Another try ... new focus.

Post-Parents Involved—what are we to do?

In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District 1, the Supreme Court invalidated two school districts’ policies that used a child’s race as a factor in choosing the child’s school, in attempt to balance the racial make-up of their schools. To those who want to see the U.S. public education system truly offer equal educational opportunities to all students, this was a troubling decision. Instead of furthering the progress that Brown made towards this goal, Parents Involved seems to twist Brown’s legacy and use its logic to stop school districts from actively pursuing integrated, equal opportunity schools. Where can equal-opportunity-education advocates turn after such a disappointing offspring of Brown?

Maybe the real problem with Parents Involved is that it legitimized the battle cry of white parents, scared of losing their (somewhat) exclusive access to high quality public schools. Unfortunately, any mention of this kind of truth would likely result in a backlash that’s helped drive Parents Involved-style litigation in the first place. But maybe the proponents of “the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” can have their way without destroying local education agencies’ ability to offer high quality education to all students.

Reason #1: Class is more important than race

Fine. We can keep our strict interpretation of Brown: schools can’t integrate based on race, and schools segregate based on race. But race, while still a huge factor in determining a child’s success, is a phenotypic emblem of the real disparity, which is class. There’s no reason that school districts can’t use factors such as neighborhood demographics to achieve the goals of quality education for all students and diverse student bodies.

Reason #2: Racially diverse schools are no panacea for educational inequity anyway

Some education advocates have argued that the ultimate solution to educational inequity in this country is to get rid of all private schools, and force all parents, rich and poor, to send their students to public schools. Public schools (and the students in them) would gain access to the wealth of resources that upper-middle class parents have to offer: participation, advocacy, and money.

But this is a largely urban-centric idea. Only in a handful of major cities harbor a wide range of socioeconomic classes, enough to truly balance schools without going inter-district (a la Miliken). This would not help in metropolitan areas that are highly segregated between the city proper and the suburbs. This would also not help in most rural areas. While the deep south, the stomping ground of LDF litigation, was in great need of desegregation of its schools, it is not representative of the rest of this country’s ruralia. Unlike the Mississippi Delta and former slave states, many rural areas in this country are homogenous. Integration, therefore, offers no help for students whose local school fails to offer an adequate education.

Moreover, integration may not be the most important value worth fighting for. The quality of a child’s education depends on many more factors than the races of the faces in her classroom, or the wealth of her peers. Teachers are undoubtedly one of the most important factors that affect student success (plenty of research demonstrates this, but it’s also evident from the hyper-heated public debates over teacher-related issues).

Reason #3: Brown’s world and paradigm no longer apply

Brown-style litigation is based in an outdated paradigm, that just getting a child into a “good school” everyday will give that child the educational opportunity they deserve—one that will afford them freedom of choice as to how to spend their time and make a living in life. We know that that is not true. Whether a school is “good” depends on a series of tiny decisions and daily diligence of the teachers, administrators and other staff. Given the discrepancy of literacy development between entering 5-year-olds based solely on parent’s income, the quality, methods and format of instruction needs to be adapted if students from all backgrounds will be able to make similar intellectual developments (across the board). This is certainly possible, but not if we continue to see schools as static institutions, either “good” or “bad”, and that if we simply get kids into the “good” schools that will be good enough.

It is this paradigm that contributed to the pursuit of the relocation remedy—simply get the minority or low-income kids into the good schools, and they will achieve. The problem with this (besides the fact that is that often impractical) is that it doesn’t get at the heart of quality education (teachers), and that it might actually detract from children’s development. No matter how ‘blighted’ a neighborhood may be, there is something to be said for community-oriented schools (see Harlem Children's Zone for a stellar example of an initiative that values local community).

Conclusion