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education equity barriers

Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Attendance zone boundaries: Barriers to educational opportunity

Special to redefinED March 1, 2021
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: Jude Schwalbach, a research associate in the Institute for Family, Community and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation, wrote this commentary expressly for redefinED.

For a century, public schools have been billed as the center of a community, with Friday night football games, clubs, theater, and arts activities. But not all students have access to these “community” schools.

Within school districts, most public schools have attendance zones determined by district officials. These “lines within districts,” as author Tim DeRoche describes them, mean all families that reside within the geographic boundaries of the attendance zone are assigned to the public school in that zone. These zones, however, often divide communities by race, socio-economic divisions, and social capital.

In his book, A Fine Line, DeRoche illustrates how much school zones can affect the make-up of a school’s community. For instance, students attending Mount Washington in Los Angeles during 2019 lived in a zip code with a median home value of $847,522. Mount Washington Elementary is ranked a B+ school on Niche.com – a school rating website – with nearly 68% and 75% of students meeting or exceeding state standards in math and reading, respectively.

Meanwhile, just a little more than a mile away, Aldama Elementary School’s student body lives in a zip code where the typical home value is $47,000 less than in Mt. Washington’s zip code. Niche ranked the school a C school, with only 33% of students meeting or exceeding state standards in both math and reading.

At the same time, each school’s number of eligible students for the Free Lunch and Reduced-Price Lunch Programs — historical poverty proxies—illustrate a marked difference in student body. More than 70% of Aldama Elementary students — nearly seven times the number of eligible students at Mt. Washington — are eligible for the Free and Reduced-Price Lunch program.

Depending on which side of the boundary line a student lives on, she will be assigned to either Mount Washington or Aldama — likely having a significant impact on the educational opportunities available to her.

Even though students who attend Aldama and Mount Washington are in the same school district, paying the same property taxes to support all public schools within the district, government officials draw lines around which “public” schools they may attend. This hardly seems fair.

The school zone boundaries sharply divide families that live literally next door to each other. Which side of the street a family lives on can determine the educational opportunities fostered by their “free” public school.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon is all too common; families in cities across America, such as New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Chicago, to name a few, find themselves in similar situations.

For example, in 2019 the Senate’s Joint Economic Committee reported that enrollment in a high-performing public school and greater educational opportunities is often associated with purchasing a more expensive home.

The committee’s report found that “The average U.S. zip code associated with the highest quality (A+) public elementary school has a 4-fold ($486,104) higher median home price than the average neighborhood associated with the lowest quality (D or less) public elementary schools ($122,061).”

At the same time, the gerrymandered nature of school zones means that in many cases some children assigned to a poorly performing school actually live closer to a higher performing school.

For instance, children living between San Adreas Ave and Oneonta Dr. in Los Angeles are closer to the high-performing Mt. Washington Elementary — just a 15-minute walk — but are assigned to the lower-performing and more distant Aldama Elementary.

“No matter the goal, an attendance zone always creates sharp inequalities of opportunity for families who live in the same neighborhood. Some children will be allowed to enroll in the best public schools, and their playmates across the street will be excluded because of where they live,” writes DeRoche.

School zones can divide communities, shepherding children from different social and economic backgrounds into different schools. Such divisions are antithetical to the free and voluntary collaboration essential to American institutions.

Instead of assigning students to schools based on attendance zone boundaries, school districts should stop drawing attendance zone boundaries and instead adopt open enrollment policies, which would allow students to enroll in any school within their school district. Open enrollment, Heritage’s Lindsey Burke and Jonathan Butcher write, “effectively separates housing from schooling.”

However, Burke and Butcher note that even though 47 states in addition to the District of Columbia already allow some type of open enrollment policy, many school districts choose to not participate.

For instance, Alaska only requires that school districts provide open enrollment to students in persistently dangerous schools. By contrast, families in Florida can enroll their children in any school operating in the state’s 67 districts that is not at full capacity.

Expanding open enrollment to benefit all children would mean all children within a district have equal opportunities to attend public schools that are the right fit for them. 

March 1, 2021 0 comment
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Commentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityFeaturedParental ChoicePodcastPublic School ChoiceSchool Choice

podcastED: Matt Ladner interviews Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Chad Aldis

redefinED staff February 18, 2021
redefinED staff

In this podcast video, redefinED’s executive editor speaks with longtime education choice advocate Chad Aldis, vice president for Ohio policy and advocacy at Fordham, wo previously served as executive director of School Choice Ohio and was Ohio State director for StudentsFirst.

https://www.redefinedonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Ladner_Aldis-1.mp4

Ladner and Aldis discuss a recent Fordham study that mapped out open enrollment policies across Ohio after some media outlets questioned whether open enrollment education choice policies exacerbated school segregation. The study concluded they do not, it brought to light something more alarming.

