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Harvard researchers: BPS re-zoning plans would increase inequality
By adamg on Sun, 09/30/2012 - 12:12am
Researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have taken a first look at the proposals to redraw school assignment zones and say students in some zones would have more access to good schools than others.
For example, under a six-zone system, in a Zone 6 made up of West Roxbury, Hyde Park and parts of Roslindale and Mattapan, 35% of available seats would be in "high quality" schools, compared to just 5% in a Zone 3 consisting of South Boston, Roxbury and Mission Hill. The researchers defined "high quality" schools as ones that did well in MCAS scores, were ranked higher by the state Department of Education and on how popular the schools are.
Given current student enrollments, only 20% of primary school students in BPS attend high quality zoned schools. Nearly one-third of all zoned primary students attend low quality schools. ... Under the 6-Zone plan, children living in Zone 6 have seven times the access to high-quality primary school seats than children living in Zone 3.
In announcing the proposed plans, which will be reviewed in a series of public meetings over the next couple of weeks, school officials said they wanted to ensure students at least have a shot at a good school until Boston can reach the nirvana of all quality schools. Past efforts at changing the current three school assignment zones have all foundered because they resulted in at least one zone with no quality schools.
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Comments
Quick summary
It's so unfair that upper middle-class children get to go to schools with higher MCAS scores. And the more you localize the population, the more unfair it gets. If you had a district with nothing but upper middle-class children, they'd all be going to a school with higher MCAS scores, and that would be super unfair.
No
That wouldn't be unfair, that would be Hingham.
My question for Harvard
Is there a city school district that has figured out how to do this right?
Brookline
Who in 1873 said no thanks to being annexed by Boston.
I think
a big part of the issue, which I don't know how to solve quickly, is the culture of racism and classism where we have huge numbers of middle-class and upper-class families who won't consider sending their children to BPS no matter what. If we had most of the kids in the city in BPS, then it would be easier to draw the maps so that you had a mix of backgrounds in each school.
That, and changing what they're basing "good" schools on. I like that popularity is there, but I'm sure a good part of that is a cyclical thing where you have parents choosing schools just based on the MCAS scores. I think they should look at things like students reporting feeling safe, diversity of student body according to multiple characteristics -- and if they're going to look at MCAS scores at all, for fuck's sake, stop counting the scores of kids with severe disabilities who don't take the MCAS as "not passing" and just report the number of passing students out of the number who take it.
There is no culture of racism
There is no culture of racism or classism, parents that care and can afford it simply do not want their kids going to substandard schools with populations of murderous kids that could care less about the curriculum.
Want to improve BPS and get middle class kids back into the system? Get rid of teacher tenure for merit pay and VERY IMPORTANTLY allow the thugs to drop out and stop disrupting the learning environment for the kids that actually want to be there.
Forcing middle class kids to attend the schools does nothing but hide the problems behind better statistics and SOLVES NOTHING.
Right.
There's no racism in Boston or how parents choose schools. How silly of us to suggest that. If kids drop out or get kicked out of school, where do they end up? The streets, and then prison. Have you read "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander? I highly recommend it.
The bad kids are going to
The bad kids are going to wind up in the streets eventually anyway, as they aren't at school to learn. Better to let the bad kids drop out or kick them out, than wreck the education of all the students at schools that really want to learn and get ahead in life. Part of the reason why charter schools tend to do better, even in poor crime ridden neighborhoods, is that the unmotivated and downright disruptive kids aren't in class holding back those children that really want to learn.
I found two cultures of racism and classism in BPS
One culture of racism and classism was the insistence by almost everybody that MCAS scores (which track socioeconomic status very closely) are the definition of quality. This makes "quality school" a convenient dog-whistle for "fewer poor black kids." Rich and poor, black and white, parent and administrator would like to blow this whistle all day. Everybody's kids should to to a "quality school" tweeee tweeee! Note that most people agree that when white people from West Roxbury blow this whistle, it's racism. But when black people from Roxbury blow it, it isn't.
