AFTER 50 years of fighting it, school segregation hasn't gone anywhere. Like a virus, it has survived by adapting amidst changing times and pressures. It used to be overtly racial. Now, we face a more powerful, though less visible, segregation: that of wealth.
A recent Washington Post study, commissioned in the face of a growing achievement gap between rich and poor students, suggests that we can reverse this inequality. Economic integration can benefit poor students without harming rich ones. School systems must act to combat economic segregation through redistricting and busing.
According to the Post report, "Pupils' Poverty Drives Achievement Gap," poverty is the best predictor of a student's academic performance - not the economic status of the school, but that of an individual student's family. Every standardized test out there shows a large and growing gap between rich and poor students.
This phenomenon occurs when there is an influx of poor, often immigrant, families into an area - as there has been in recent years into the older, inner-ring suburbs of major cities. These low-income children flood the schools, and middle- and upper-income families get scared. They think their children won't do as well if they stay in these schools, so they flee to richer, younger, more peripheral suburbs. The "white flight" of the 1950s and 1960s has become the "rich flight." Low-income families are left behind, and soon the schools are high-poverty schools. Educational performance plummets.
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If middle- and upper-income parents were correct in their fears, this would be a difficult problem to combat. It would be harder to justify keeping high-income students around just to counterbalance low-income ones if this came at a cost to the wealthier students - that is, if it was a trade off, a matter of pulling down the rich in order to lift up the poor.
But the most important finding of the Post report is that it's not a zero sum game; the rich don't have to suffer to help the poor. Put low-income students around high-income ones, and they have a reason to achieve. Put high-income students around low-income ones, and they don't suddenly lose their motivation, drop out of school, and deliver pizza for the rest of their lives.
Educational environment is the key. Lower-income students perform reasonably well at low-poverty schools - that is, schools where a low percentage of the students come from low-income families. But put them in a high-poverty school, and they struggle. At the same time, though, middle-class students do well regardless of the level of poverty in their school. They still excel, even in high-poverty schools. The assumption that drives parents to panic and run is wrong.
This all suggests that positive influences overshadow negative ones. If all that children see are families in low-pay, manual labor jobs that don't demand an education, it's harder for them to value learning, to aspire to great things, and to set goals and learn how to pursue them. But if they are exposed to at least some role models in high-pay, intellectually demanding jobs that communicate the importance of education and the possibility of upward mobility, they will tend to respond.
This means that school systems can close the gap by integrating schools. Voluntary integration - trying to attract high-income families back to high-poverty school districts, often with magnet schools - isn't very successful. Parents don't understand that high-income students don't perform any worse in such schools. So what schools should do is integrate involuntarily - through redistricting to balance the proportion of low-income students between schools instead of having all of them at some schools and virtually none at others.
The main barrier to this solution is ignorance. High-income parents make the incorrect assumption that busing would mean a decrease in the quality of their children's education. They protest in droves any time schools attempt to redistrict, often forcing school officials to renege on their plans to combat economic segregation.
School systems must not be deterred by well-intentioned but poorly informed people. They should use evidence like the Post's findings to defend their redistricting and busing plans against the concerns of parents. In the meantime, they must continue to foster voluntary integration efforts.
Education has become a great divider instead of a great equalizer; it may be the most significant obstacle to equal opportunity in modern society. School boards must intervene now to level the uneven playing field that capitalism has created.
(Bryan Maxwell's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at bmaxwell@cavalierdaily.com.)
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