On Equity and School Choice
One of the hottest buzz words in the election coming up next Tuesday is “equity.” All candidates are in accordance that equity is the goal, but none seem to agree on how to get there. This summer, as I discussed in my first post, special sessions extended the stay of the Washington state congress more than two months. The battles which caused the delay centered around how the budget could improve educational equity. When the budget was finally approved on June 30th, the state’s legislators asserted that their changes will level the playing field in education. Frankly, their changes will help — they provide more state funding to local districts and schools so that the system of funding becomes less reliant on local taxes and levies (and therefore less variable between high-income and low-income neighborhoods).
More recently, however, districts have come to doubt the changes made. Provisions enable school districts to supplement state funds through levies, though they are intended to be used only as supplements to education. Certain loopholes in the budget are going to enable more affluent areas to take advantage of these supplementary levies because of disproportionate caps, changing attitudes towards school funding, and limited state support. Thus, the budget does not wholly eradicate the ability of affluent neighborhoods to continue disproportionately funding their schools.
The emphasis on equity takes form at the district level as well. For our recent project, I had the pleasure of interviewing Cassandra Sage, a candidate for LWSD school board, parent of four LWSD students, and PTSA member for over 20 years. Our discussion was dominated by talk of school choice and equity — both ideas which Cassandra strongly supports.
As a parent with two special needs children (one with autism, one with physical disabilities), she needs to be able to access whatever school has the best resources for her kids. Our district’s lenience on school choice has enabled her to do just that. However, she herself admitted that she is lucky to be able to put her sons through those programs because she has the resources to do so. The primary access barrier which she is able to overcome is that of transportation. Since the schools her boys attend are not their home school, she has to drive them herself. Thus, dual-earner families, single-parent households, and families without the ability to access transportation to a distant school are not able to support the educational needs of their children with the resources of that choice school.
The same trend goes for all choice programs. Programs which support the learning needs of gifted or curious students do not often provide transportation. Additionally, these choice programs are only made available to English-speaking families because all advertisement of the programs is made available only in English. The result? Most students populating the various choice schools are students of families who have the resources to access them: those from affluent white or Asian English-speaking families.
Even in the wealthy, tech-dominated Seattle area, choice schools are still sites of segregation. However, in the LWSD, the system of public and choice schools works. Taxes and levies amply support the choice schools and the public schools equally. In the LWSD, you can’t go wrong with which school you attend. All are filled with well-paid, highly-qualified teachers who consistently produce hundreds of college-bound students every year. But what about the students not on that college bound track? Cassandra has a lot to say about that too, but that will have to wait for my next post.
