Best and Worst In Education, 2009

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In the past year, the bad news is that federal policies have been mostly underwhelming, with a focus on charter schools and merit pay for teachers, which some are calling a "Bush III" agenda . By contrast, good news comes from a few local districts that have taken important steps on their own to address what research suggests matters most in education - reducing the separation of rich and poor children.

The Worst: Federal Emphasis on Charter rather than Magnet Schools

There have been two main theories about what drives inequality. Liberals, backed up by extensive research, focus on fundamental issues like family poverty and economic school segregation. Conservatives, relying on a much thinner research basis, blame teachers and their unions for promoting inequality.

Unfortunately, the early policies of the Obama Administration, for which many of us had very high hopes, have embraced the conservative world view about teachers and unions: lifting the cap on charter schools, turning around failing schools by firing teachers and bringing in new ones, and instituting performance pay based on test score gains. The chief distinguishing feature between most charters and regular public schools is their nonunionized teaching force. Turnaround efforts aimed at firing teachers suggest that they - not segregated schooling - are primarily to blame for failure in high poverty schools. And performance pay is predicated in part on the idea that if only teachers worked harder they would achieve far better results.

Mountains of research, however, have found that high poverty schools are extremely difficult to fix because they concentrate students with the smallest dreams, parents who are least likely to volunteer in class, and teachers who quickly burn out in extremely challenging environments. The best approach to turning around failing high poverty schools seeks to attract an economic mix of students through special magnet offerings that generate positive peer influences, active parental involvement, and high quality teachers.

Instead of talking about magnets, however, the administration emphasizes charter schools, which are usually even less integrated than public schools. The administration's Race to the Top Fund gives extra points for embracing performance pay and charter schools, but none for promoting economically or racially integrated schools. When administration education officials talk about Brown v. Board of Education, they generally use it metaphorically to describe unequal opportunities, and rarely if ever embrace Brown's vision of integrated schooling.

The Best: Local Efforts to Combat Economic School Segregation

Although rhetoric and funds from federal education officials mostly focused on policies embraced by the Bush Administration, a number of school districts, to their credit, have recognized the inequality inherent in high poverty schools and are acting on their own to reduce concentrations of poverty. As outlined in a November article in USA Today, more and more districts are seeking to integrate student bodies by economic status. At the beginning of the decade, only a few districts, led by La Crosse Wisconsin considered socioeconomic status in student assignment. By 2007, there were 40 and today there are roughly 70.

The growth is due in part to the desire of districts to preserve racial integration indirectly in a manner consistent with a 2007 Supreme Court decision curtailing the use of race in Seattle and Louisville. And, in part, districts know that all students do better in middle class schools. Low-income students in more affluent schools, for example, are two years ahead of low-income students in high poverty schools on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 4th grade math. In Cambridge, which sought to integrate schools by race, and since 2001, by socioeconomic status, low-income, black, and Hispanic graduation rates are close to 90 percent, compared with 65 percent statewide for low-income students, and comparable percentages statewide among blacks and Hispanics.

Not all districts are moving forward. Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, a leader in the socioeconomic integration movement and subject of a recent book outlining the district's gains, saw a setback in 2009 as school board elections elevated a 5-4 conservative majority in the district. Even so, however, the magnet schools in Wake remain highly popular, and there may be a third way moving forward in the district that emphasizes more choice for parents.

Moreover, the general trend is positive. This year, a number of districts, including Kalamazoo Michigan, Amherst, Massachusetts, and Champaign, Illinois, adopted socioeconomic integration plans. The biggest likely addition is Chicago, Illinois, whose school officials proposed an innovative new socioeconomic plan in November for the system's magnet and selective enrollment schools. The effort recognizes that trying to make separate schools for rich and poor equal has a long track record of failure, and that it is imperative that we address the fountainhead of inequality itself.

One can only hope, in 2010, that the news from Chicago reaches two important figures in the District of Columbia: the former Chicago superintendent, who now sits as Education Secretary and the Hyde Park resident who lives in the White House.

Adopted from an article by Rick Kahlenberg. The Century Foundation