The other culture of racism and classism I found was widespread resentment of the makers of high MCAS scores, the "white, privileged" people. The administration of the BPS, from principal up to superintendent, is mostly minority and seems to share a great resentment of the "white, privileged" people. I have heard principals complain in many ways about white, privileged people getting all the good stuff, feeling entitled to impose their values, or not being worth listening to because they can always just go away. It's a regular witch hunt out there, and sometimes it seems like the BPS feels their first job, before no child getting behind, is no child getting ahead. Anything that might possibly result in white, privileged kids getting a better deal is smacked down no matter how much it might benefit everybody else. If a rising tide is going to float the big boat first, smack it down.
Good Point
I don't see them doing this for political reasons - but I would imagine that a good statistician could measure how kids of certain socioeconomic backgrounds score at various schools. Then you compare the pools of those kids against each other - if two groups of kids with "similar" backgrounds perform very differently - then one is obviously doing something that works better. You don't have to "punish" one school - just get whatever's working implemented in that school if you feel it's transferrable.
Another perhaps more politically acceptable way is to measure improvement from year to year, crediting "better" schools as those that improve performance, not necessarily those that have "good" performance.
Unfortunately, the number one thing that will probably lead to increased performance is a longer school day/year and the teachers won't allow that without more pay and unfortunately there's no more money in an already enormous budget for that.
Ambiguity
When you say "I don't see them doing this for political reasons," do you mean that you don't believe they are doing what they are currently doing for political reasons, or do you mean that you don't believe they will do what you suggest, and it will be for political reasons that they don't?
I agree more with the latter.
Yes, it is the measurement system that must change if they are to stop just chasing their tails about school quality. The statistic you're describing might be more commonly referred to as "deviance from baseline." You predict, based on the known factors of the actual students, what the baseline expected result should be (for now, let's assume on MCAS scores), and then you compare the actual result and its deviance from the baseline.
A school that is actually contributing more than the usual to the children's knowledge will have a positive deviance. A school that is contributing less will have a negative deviance. Those deviances will not be dependent on the actual overall score - one of today's "low quality" schools might be found to have a great positive deviance whereas one of today's "high quality" schools might be found to have a negative deviance.
And then we have a better idea of what works besides "have richer kids."
Less Ambiguous
No matter who comes up with the methodology or what variables you use, some interest group is going to complain that it's not fair - even if it's fairer than the pure MCAS methodology. So if I'm reading your post correctly - yes - the latter.
As for your last comments, based on current develoment policies targeted at building luxury downtown buildings almost exclusively (at least as far as larger projects go) I think the city's policy is not "have richer kids" but instead "have no kids".
So if you won't send your
So if you won't send your child to a building where there are adolescents with loaded guns in their schoolbags, you're a racist? I assume you have no children.
You might want to check you lily-white opinions with the black people who have moved out of Boston or sent their children to private schools over the years to get them away from the same Boston public schools. I'm sure they'd be very interested to hear your opinion of them.
The ones crying racism are
The ones crying racism are not the white people, keep that in mind. And no, I don't want my child going to a school were the kids are gun toting, knife wielding little hoodlums, so if that makes me a racist, deal with it. That would make me a parent who wants a child coming home after school. This city and it's schools have been torn up because of busing and the cry babies, education is there for the taking, it's up to the parents to make sure their children get one or not. Take responsibility for your own children, after all you all are the ones who gave birth to them. Furthermore, if you all don't want an education, don't blame anyone but yourselves, it's no ones fault but your own, quit when your 16 yrs old, and stop taking up space.
BS
We're talking about elementary schools here, not high schools. Are there marauding hordes of knife-wielding 8-year-olds out there I'm unaware of? Only in the imaginations of white people, it seems.
And nobody's crying racism. People are crying "quality." There are good schools outside of West Roxbury, just not enough of them. I can't imagine a black parent really would want her kids to spend 30 or 40 minutes each way on a school bus any more than your white self would.
Yeah, parents have a big role in their kids' education. But there's only so much even the most devoted of parents can do. If our schools are failing their kids, that's not all their fault.
marauding, knife wielding 8 yr olds?
