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How To Keep Brown AliveUse income level, instead of race, to integrate the schools.

By Richard Kahlenberg
Posted Friday, June 29, 2007, at 2:20 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Districts like Wake County shifted to socioeconomic integration in part to produce healthy racial integration indirectly, without running afoul of the Constitution. And now they look prescient. The courts have long held that distinctions based on income are permissible: The progressive income tax, for example, which imposes a higher marginal tax rate for the wealthy, presents no constitutional problem, while a tax system that imposed a higher marginal rate on whites than blacks would likely be struck down. Even the Bush administration has said that income-based school integration is perfectly legal.

And integration based on income can yield racial integration. African-American and other minority students are almost three times as likely to be low-income as white students. For example, among fourth-grade students nationally in 2005, 24 percent of whites were eligible for federally subsidized lunch, compared to 70 percent of African-Americans and 73 percent of Latinos. Furthermore, poor blacks in particular are more likely to attend high-poverty schools than poor whites. The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University found that in the 2003-04 school year, 76 percent of schools with minority rates at or above 90 percent were high poverty, compared with only 15 percent of schools with minority populations at 10 percent or lower.

In the higher-education arena, some poorly crafted income-based affirmative action plans have failed to produce sufficient racial diversity. That's in part because low-income whites tend to achieve at higher levels than low-income blacks. But at the K-12 level, the achievement gap between racial groups can actually be used to increase the racial dividend of income-based programs. Wake County's plan to avoid concentrations of low-income students and low achieving students has yielded almost as much racial diversity in schools as its old race-based integration plan. One study found that under Wake County's old policy, 64.6 percent of schools were racially desegregated in 1999-2000. Two years later, under the new socioeconomic integration policy, 63.3 percent of schools remained racially desegregated.

Significantly, however, income-based integration isn't just a clever proxy for racial integration. For 40 years, researchers have found that the single most important thing you can do to raise the achievement of low-income students is to send them to attend a middle-class school, where classmates tend to have big dreams and make good peers, parents in the community actively volunteer in the school and hold school officials accountable, and good teachers teach based on high expectations.

Indeed, education research has long suggested that the economic mix of a school matters more than the racial mix in promoting the academic achievement of students. UCLA professor Gary Orfield, a strong proponent of racial desegregation, notes that "educational research suggests that the basic damage inflicted by segregated education comes not from racial concentration but the concentration of children from poor families." This is a better way to further the promise of Brown—and one that the Supreme Court won't lay a glove on.

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Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and author of All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools Through Public School Choice (2001) and a just-released report, "Rescuing Brown v. Board of Education: Profiles of Twelve Districts Pursuing Socioeconomic School Integration."
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Remarks from the Fray:

Wouldn't any attempt to use income level as a proxy for race be vulnerable to accusations of disparate impact? As I understand it, a policy or program which is not explicitly biased can still be held to be impermissible if an analysis shows that it produces biased results.

This is the line of reasoning used to argue that colleges should not use the SAT for admissions, or to prohibit redlining by banks. I would expect segregationists to cash their winnings from this round and then start a new round of lawsuits against any replacement policy on the grounds of disparate impact.

--Clever_Hippo

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Since you cannot ask parents for their income as a criteria for attendance at public school there really is no way to do an economically based de-segregation. At best you can use Hot Lunch programs, but that assumes that once you get out of abject poverty, racism doesn't affect your access to education. And as we have seen in study after study, both within classrooms, and in the real world of middle-class housing, this is not the case. Racism continues to live on. Thus you really don't create an environment where minorities have their 14th Amendment rights protected. What you have is an environment that allows white unearned privileges to be protected by the force of law. Essentially a surreptitious Jim Crow

Similarly, when you do start to allocate funds based on socio-economics, the research that shows discrimination to affect outcomes within a socio-economic strata comes into play. Thus a poor white male receiving hot lunch will be more likely to get 'desegregated' into a better school than a poor Hispanic female. So socio-economically based integration really isn't addressing the racial issue at all. It is relying on a statistical belief that somehow because the sample is predominantly minority, that the cross-section benefiting from that de-segregation will not be racially biased. And the research doesn't support this.

--degsme

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By forcing kids to attend schools outside their own neighborhoods you break down the bond between neighborhoods and their schools. The local school is no longer a neighborhood institution, it's an institution of the State that just happens to be located nearby.

No one gives a damn about the "State" but most people care about their neighborhood. Cut that bond, and you lose one of the key pillars of support for local schools.

Keep schools local, and keep the students in their local schools. If some neighborhoods have better schools than others, so be it. Aspirational parents will try to get into a neighborhood that has good schools.

--RoboTombo

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(6/30)

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