
II. K-12 is "Too Late"
Governor Lamm argues that reforming schools isn't likely to help much because
by the time a student enters kindergarten "the impressionable gelatin of a child's
mind has mostly hardened to cement." This would be surprising news indeed to
all the parents who search hard for a good school for their children, for all
the elementary and secondary teachers who devote their lives to shaping minds,
and to all the researchers who find enormous effects depending on what school
a student attends.
Of course, preschool matters a great deal, and we should do much more to improve
it. But even here, The Piton Foundation's emphasis on economic integration is
relevant. Recent research in West Hartford, Connecticut found that low income
students in economically integrated preschools gained vocabulary at six times
the rate of low income students in economically segregated preschools.
III. Kansas City, Missouri Results
Governor Lamm cites Kansas City as an example of the failure of busing and the
success of neighborhood schools. In the research literature, however, Kansas
City is universally cited as an example of the failure of extraordinary spending
by itself to boost achievement in part because officials put no structure in
place to ensure that the spending would actually produce integrated schools.
By contrast, in St. Louis, a public school choice program which allows roughly
14,000 urban students to attend suburban schools has shown high levels of success.
In the late 1990s, the business community in St. Louis formed an alliance with
suburban Republican legislators and civil rights groups to maintain state funding
for the program.
There is overwhelming evidence that all children perform better in middle class
schools. The Century Foundation's Task Force on the Common School, led by Governor
Lowell Weicker and consisting of scholars, teachers, business leaders and others,
recently concluded that economic school integration isn't just another reform
option; "Of all the various strategies available, research suggests that the
best method of improving education in the United States is to eliminate the
harmful effects of concentrated school poverty." To cite one statistic, the
Department of Education reported this year that looking at 4th grade math scores
on the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), low income children
in middle class schools performed higher than middle class children in high
poverty schools. To cite another, in Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina,
schools are economically integrated and 90% of students achieve at or above
grade level.
IV. Schools not a Tool for Reform
Governor Lamm laments that many of the strategies tried over the past many years-including
Head Start and Title I compensatory spending-have had little effect. The economic
school integration movement fully recognizes those failures and asks, why doesn't
extra spending do more? The answer is that per pupil expenditure only represents
one element of what makes a school strong. The other ingredients of a good school
include efficient spending; an orderly environment; a stable teacher and student
population; a good principal and well qualified teachers trained in the subjects
they are teaching; a meaty curriculum and high expectations; active parental
involvement; motivated peers who value achievement and encourage it among classmates;
high achieving peers, whose knowledge is shared informally with classmates all
day long; and well connected peers who will help provide access to jobs down
the line. As outlined in an earlier article, middle class schools do a much
better job of providing all ten of these ingredients. Parents know this, which
is why those who have options find good, middle class public schools for their
children. (Even Laurence Steinberg, whom Lamm cites, notes that "For a large
number of adolescents, peers-not parents-are the chief determinants of how intensely
they are invested in school and how much effort they devote to their education.")
Governor Lamm adds racial integration to the list of failures-alongside compensatory
spending-but here he is only half right. Racial integration programs sometimes
improved achievement (in places like Charlotte Mecklenburg, North Carolina)
and sometimes didn't improve achievement (in places like Boston). As a general
rule, racial integration worked when it involved economic mixing, and didn't
when it involved mixing low income whites with low income minority students.
That's why a growing number of communities are now honing in directly on the
factor that matters most: economic integration.
V. An Alternative: School Vouchers
Governor Lamm concludes by suggesting an alternative proposal-Robert Reich's plan
for school vouchers generously funded for low income students. A plan to include
private schools would undercut the role of public schools in fostering social
cohesion amidst racial and religious and economic diversity, but if limited to
the public school system, and properly funded, such a plan would serve the goal
of economic school integration and would represent a genuinely innovative and
constructive move. Separate schools for rich and poor, even when adequately funded,
are unequal. In a middle class country, we should find ways to give every child
the chance to attend a good middle class public school.
Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. This
article originally
appeared in the November 2002 issue of The Term Paper.
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