Underhand racism at work in Kentucky

Sounds like lots of busing again

Last June, the eulogizing came quickly after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to strike down the race-based integration plans at two public school districts. "Bye-bye, Brown," was University of Louisville education professor Skip Kifer's succinct response in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader.

But in Jefferson County, Ky. - one of the school districts whose policies the court declared unconstitutional - school officials have come up with an integration strategy that uses household income, adult education levels and race to determine a school's student body composition. If the Board of Education adopts the plan when it votes in early May, Jefferson County will join the vanguard of school districts that looks at integration along socioeconomic lines as the best way to diversify their schools.

National scrutiny of school integration in Jefferson County is nothing new. The county first made headlines in 1974, when a U.S. district court judge ruled that the county's schools had not been desegregated. A 1975 Time cover-story, "Busing Battle," reporting on the resulting court-ordered busing, described black students passing through rows of armed state troopers into their new schools.

Jefferson County achieved integration with a policy requiring that no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent of the student body be black. That was the plan the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional last summer in Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education. Jefferson County's new plan uses Census data to divide the county into two geographic areas. "Area A" is below the district average in median household income and educational achievement, and above the district average in its percentage of minority students. "Area B" is the opposite.

Schools are then grouped into clusters and students are assigned to schools within those clusters, based primarily on parents' choice. Schools would now have to include no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent of students from geographic Area A.

Only the district's elementary schools will be affected by the plan. Depending on how the clusters are drawn, as few as 1,700 elementary students would have to shift schools. (Enrollment at middle schools and high schools currently meets the new standards.)

"There's a reason to want to [integrate schools along socioeconomic lines], even if it didn't produce racial diversity," says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a nonprofit public policy institute. "It's that low-income kids do better in a middle-class environment." He points to the 1966 Coleman Report on educational integration, which showed that the socioeconomic makeup of schools is second only to family influence in its effect on student achievement. It's a finding that has been repeatedly upheld.

Kahlenberg says that in schools integrated along socioeconomic lines, students tend to be more academically engaged and are less likely to create discipline problems; parents tend to be more involved; and the schools attract better teachers and administrators.

Kahlenberg says that if the purpose of school assignment is to increase academic learning, "then the primary issue is class. If the issue is how do we create tolerant adults, then I think we want to continue to focus, in part, on race." The model in Jefferson County attempts to do both.

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Charter School Students in Chicago Enjoy Better Graduation, College Entry Rates

Chicago's multi-grade charter high schools (those serving students in grades 7-12, 6-12 or K-12) appear to improve their students' chances of graduating and attending college, as compared with the city's traditional public high schools, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today. The study is the first to rigorously examine the impacts of charter schools on the critical measures of high school graduation and college entry.

The study finds evidence that Chicago's charter high schools may produce positive effects on ACT scores, the probability of graduating, and the probability of enrolling in college-but these positive effects are solidly evident only in the charter high schools that also included middle school grades. For the average eighth-grade charter student in Chicago, continuing in a charter high school is estimated to lead to

* an advantage of approximately half a point in composite ACT score (for which the median score for the students included in the analysis is 16)

* an advantage of 7 percentage points in the probability of graduating from high school

* an advantage of 11 percentage points in the likelihood of enrolling in college.

"The results for the charter high schools are encouraging and raise questions as to why students attending these schools exhibit higher graduation and college attendance rates," said Ron Zimmer, co-author of the study and a senior policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "If the educational community is to learn from charter schools, we need to explore further the factors that lead to these results."

Charter schools are publicly funded schools that operate outside direct school district control and are intended to provide educational choice to families, reduce bureaucratic constraints on educators and provide competitive pressure to conventional public schools. Forty states and the District of Columbia have charter-school laws, and more than 4,000 charter schools operate in the United States, enrolling more than 1 million students.

"The strongly positive attainment results for Chicago's multi-grade charter high schools suggest that test scores alone may not fully measure the benefits of charter schools for their students," said Brian Gill, a study co-author and a senior social scientist at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. The authors contend that additional research is needed before it can be determined how charter high schools produced these results and whether district-run schools can produce positive effects by incorporating middle school and, perhaps, elementary grades onto the same campus.

The study also found that in grades K-8, Chicago charter schools are doing about as well as the city's traditional public schools in raising student achievement as measured by test score, but that charters do not do well in test score achievement during their first year of operation. On average, the prior achievement levels of students transferring to charter schools differ only slightly from the citywide average and from the achievement levels of peers in the district-managed Chicago public schools they departed. In addition, charter schools in Chicago are not having major effects on the sorting of students by race, ethnicity or achievement and while charter schools have been criticized for "skimming the cream" by attracting the top public school students, this was not the case in Chicago.

The study includes data from the 1997-98 through 2006-07 school years, except for graduation and college attainment data, which included 1997-98 through 2005-06. The full report, "Achievement and Attainment in Chicago Charter Schools," and a report summary are available at www.rand.org.

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