The Paradoxes of Choice and Recruitment: Boston's Home-Based Choice Policy

• In Event: Tensions Between School Choice and Neighborhood Schools in the Changing City

Abstract

In 2013, the Boston Public Schools (BPS) adopted a new elementary and middle-school student assignment policy that limits families’ options to a set of schools identified by a “home-based” algorithm. The algorithm includes only nearby schools in each choice set, and adds more-distant schools only if necessary to ensure that each choice set includes at least four schools in the upper two quartiles of BPS performance as measured on state tests. BPS intended for the new policy to reduce transportation costs and increase recruitment and retention of families who had previously been discouraged when their children were assigned to far-away schools. Evidence from the first several years of the new SAP suggests that the policy may have helped retain White students, though over the same period Boston has lost more Black students—and increasing amounts of money—to an expanding charter school sector.

The paper is grounded in research on how student assignment policies contribute to maintaining “enclave schools” that serve middle-class, White families (Henig et al. 1999; Author 2015). It also draws on recent research about what shapes White urban families’ school choices (Holme 2002; Stillman 2012; Billingham 2013; Kimelberg & Billingham 2013) and the ways in which districts’ efforts to retain and recruit White, middle-class families are shaping local education and policy agendas (Stillman 2012; Cucchiara 2013; Posey-Maddox 2014).

This case study draws on media accounts of the student assignment policy change, minutes of meetings of the External Advisory Committee on student assignment, video from Boston School Committee meetings, public documents, and interviews with key participants.

Supporters of the new policy argued that reducing transportation expenditures would benefit all students, that all parents would rather have their children in schools close to home, that all students would have at least four higher-performing school options, and that connecting schools more closely with neighborhoods would generally help mobilize communities to improve their schools.

Although on its face the new policy treats all neighborhoods the same except for providing extra choices to students in neighborhoods without better-performing schools, in reality its effects have been different across neighborhoods and, because of residential segregation, across racial/ethnic groups. Students in parts of the city where better-performing schools are concentrated (e.g. middle-class, mostly White neighborhoods) have more predictable access to such schools than they did before and a higher probability of being assigned to a better-performing school than their peers in lower-income neighborhoods. After reducing choice within BPS, Boston is now retaining White students while losing more Black students to charter schools. In part, this shift resulted from a change in state policy that expanded charter schools in and near districts with lower-performing schools. It also is a consequence of continuing inequality in the Boston Public Schools, where budget issues that include still-high transportation costs and rising charter-school tuition payments, hinder school-improvement efforts.

Authors

• Kathryn A. McDermott, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Anna Fung-Morley