“Autonomy” has become kind of a buzzword in recent
years. It’s treated with reverence by
charter school advocates…
almost as a panacea that will fix nearly any problems facing public schools. The belief is that, given greater autonomy,
schools are better able to sense and respond to families’ preferences for
schooling, and to the competitive incentives of the emerging education market.
This all sounds quite appealing, and makes sense in a lot of
ways. After all, school leaders are
indeed better positioned than are bureaucrats in faraway offices to understand
the needs of the local families they serve in areas such as curriculum, hours,
or allocating resources to various programs.
Especially in a choice system such as with charter schools, autonomy
allows school leaders to compete in shaping their services in ways that will
attract and retain students. And this is
particularly important if we want to provide an increased number of high
quality options for disadvantaged students trapped in failing public
schools. But, in responding to increasing
competition for students, do they use this autonomy to advance their school at
the expense of other important societal goals for public education?
Many school choice systems have been associated with
inequitable access, and segregative
patterns in many cases (also look here, here, here, and here).
Much of the research on these patterns has focused on self-sorting —
such as “white flight” — by families as parents make school choices based on
social characteristics of students at a given school. Little attention has been paid to the role of
schools in shaping those patterns, even though, with the increasing importance
of choice and competition, many schools often have the autonomy to improve
equitable access for disadvantaged students.
To study this issue, we looked to the choice system in New
Zealand, where policymakers have been encouraging family choice of schools, and
school autonomy, since the “Tomorrow’s Schools” reforms
over two decades ago. By essentially
eradicating local education authorities, policymakers devolved power to schools
as autonomous, “self-managing” entities.
This has led to a system of comprehensive choice for families, and
considerable competition between schools for students, particularly in urban
areas. In Auckland, the largest city in
the country, upwards of one-third of traffic congestion is due to parents
shuffling their kids to the schools of their choice.
But, of course, schools have a finite amount of space. So, when a school has more applicants than
seats, it can implement an “enrolment scheme” to manage the demand, through measures
such as randomized “ballots” (lotteries), and/or specifying their own zones in
which residents have priority access to the school.
Previous research has shown that schools in more affluent
areas are more likely to be in greater demand, and thus more likely to have
enrolment schemes. The question we asked was whether these
self-managing schools were using their autonomy to draw their zones in order to
improve or restrict access for disadvantaged students. To do this, we simply compared the level of
affluence in a walkable radius around each school to the level of affluence in
the boundaries that the schools themselves had drawn. Certainly, school zones are not perfects
circles, as their creators have to consider traffic patterns, geographic
barriers, and the boundaries of competitors.
But, all things being equal, we could expect that deviations in those
boundaries from a geometric radius around a school would be more or less
equally likely to include or exclude more affluent neighborhoods.
But that is not what we
found. Instead, there is evidence of
rampant gerrymandering to exclude children from more disadvantaged neighborhoods. In the cases where there is a statistically
significant difference in the “deprivation level” of the population in a
school’s drawn zone compared to its immediate area, over three-quarters of
these self-managing school had drawn a zone that was significantly more
affluent than their immediate vicinity.
Moreover, as if to add insult to injury, more affluent
schools are not only drawing boundaries to keep poor kids out, but in their
promotional materials are bragging about their success in doing this. A review
of
school websites shows that more affluent schools are much more likely to
include official information about the number of disadvantaged students they
serve. In the US, this would be akin to
school leaders boasting about how few of their students are eligible for
free-reduced lunch.
While we might find these types of practices to be
distasteful for public schools that are funded by taxpayers to serve all
students, in some ways, such actions are predictable (if indefensible). After all, policymakers are creating
education markets where schools recognize competitive incentives to shape their
enrollments. It should be no surprise
that, given such autonomy and such incentives, they find creative ways to do
just that.
The full paper is available at the Forum
on the Future of Public Education.
By: Chris Lubienski
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