Um Adam?
I am going to stay anon on this one. Maybe not a "horde" of marauding, knife wielding 8 year olds, but as the parent of a child who was bullied pretty badly last year at a "good" west zone school by a 10-11 year old who brought a knife to school. With minor repercussion to the weapon carrying child, and seeming inability on the part of school to deal with issues. Child possibly on an IEP? I believe the child's attitude was along the lines of "good, I can stay home and play DS" I am going to call bullshit on your statement that it is imaginary. If your child is not in an advanced work class or exam school, good luck!
Granted
And my condolences - that has to have been absolutely awful.
Our daughter apparently left a "good" West Zone school just in time - she missed all the fun with the teacher being investigated for inappropriate conduct with a student.
I wasn't arguing there are no problems at all even in the lower grades, but against the other person's apparent belief that all the schools in the "bad" areas are filled with knife-wielding thuglets. It's just not true.
There actually are great BPS schools
Wow, there is a lot of generalizations in this thread. For a specific anecdote, my three kids (ages 5, 7, and 9) all go to the Gardner Pilot Academy in Allston and have since each was 4 years old. It is a great, safe, and nurturing school with a very positive environment. I don't know about the entire BPS system, but I know that my wife and I are very pleased with the BPS school that our children attend.
I'd be interested to hear
What you think the BPS could do to bring those "huge numbers of middle-class and upper-class families who won't consider sending their children to BPS no matter what" back into the system (another key question is why in the world the BPS would want to do that at all? They have no economic interest in having to teach more kids without getting more revenue).
The BPS could make changes that brought these families back into the system, but they wouldn't be the changes the BPS wants to make. These families are exercising their choices by leaving, and you'd have to somehow make the choice of staying stack up. I believe you'd have to allow them the security of having their kids go to their local schools in their neighborhoods with their neighbors, and allow them to develop an ongoing institution in their local school, rather than a shaky seat in a game of educational musical chairs. This would likely not help demographic distribution very much, although it would improve Boston property values overall.
I agree with you entirely about the major assumption problem of basing the definition of quality on MCAS scores. What these silly Harvard kids have done is take three measures reducible to the same thing (MCAS scores; ranking, based on MCAS scores; popularity, based on MCAS scores) and average them together as if that makes a difference. We all know that MCAS tracks socioeconomic status very closely - that's why MCAS scores are such a useful proxy for parents (rich and poor, black and white) trying to find a school with kids of higher socioeconomic status. Their study is a grand exercise in tautology.
One thing often forgotten in the discussion of racism and classism here is that practiced by people who are not white and rich. Lots of folks from Roxbury are very eager to have their kids go to school with rich, white kids instead of kids like their own. The administration of the system, from principal up to superintendent, is overwhelmingly minority and startlingly free with expressions of racial and class bias. There is an incredible amount of animus in the system against well-off white kids, at the same time as folks from all neighborhoods want these same kids to be their classmates. Why in the world would anyone want to be that well-off white kid, both hated as an individual and desperately desired as a statistic?
It's too bad MCAS are the judging criteria
of a "good" school.
To me, a good school is one where neighborhood parents are/can be engaged in their child's education. I don't want to move to the burbs for that. I love my neighborhood in Boston.
I'd like to see busing done away with as much as possible. It's great for those who need it, otherwise a huge expense to our school system when kids are being shipped across the city every day. My kid will do that once he reaches high school unless our local school becomes more local and appealing.
There is no greater cultural melting pot than here.
I went to school in Hingham and rode horses there. So what. I want my kid to be in Boston and get a great education here.
Please
As usual, I have to put on my big winter boots when wading into this shit. BPS system, especially the HS level [minus Latin and a few charter schools] is a DISASTER. It currently is also overwhelmingly 'minority', yet they bus 'minority' kids from a 'minority' neighborhood to attend an overwhelmingly 'minority' school located in a 'white' neighborhood [W. Roxbury]. Please, someone explain to me why busing is still going on? It costs a fortune and in totality the schools themselves, in 2012, are no longer diverse in their student population, so it's futile to bus kids around town in an attempt to increase diversity.
