School attendance zones are relics of housing discrimination
School attendance zones are relics of 1930s housing discrimination
In American education, there are few barriers as prevalent and unjust as the practice of assigning students to public schools based solely on their home address. This practice – “residential assignment” – is an intentional public policy decision that results in opportunities for some kids, and barriers for others. That’s why Stand Together Trust is focusing on this issue through partnerships with social entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and researchers to tackle this important issue.
One such example is the Urban Institute, whose researchers released, Dividing Lines: How School Districts Draw Attendance Boundaries to Perpetuate School Segregation. The incredible mapping tool and report examined 65,000 school attendance boundaries and highlighted 2,000 pairs of adjacent public schools with dramatically different racial compositions. Simply type in a city and see the most egregious pairs. (Also see coverage from Axios).
Here is an example of two elementary school zones within the same school district in Atlanta, GA. Each dot represents a racial demographic of a child in that area. This shows how attendance zones are separating black and white students within an increasingly gentrifying and transforming area outside of downtown Atlanta.
Examples can be found in every city in the U.S. Here are some more examples taken directly from Urban Institute’s mapping tool:
While it's jarring to see the stark differences, the fact that we have school zones with dramatic racial differences won't be surprising to those who have worked in education or housing policy. As Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, recently explained in the pages of the Wall Street Journal:
In response to the Great Depression, the federal government created the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration to help people refinance their homes. It created color-coded maps in which the most attractive areas were shaded blue, green and yellow. The red areas were labeled “hazardous,” and had large minority populations. If you lived in a hazardous area, accessing the loans was much more difficult.
The Federal Housing Authority in its guidance also recommended against putting children of “incompatible racial elements” in the same schools. It is no coincidence that the school lines of today largely align with the color-coded zones that the federal government created in the 1930s to shut black people out of coveted home loans.
In March, the Annenberg Institute at Brown University released a paper, "The Lingering Legacy of Redlining on School Funding, Diversity, and Performance," which states: "We find districts and schools located today in historically redlined neighborhoods have less district-level per-pupil revenues, larger shares of Black and non-White student bodies, less diverse student populations, and worse average test scores relative to those located in A, B, and C neighborhoods."
The Urban Institute study confirms the connection, noting that "many of the racially unequal boundaries in our data are direct vestiges of our cities' historic roots of explicit racism, and not merely an artifact of recent individual household choices."
So, what can we do?
Conventional approaches to fixing this issue maintains the lines, but tries to provide equity through redrawing the lines, pouring more money into zones with problematic statistics, or other top-down approaches that still ultimately leave administrators and bureaucrats assigning kids to school.
We think the lines themselves are the problem. As Tim DeRoche writes in his book, A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools:
If a child lives within the school district, it is morally wrong for that child—black or white, rich or poor—to be kept out of a district school because she lives on the wrong side of a line drawn by the district. Attendance-zone boundaries benefit a very small group of public-school parents who pay a pretty penny for privileged access to these elite schools. Public education would simply work better if our laws forbade districts from drawing these lines, rather than allowing them or even requiring them to do so.
In housing policy, would we have found it acceptable to merely redraw redlined maps to let some families access government-backed loans while continuing to deny opportunity to other families in the neighborhood? Of course not. The solution was to remove the government-backed barrier altogether.
That should be the solution in education too: completely disconnect the association between a child’s home address and which school the government allows them to attend. As the Heritage Foundation recommended in a recent paper, school districts should cease drawing attendance zone boundaries within their borders and assigning students to particular public schools based on their parents’ address. In the event of oversubscription... districts should employ a lottery system similar to that used by public charter schools across the country.”
Going further, states should start to blur the lines between school districts – not just zones within districts. This would have a larger impact in states with lots of school districts.
For instance, compare Florida and Texas.
Florida: There are 2.8 million public school students in 67 school districts in Florida. District boundaries are the same as county boundaries, which leads to more than 40,000 students in the average Florida school district.
Texas: There are 5.5 million public school students in more than 1,000 school districts in Texas. 676 districts have fewer than 1,000 students – with the vast majority only having one district-run school option per grade level for kids.
So, while it philosophically makes sense to open up all district options to students within districts in Texas, the practice would only have actual benefit to students located in larger school districts with multiple school options. That’s why opening up schools outside of a child’s school district is so important.
Conclusion
The institutions that should bring us together continue to divide us. It is time to put an end to government policies that encourage and perpetuate social divisions of class and race. Public schools are gatekeepers of opportunity – and it’s critical that they do not contribute to social separation by arbitrarily assigning students to schools based on home address.
Interested in learning more about residential assignment?
Check out these resources:
A quick video: Derrell Bradford participated in this video for an event with Stand Together and the LeBron James Family Foundation.
A foundational book: A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools by Tim DeRoche
A panel discussion: Redlining and Education: How 20th Century Practices Impact 21st Century Kids
A policy paper: "Housing Redlining and Its Lingering Effects on Education Opportunity", by Lindsey Burke and Jude Schwalbach
A policy paper: "Racial Justice through Expanded Choice", by Derrell Bradford
An op-ed: "It's Time to Break the Link Between Housing and Education", by Anna Tyger
An analysis: "Public-School Attendance Zones Violate a Civil Rights Law", by Tim DeRoche
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