Defining and Measuring Diversity in a "Postracial" Climate: Understanding School Districts' Approaches

• In Event: How Voluntary Integration Works: Contemporary Political, Policy, and Practical Considerations

Abstract

Objectives: Prior to, but especially after Parents Involved (2007), districts pursuing voluntary school integration plans have questioned what methods are legal, politically acceptable, and effective. The Trump Administration’s repeal of 2011 OCR race-conscious guidance (Author, 2019) alongside growing concerns about the validity of free-/reduced-price lunch (Harwell, 2018), make defining and measuring student diversity more challenging, both technically and politically. This paper will shed light on how districts now address these challenges.

Perspective/Theoretical Framework: Students benefit from racial and economic diversity (Wells & Crain, 1994; Mickelson & Nkomo, 2012; Author et al, 2017). Controlled parent choice is a popular strategy for districts seeking to integrate students (Author, 2017). Yet, perceptions of legal and political risk (Author, 2015) have led districts to move away from using race, although we know less about how those decisions are made.

Methods: This paper entails an instrumental, collective case study (Stake, 2000) of three urban districts in three states. These cases enable insights into different measures of diversity used to foster voluntary integration. Additionally, we conducted analyses of changes in school and district racial and socioeconomic composition from 2000 to present and students’ distribution within each district from 2000 to present (Massey & Denton, 1988), using exposure and evenness indices.

Data Sources: Data include contemporary, historical, and legal documents pertaining to the three districts. We also conducted 12 interviews with current and former school district officials, civil rights or other organizations, and districts’ technical consultants. Data analysis began with memoing following interviews. The development of deductive codes was driven by our initial research questions for this paper: What measures of diversity are used by districts engaged in voluntary integration plans and why? These were supplemented by inductive codes (e.g., “lawsuits”; “demographic change”). Finally, we analyzed publicly available quantitative data from NCES’ Common Core of Data since 2000.

Results: The three districts measure diversity differently. One uses a race-conscious approach alongside SES. Two others rely on socioeconomic indicators but use different SES measures, one relying on free/reduced lunch and the other incorporating varied indicators. Additionally, each district extensively discussed what diversity measure(s) to use and regularly re-evaluated their approaches. Notably, they have replaced race-only diversity measures with more complex measures of diversity. For example, by considering neighborhood instead of individual race, Berkeley developed a unique approach to achieve voluntary integration within the limits of current legal restrictions in comparison to other methods hypothesized to be less effective (Reardon et al., 2006).

Scholarly Significance: Districts may believe that school integration is futile unless they grasp alternatives to the race-only measures commonly used during court-ordered desegregation. Understanding the process that led to the adoption and maintenance of three distinct definitions of diversity and their effectiveness will contribute both to our understanding of integration, and to its practice in a race-neutral era of law and policymaking. We anticipate that these districts’ approaches to defining and measuring diversity will provide other districts with useful examples.

Authors

• Erica Frankenberg, The Pennsylvania State University

• Mindy L Kornhaber, The Pennsylvania State University - University Park

• Peter Piazza, The Pennsylvania State University

• Jeremy Anderson, The Pennsylvania State University

• Tyler James Snyder, The Pennsylvania State University