School Desegregation, Post #1

For me, not for you

A middle school in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, hopes to set aside seats for poor children in fall 2017. A small district on the Lower East Side of Manhattan is looking to shake up admissions so that poor and middle-class students will learn together. And a popular elementary school in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan has reserved more than 60 percent of its seats this coming school year for students from low-income families.

Are there penalties for misrepresenting wealth?

But in most city school districts, where poor children live near other poor children, no such diversity exists. There, meaningful integration would require major intervention.

True.

There, officials are considering a system often called “controlled choice,” in which families pick a certain number of schools they would like their child to attend, and the district picks from among them, with the demographic makeup of the schools in mind. If a child is poor enough to qualify for free lunch, for example, he or she should perhaps go to a school with a relatively high proportion of middle-class students.

You don’t think richer kids would then just leave the system?

“There is a strong body of research that it’s the socioeconomic status of classmates that drives achievement,” Mr. Kahlenberg said. “So this is not just a politically cute way of avoiding the elephant in the room.”

What was that strong body of research? How did they separate the effects of race and “socioeconomic status?”

“Everyone wants systemic change, but to say that smaller steps are somehow antithetical to that, I don’t think it’s logical, and I don’t think there’s evidence for it,” Mr. Tipson said. “These small steps make a big difference in the lives of individual families and children.”

Well, unless they don’t, and it allows families to game the system in even stronger ways than they do now?