The middle class have all but abandoned BPS schools at least at the HS level, except for Latin and charter schools. Middle class people [and many so-called working class] of all 'races', ethnicities, etc. have done this. This has occurred because the schools became very dangerous, violent, and poorly performing. Until you solve this endemic issue of extreme levels of violence and disinterested / poorly performing students, things will not improve. And this is caused not just by 'poverty', but by a vicious subculture that is enabled by social services and many 'progressives' who may or may not be sincere.
One of the main reasons our political boundaries like municipal, county, are so convoluted, and why public transit especially subways were not extended to places they rationally should have is the desire of people to isolate themselves and their communities the best they can from this ultra dysfunctional and violent subculture.It's the 800lb gorilla in the room that everyone is uncomfortable talking about in regards to many of our social [and economic] ills. Everything the 'experts' suggest is no more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Post a Piece about BPS or Breastfeeding
and the child-bashers pile right on. That is, when they're not posing as teacher-bashers. Odd and sickening phenomenon in our society, the rush to frame children as parasitic fiends, and those who nurture them as disgusting-by-proxy.
Big news: each of you was once a parasite, if that is your definition of your species' young. More news: BPS schools are struggling, not because of your imagined infestation by pint-sized killers, but because the city has been systematically starving its schools of funds and wreaking havoc on school after school with a mad rush to close, move, consolidate, break up, and generally weaken, destroy and take over establishment after public establishment by the decree of the corporate stooges running the show. And which schools are hit hardest? Why, those in lower-income areas, of course, where anyone with a healthy sense of entitlement is soon worn down by the task of balancing interminable protest with the demands of day-to-day survival.
Congrats, public schools are going down, but so are you -- in history, and a nice role you chose yourself, too.
Thanks Harvard
Thanks Harvard for wading into a political crap storm with your preliminary statistical analysis. Setting aside that I find it bizare that they would rush this out into the fray, the fundamental problem that I have with these findings - i.e. that certain zones would be left with underperforming schools - is the notion that there are just always going to be underperforming schools with which people get stuck. If one presupposes that the "bad" schools in poor neighborhoods can never be made better then I suppose the only way to solve the issue of how to educate the children in those neighborhoods adequately is to ship them to other neighborhoods (unless you are willing to go retro and raze those neighborhoods to the ground and create futuristic high rise utopias in their place). The fact is that you can turn schools around. It takes inovation, resources, political will, and a set of parents dedicated to their school. Inovation has been demonstrated in charters. Resources can be found in cost savings (e.g. $80mm in bussing costs) and tax increases (you get what you pay for people). Political will is currently lacking. Parents dedicated to their schools would be fostered by elimenating the lottery and creating small zones. Maybe its difficult to see this from high in the ivory tower accross the river.
The Harvard professor
who is the primary author, Meira Levinson, is a former BPS teacher and parent of kids in BPS. She's not in an ivory tower, she's got her feet on the ground. Of course schools can be turned around and improved and the research report states that. The problem is that there is not a distribution of high quality schools and trying to redraw the zones before addressing the problem of lower quality schools exacerbates the problem.
The zones ARE the problem
You aren't going to address low quality schools until you give parents predictability in where their kids are going to go to school and, thus, ownership over the schools that their kids will attend. Moving kids around with "bad" socioeconomic indicators is not a solution to the problem and, in fact, disguises the problem, as the statistics are based on individuals' MCAS performance, which inherently means that the "good" schools are really just the ones where kids with fewer socioeconomic problems have ended up as a result of the lotery. Furthermore, you can't create "high quality" schools until you have predictability in exactly who you are serving and what the challenges of that studen body are, which you will never know if you keep shuttling all the kids all over the city.
BPS students are
80% minority and 80% receive free and reduced price lunch. I think BPS knows who they are dealing with and what the challenges of the student body are. They deserve good schools, no matter what school or area of the city they live in. And the new zone proposals don't say how they will do it.