Essay School Segregation on School Report Cards: Who Are We Grading Anyway?
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An Essay for the Learning Curve
James Carter, Leonardo Restrepo
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Last fall, legislators in North Carolina and New York introduced bills that would add measures of school segregation and resource equity into the school report cards required by the Every Student Succeeds Act. The proposed policies, which would assess schools on how their racial composition compares with all residents of the counties in which they are located, are likely to paint a misleading picture for the many places where generational differences in demographics and school choice make schools and their communities look different from one another.

Key Takeaways

Using the US Department of Education Common Core of Data school demographic data and the American Community Survey, the findings show the following:

  • Of North Carolina’s 2,692 public schools, 19 percent are categorized by the proposed bill as highly proportional, 39 percent are proportional, 35 percent are somewhat disproportional, and 7 percent are highly disproportional.
  • But the racial demographics of the school-age populations are not necessarily like those of the broader age range included in the entire county population. On average, North Carolina children ages 5 to 17 are less white (and more Hispanic) than the full population, and the differences between public school enrollments and county demographics are even larger. In 111 of the 115 noncharter school districts in North Carolina, the student body in public schools is less white than the county in which the school district is located.
  • Using an alternate approach like recalculating the proportionality scores using American Community Survey data for 5-to-17-year-olds—rather than data from the entire county—71 percent of public schools would grade in the top two proportionality categories instead of 58 percent in the proposed bill language. Similarly, another alternative approach of removing from the calculation children in private schools and home schools would result in the same share of schools (71 percent) ending up in the top two proportionality categories as in the comparison with all 5-to-17-year-olds.
  • Charter schools enroll about 8 percent of public school students in North Carolina, and analysis finds that North Carolina charter schools are slightly more likely to be classified as highly proportional than traditional public schools, with 21 percent of charter schools falling into the highly proportional category (defined using the bill’s definition) compared with 19 percent of traditional public schools. But charter schools are also more likely to be classified as highly disproportional (17 percent versus 7 percent for traditional public schools).
  • Public charter schools and private schools also show racial demographic differences even among the school-age population; private schools are, on average, about 3 percent whiter than the school-age population in their county.

Implications

The discrepancy between student racial and ethnic demographics and those of the counties they attend school in is complicated to capture in a segregation report card. When trying to analyze school segregation, a key question for policymakers should be who should be responsible for trying to change a school to be more representative?

If the answer is public school districts, then policy should use a measure that compares school racial demographics to a county’s 5-to-17-year-olds rather than the entire county population. Then, school districts can use student assignment plans and controlled intradistrict choice, such as magnet programs, to influence their schools’ demographics. If policymakers would like all public schools to be involved in the process, then using a measure that includes charter schools makes sense. The state charter authorizing body would need to be involved in making sure the type and location of charter schools do not increase school segregation. And state charter authorizers could give priority to schools that are intentionally designed to further diversity in their student bodies.

Although the work to address school segregation is important, administrators at the school, district, and state levels could try to make schools more representative of the wider community in a more accurate way rather than trying to make those schools mirror their home counties.

Additional Resource

Research and Evidence Work, Education, and Labor
Expertise K-12 Education Higher Education
Tags Racial equity in education Higher education