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Breaking out of Old Debates: Raleigh's Innovative Education Plan
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Richard D. Kahlenberg,
The Century Foundation,
9/27/2005
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Sunday's New York Times gave us a clear picture about what's wrong with
the education debate in America, and also what's right. In the book review section,
in an article
that could have been written thirty years ago, Nathan Glazer told us why Jonathan
Kozol's latest book calling for racial integration and equality of spending was
espousing solutions that weren't going to raise achievement of poor and minority
students. By contrast, on the front page, the Times featured an encouraging
story
which reported that Raleigh, North Carolina had found a way to raise the achievement
of the very low-income and minority children about whom Glazer is so pessimistic:
through a new strategy of integrating schools by income, rather than race.
The Glazer-Kozol debate is frustrating because each of them is partly right and
partly wrong. Kozol is right to say that racial integration and equity in spending
are important societal goals that ought to be achieved as a moral matter. And
Glazer is right to say that the two premier liberal education strategies of the
past half century have, on average, yielded limited and disappointing results
in the academic achievement of low-income and minority students. That's what's
so exciting about the Raleigh plan: it manages to achieve a fair amount of racial
integration, which is good for society, but more importantly, it has broken the
logjam over raising achievement among groups of students whose progress has been
stubbornly slow.
In Wake County (which includes Raleigh and the surrounding suburbs), the school
district adopted a goal of ensuring that no school have more than 40 percent of
its students from low-income families. As Alan Finder reports, test scores have
risen dramatically: "only 40 percent of black students in grades three through
eight scored at grade level on state tests a decade ago. Last spring, 80 percent
did. Hispanic students have made similar strides. Overall, 91 percent of students
in those grades scored at grade level in the spring, up from 79 percent 10 years
ago."
Why is the Raleigh income integration plan working better than racial integration
or equity in school spending? Racial integration has a mixed record because it
improved test scores in some places, like Charlotte, North Carolina, and didn't
in other places, like Boston. A host of studies going back to the famous Coleman
Report of 1966 have found that black students don't do better when they sit next
to white students, per se, but that low income students of all races do
better in a middle class environments.
In Charlotte, wealthier suburban whites took part in racial integration; in Boston,
it was poor and working class whites who mixed with blacks. Likewise, spending
equity, while important, is insufficient to produce equal opportunity because
the "resources" in a school go far beyond per pupil expenditure and
include such factors as access to motivated peers, who have big dreams and work
hard to achieve them; active parents, who volunteer in the classroom and make
sure the school is running well; and high quality teachers, who have high expectations.
Mountains of research find
that all these non-monetary resources are much more likely to be found in middle
class schools.
The good news is that Raleigh is raising achievement. The bad news in the Times
story is that there is substantial resistance from some better-off families, who
don't like the longer bus rides required to achieve economic integration. People
with means are used to a system in which they can effectively purchase an exclusive
public education by buying a home in a wealthy school district. The Wake County
plan, which recognizes that the neighborhood school is not such a great deal for
students whose parents can't afford to live in a good neighborhood, arouses the
ire of some privileged families.
In several other communities that have income integration plans—La Crosse,
Wisconsin; San Francisco, California; Cambridge, Massachusetts—it has taken
some heavy political lifting among leaders to achieve their goals. In most cases,
as in Raleigh, school systems rely primarily on public school choice and magnet
schools as a lure to integration rather than on compulsory busing, which reduces,
but does not eliminate, resistance.
In the end, because wealthy parents are more likely to be active in school affairs,
the only thing going for the income integration plan politically, as they say
in Raleigh, is that it works.
Richard D. Kahlenberg is education fellow at The Century Foundation.
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Taking Note
