Changing Student Assignment in the Boston Public Schools

• In Event: 65.027 - Places, Boundaries, and Changing Racial Politics

Abstract

Boston was under a desegregation order from 1974 to 1990. The city continued controlled choice for elementary and middle school, with racial balance criteria until 1999, when it dropped the racial-balance criteria but continued choice. In the system that was in place through the 2013-14 school year, students chose schools within three large zones, and with priority for 50% of each school’s seats for students who lived within walking distance. Many Bostonians were unsatisfied with the system, because they could not predict where their children would be enrolled, and because students often had long bus rides to schools that were not necessarily better or more diverse than their other options would have been. However, efforts to change the student assignment policy in 2004 and 2009 failed because participants could not agree on a better system. This impasse ended in 2013, when the Boston School Committee voted to eliminate all school zones and instead use a computer algorithm for student assignment. The algorithm generates a set of choices for each address in the city, which includes the 6 closest schools and then pulls in more distant schools if necessary to ensure that each choice set includes at least 2 schools in the city’s top performance quartile and 2 in the second quartile (Boston Public Schools 2013).

This paper is grounded in prior research on the politics of race and urban schooling (Henig et al,. 1999; Author, in press) in mayor-controlled school districts (Henig & Rich, 2004). We examine why the stalemate over Boston student assignment ended, and why the city adopted this particular, innovative approach to student assignment. Data for the analysis are drawn from interviews with participants, media accounts, and observation of public meetings connected with the process. We conclude that three factors enabled approval of the new policy. First, because the new policy uses a choice algorithm rather than attendance zones, its effects on access to better schools were harder to predict in advance, and less immediately visible. Earlier proposals had redrawn lines on a map, which made it quite visible that students in some neighborhoods would have less access to better-performing schools. Second, many participants believed that promoting diversity in schools (one of the goals of the previous policy) was no longer a relevant goal in a school system whose students are 87% students of color. Finally, getting students into schools closer to their homes had long been a goal of the city’s popular mayor, who was in his final term. The paper’s main contribution is to analyze how race-blind policies may perpetuate racial inequality; it also illustrates the complexity of racial issues in a mayorally controlled school district.

Authors

• Kathryn A. McDermott, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Anna Fung-Morley