[CSPS] true integration of schools?

[Jonathan Coopersmith]

FYI.  This will an important consideration with the second CSISD high school.


McKinney touts integration of a different sort

School district says poor students do better at wealthier campuses



09:28 PM CST on Sunday, November 13, 2005

By KAREN AYRES / The Dallas Morning News

McKINNEY – The rivalry between the McKinney High Lions and the McKinney 
North High Bulldogs fosters the kind of friendly competition that school 
leaders here love to hype.

School spirit may divide the city's two high schools, but officials decided 
long ago that economics would not.

As the number of expensive subdivisions exploded in parts of this Dallas 
suburb, the district chose to bus youngsters across its 109-square-mile 
territory to make sure poor students were equally spread among the high 
schools and middle schools.

And as the district prepares to open its third high school, officials vow 
to follow a practice few others have adopted across the country.

"We want it to be indistinguishable whether you are an economically 
disadvantaged student or not," Superintendent Tom Crowe said. "Can we do 
it? I don't know."

Supporters in McKinney and elsewhere say kids who are poor enough to 
qualify for free or reduced-price lunches perform better if they go to 
school with students from higher-income families. But administrators from 
other Dallas-area districts say there are better ways to help low-income 
kids succeed than hauling them to wealthier campuses.

A Dallas Morning News analysis of the latest state test scores and 
demographic data from 55 suburban high schools in North Texas shows:

•On average, poor kids who attend high schools with very small percentages 
of disadvantaged students pass state tests at significantly higher rates 
than poor students at schools with more low-income students.

•Once a school exceeds 20 percent in its share of poor students, passage 
rates for those youths are no longer noticeably higher than for kids 
attending schools with larger low-income populations.

•Low-income students in either environment generally perform well below 
students of greater means.
Believers

With Boyd High scheduled to open next year, a group of 50 McKinney 
residents is redrawing school assignments – with economics in mind.

McKinney Independent School District officials acknowledge that they don't 
have solid comparisons to prove their plan works, since the district has 
never assigned secondary students to schools based on geography, as most 
other districts do.

But Mr. Crowe, the force behind continuing the practice, is undeterred.

Mr. Crowe points to steady improvement on state tests. In 2004, 62 percent 
of poor students at McKinney High School passed the reading portion of the 
Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. In 2005, 80 percent passed.

At McKinney North High School, the percentages of poor students who passed 
the TAKS reading test rose from 69 percent to 78 percent over the same period.

Even with those jumps, there are still significant gaps between poor 
students' performance and that of the general student population. But many 
of those gaps are narrowing. At McKinney High, for example, there was a 
22-percentage-point gap in passing rates between poor students and all 
students on the social studies test in 2004. That was cut to 11 points in 
2005.

The overall passing rates are virtually the same at both schools, which Mr. 
Crowe considers an asset for the town and an advantage in recruiting strong 
teachers. Both high schools are rated Academically Acceptable by the Texas 
Education Agency.

Mr. Crowe said the extra $42,000 busing cost is well worth it. Without it, 
he said, McKinney High School would have the bulk of the district's poor 
and minority students.

"The sole factor is economics," Mr. Crowe said. "Does it tend to work out 
racially, too? Yes. But the driving force is economics."

Robbie Clark, a former McKinney school board member, said the district 
wanted to avoid creating an economic divide between its high schools when 
it unveiled the integration plan in 1995.

"What we wanted to do was try to maintain the character of our community as 
one community and not an east-side, west-side situation," Mr. Clark said.

With few exceptions, the plan is mandatory.

Many McKinney parents endorse the policy, saying the benefit of exposing 
their children to people of different backgrounds is worth the hassle of 
students attending schools far away from home.

"We live in a pretty affluent area, and I wouldn't want my kids to hobnob 
solely with kids in our area, because there is a whole world out there," 
said Laura Davis, whose two sons attend McKinney North High School.

But others argue that the policy isn't fair to everyone. Cindy Curtis, who 
lives in Lucas on the southern tip of the McKinney district, said it's 
ridiculous that her sons must take a 45-minute bus ride to the northern end 
even though there are closer schools.

Her son Rocky, who attends Scott Johnson Middle School, often doesn't have 
time to eat breakfast at home before a bus pulls up at 6:30 a.m.

