It’s the first day of kindergarten. Aren’t you cute? You, five years old, walk out the door to school, maybe for the first time – excited, impatient, catatonic or crying hysterically. You’ve walked past your neighborhood school hundreds of times, and that might be where you’re going today. But if you live in Boston, you might also be among the 64% of students K-8 who, forty years after the formal desegregation of the Boston school system, have been assigned instead to a classroom outside of your neighborhood.
There is no longer a court-ordered busing system, as there was through the 1980s, but Boston’s school district still practices the semi-random assignment of students to schools. According to one city councilor, the system persists only because “no one has had the political courage to dismantle it.” In fact, the system is costly in terms of both money ($80.4 million per year) and community engagement with schools, and although the population served was majority white in 1974, it is no longer. Today, the main effect of the system is not to desegregate by race or ethnicity but instead to reduce students’ geographic isolation and even, to some extent, socio-economic disparities between schools. In the short term, the proposed changes to the policy might be well-received by more affluent families and perhaps even by taxpayers in general, who are not altogether happy with the costs of the current system. But it’s likely that things won’t even get to that stage – in the past, Boston has only briefly entertained the possibility of making changes before ultimately returning the issue to the back burner. And there are those who argue that it should stay that way.
Aside from the institutional structures that have thwarted change in the past, supporters of the current system also argue that it is actually the lesser of two evils. Should random assignment stop or be substantially altered as proposed, disparities between schools could increase, potentially further reducing opportunities for students from low-income neighborhoods to attend high-performing schools. As noted by a recently released HGSE report on the subject, “Schools are part of a larger urban ecology.” Decisions around Boston’s school assignment policy could therefore have a potentially enormous impact on broader city concerns, such as property values, civic life, and neighborhood cohesion.
Clearly, almost 50 years after the formal civil rights movement, socioeconomic and racial isolation does and should remain an important issue in education. As of 2009, the Population Studies Center at University of Michigan ranked Boston 19th among the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas in terms of Black-White segregation, just behind Birmingham-Hoover, Alabama and ahead of Springfield, Massachusetts. As a point of comparison, the Providence-New Bedford-Fall River area ranked 50th on the same index.
The long-term value of the current debate is therefore not restricted to the actual decisions made regarding the city’s school assignment policy. Historically, discussions around schools have had unique power to elevate larger, underlying issues of inequity (see Brown v. Kansas Board of Education). What will be important here is whether the current conversation is maintained and whether it can be translated into a larger discussion about equity overall.