Interdistrict Choice and Educational Policy

• In Event: 72.046 - Learning From the Past: How Interdistrict Desegregation Policies Can Inform School Choice and Improvement Policies Today

Abstract

Objectives
This paper situates the forthcoming papers by providing a detailed discussion of the history of inter-district desegregation policies in the U. S. The paper explores how and why these policies evolved, and examines how they have been able to persist throughout dramatic shifts in the educational policy landscape. This paper concludes by considering the relevance of these policies for educational policy today.

Methods & Modes of Inquiry
This paper is conceptual rather than empirical, providing a literature review to situate inter-district desegregation policies within broader school reform trends over time. We therefore review three bodies of literature for this paper, focusing on the history of school desegregation, school choice, and educational reform. We augment our literature search with news reports and media accounts of reform efforts, and we draw on data from NCES to statistically document reform trends.

Findings:
Our analysis shows that there has been a significant shift within educational policy over the past four decades from a focus on race-based integration policies as emblematized by inter-district desegregation to market- based reforms. In this paper, we trace the history of this evolution, showing how policymakers and pundits have, over the past several decades, downplayed the patterns of segregation and concentrated poverty as causes of poor educational performance, and have focused instead on “technical fixes” to improve the performance of racially isolated and high-poverty (primarily urban) schools.

We present our review of the literature chronologically: we first describe the emerging consensus in the 1950s and 1960s at the federal level about the relationship between segregation and educational opportunity. It is in this context that inter-district desegregation policies first emerged, designed to improve equity across metropolitans area through choice- based integration across district lines. We then illustrate how this consensus gave way in the 1970s to a focus on reforming urban schools, which--as a result of deindustrialization and suburban flight-- grew more racially isolated and low income during this time. Finally, we describe how this focus on making separate schools more equal through educational reform evolved and sharpened into the 21st century, with an increasing emphasis on competition, standards, and accountability at both the state and federal levels. These policies, we also show, became increasingly punitive towards low-performing students and schools, placing the blame for failure on racially isolated districts themselves, rather than the school district boundaries that constrain them fiscally, demographically, and politically.

We conclude that despite the shift in the focus of educational policy, inter-district desegregation policies remain highly relevant in that they have tackled some of the most persistent challenges in education: the segregation of students, resources, and opportunities across school district boundary lines. We also discuss the limits of these policies in addressing the underlying causes of educational inequality

Authors

• Jennifer Jellison Holme, The University of Texas - Austin

• Kara S. Finnigan, University of Rochester