"Their strategy is wrong," Ms. Curtis said. "They're making kids suffer and 
making taxpayers suffer, too. It's like they're being too strategic."
Evaluating the system

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Century 
Foundation, a nonprofit think tank, said standardized test scores from 
several states show that students do better in middle-class schools.

He said middle-class parents are more likely to get involved. Good teachers 
are more likely to want to work in those schools.

"If life were fair, the low-income kids would get the best teachers," said 
Mr. Kahlenberg, author of All Together Now, which advocates integration. 
"But we know, in fact, that doesn't happen."

Though more districts are adopting economic integration, Mr. Kahlenberg 
said, the numbers are still quite low. He noted that as few as 500,000 
students in the nation attend economically integrated schools.

John Witte, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, said he doesn't 
believe the system should be widely used. Citing the high correlation 
between race and socioeconomic status, Dr. Witte said dividing school 
populations by income is largely the same as racial integration. He said 
testing data are inconclusive, noting that students who qualify for free 
and reduced-price lunches often have widely varying family backgrounds.

"It's sort of a way to integrate through the back door," Dr. Witte said. 
"If you're interested in spreading out the racial minority or majority, 
then you're not doing it in a straightforward way."

The decision also can be politically and legally sticky. In recent years, 
old desegregation orders that required some school districts to avoid 
clustering minority students have been lifted.
In Texas

Texas does not keep records on how many districts in the state practice 
economic integration, said TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson. An informal 
survey of local districts did not find any with similar systems.

However, schools in Wake County, N.C., which includes Raleigh, use busing 
to diversify student bodies economically.

When Wake County enacted the policy in 2000, 84.9 percent of students in 
third through eighth grades met or exceeded standards on state tests. Now, 
that rate is 91.3 percent.

District spokesman Bill Poston contends that economic policy is partly 
responsible for the improvement. But Dave Duncan of the opposition group 
Assignment by Choice says other factors, including an influx of educated 
new residents, have boosted the scores, noting that only 6 percent of the 
district's 120,000 students are bused for diversity.

"You simply can't hang the success of the school system on a single-digit 
factor," Mr. Duncan said.

Ms. Culbertson agrees.

She said many successful Texas schools have high numbers of disadvantaged 
kids, noting that half of the districts recognized by the state this year 
had more than 40 percent poor students.

Still, a survey of testing data from suburban high schools of all sizes 
shows several scoring discrepancies when comparing the performances of poor 
populations in local districts. The review did not include schools in Fort 
Worth or Dallas, where 80 percent of the students are poor and the makeup 
tends to be fairly even among schools without special busing.

In Arlington, for example, poor students at Martin, the wealthiest high 
school in the district, generally did better than their counterparts at 
other schools.

Superintendent Mac Bernd said other issues, including language proficiency, 
influence those scores. He said that the district allows transfers but that 
he has no plans to adopt an integration system.

"Changing school boundaries is like moving a graveyard," Dr. Bernd said. 
"You're relocating people for reasons other than where they've chosen to 
reside, and people get resentful, particularly if they make residential 
decisions based on where they are going to go to school."

In Plano ISD, only 42 percent of poor students at Williams, the poorest 
high school in the district, passed the math section of the test, about 25 
percentage points below the second-lowest-scoring school.

Deputy Superintendent Danny Modisette said Plano, like other districts, is 
working on plans such as tutoring to boost those scores rather than moving 
kids to other buildings.

"There are a lot of different ways of tackling a problem," he said.

E-mail <mailto:kayres at dallasnews.com>kayres at dallasnews.com
HOW THEY DO IT

The McKinney school district is divided into 241 planning units.

The number of students who qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch is 
established in each unit.

The number of those students is balanced at every middle school or high 
school.

Students from all economic backgrounds are bused to maintain that balance.

http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/dn/education/stories/111405dnccodiversity.6e01c51.html


Jonathan Coopersmith
Associate Professor
Dept. of History
MS 4236
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas  77843
979.845.8584
979.862.4314 fax

Secretary
History & Philosophy of Science Section (L)
American Association for the Advancement of Science
aaas.org 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/csps/attachments/20051120/9e813a6a/attachment.htm