Under state law, districts choose whether to accept nonresident students. Most suburban districts in Ohio have kept their doors shut. Despite being public agencies – often boasting of being “open to all” – these school systems deny children access just because they don’t have the right address.

“Let’s be real about this … no, you’re not to open to everybody. You’re open to everyone who can pay the price of admission … The price of admission is property taxes.”

EPISODE DETAILS:

·       Aldis’s critique of the current system, which results in high-wealth suburban school districts “walling out” poorer students from urban centers, who have been shown to benefit the most from education choice

·       How Ohio’s open enrollment system is different in rural counties

·       How rules restricting charter schools to urban areas further restricts choices for minority and low-income families

·       Comparisons with another education choice state, Arizona

·       What can be done to correct the inequities caused by Ohio’s open enrollment choice system

LINKS MENTIONED:

 https://fordhaminstitute.org/ohio/research/open-enrollment-and-student-diversity-ohios-schools

February 18, 2021 1 comment
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Commentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation LegislationFeaturedParental ChoicePublic School ChoiceSchool Choice

The 21st century ‘school bus’

Special to redefinED February 15, 2021
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: This post’s author, Emily Anne Gullickson, J.D., M.Ed., is president and founder of Great Leaders, Strong Schools and a former middle school teacher in Phoenix.

Emily Anne Gullickson

In 1939, representatives from 48 states developed a set of school bus standards resulting in a massive standardization of school transit systems in America. Last year, 26 million students in the United States boarded nearly 480,000 yellow school buses to go to their public school.

Almost 80 years later, a lot has changed in the technology and transportation industries, yet we continue to have a one-size-fits-all approach to transporting students.

School districts are struggling to provide efficient bus services in the face of escalating costs and increasingly complex education systems where more students attend public schools outside their neighborhoods.

Arizona recently was recognized as the most choice-y school choice state in the nation according to EdChoice. For 40 years, our state has led the way with public school options, beginning with open enrollment, which allows students to choose any school both within the boundaries of the school district in which the student rides and to transfer to public schools outside of their resident school district. With the onset of public charter schools in 1995, families truly were no longer limited to a geographically defined attendance zone in Arizona.

Yale University researchers compiled information in 2016 indicating that nearly one in two K-8 students in Maricopa County do not attend the district school to which they were assigned based on home address. The actual number is higher, as the analysis was conducted before the large pandemic shift and did not include homeschool families, online students, or students attending private or parochial schools.

Yet we still have not achieved giving all parents a real chance to truly have access to the full range of public education options. If transporting a student across town to a public school that is the right fit is a burden to a family, then that family does not actually have true access to public schools of choice.

Barriers also are experienced in our rural and remote communities. An optimal student transportation system is highly context-dependent; what works in a rural school district may not work in an urban or suburban district. Rural districts must use the same large buses to transport students as in Phoenix or Tucson, even when the number of students being transported and the geographic terrain does not justify them, resulting in empty seats, poor fuel efficiency and major wear and tear on the vehicles.

Arizona’s remote communities are not alone in having fewer alternatives than urban counterparts. According to the Community Transportation Association of America, approximately 28% of rural residents live in areas in which the level of transit service is negligible, and another 38% of rural residents live in areas without any public transit service. A choice is not a choice if you can’t get there, no matter how simple and accessible the open enrollment process is.

This fall, our sister organization A for Arizona hosted focus groups with school partners and community members about transportation barriers and solutions. The feedback that was shared served as inspiration for Arizona Senate Bill 1683, championed by Senate Education Chairman Paul Boyer, which provides innovation grants as an incentive and support to public school leaders wanting to rethink our school transportation system to better serve public school families.

These grants will allow a series of locally driven solutions to be tried and evaluated to lead to greater efficiency and cost savings, recognizing geographic and local needs and providing access for more families to the public learning options that best meet each child’s needs. 

With this transportation grant program, public school systems could leverage partners to improve operational and cost-efficiency as well as data collection, such as length of ride times, radio-frequency identification cards to track student ridership daily, and the latest GPS technology utilized in other modes of mass transit. GPS tracking for school buses also would empower parents to monitor a school bus’s status and exact location while capturing data for more efficient routing.

Other ideas such as neighborhood carpools and grants to parents are on the table here, too. Whatever it is that district and charter leaders are thinking about trying, they can pilot it with these grant dollars before trying to expand statewide. Transportation regularly is the least efficient component of a school budget and is about to break the budget of smaller schools and systems. Innovation is necessary, and these grants put some money on the table to help leaders do just that.

Under this bill, local school leaders who want to opt in with a grant proposal have the flexibility to design community-driven solutions while maintaining necessary protections for student safety and educational opportunity.

Now is the time to reimagine and rethink education – which must include how to get students to where they can learn best. 

 

 

 

 

 

February 15, 2021 0 comment
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