Economic segregation an issue

Focus shifts to increasing schools’ income diversity

I’m not eager to let schools off the hook because they have large numbers of low-income and minority students. There is a spectrum of records of success for schools with concentrations of high-needs students. Some do decidedly better than others. That keeps me wondering why more schools can’t get to at least the level of those schools.

But you have to be out of touch with reality not to see how much the income of students’ families and neighborhoods match with test scores and other measures of a school. The same is true, unfortunately, for race, which often but not entirely parallels income.

Even a brief contemplation of, say, Brookfield East High School (87% not economically disadvantaged, 4% African-American) and the not-so-far-away Milwaukee Vincent High School (44% not economically disadvantaged, 93% African-American) is enough to drive home how much education experiences differ along with income and race.

There seems to be a surge of attention at the national level to the impact of segregation in education. I have a surprisingly thick stack of studies and articles from just the last several weeks. Most, but not all, are from what I’d call the more liberal side of the spectrum, but there is broad attention being paid to the inequalities and impacts on opportunity shaped by segregation.

The emphasis now isn’t on racial integration and courtordered plans, which cities, including Milwaukee, went through in the 1970s. The focus now is on economic integration, which is to say, how to increase the economic diversity of a school’s student body.

Actions that leaders might take to increase such diversity could include changing school or school district boundaries, creating more schools with specialty programs that attract diverse students, or pairing schools with different populations for enrollment purposes.

This new batch of pieces I’ve seen includes:

A blog post from Kara S. Finnegan, a professor at the Warner School of Education at the University of Rochester, and Jennifer Jellison Holme, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, that focuses strongly on Milwaukee. They wrote, “School segregation by race and poverty is one of the underlying causes of school failure. . . . It has been largely overlooked in federal and state educational policy in recent decades.”

They wrote, “Policymakers have sought to address symptoms (i.e. failing schools, high dropout rates) with various solutions (accountability, market-based reforms) and yet, while some of these steps make the problem somewhat or temporarily better, the underlying maladies persist and, in fact, often serve to undermine those very reform efforts.”

Finnegan and Holme include a set of maps focused on economic and racial trends in the Milwaukee area that show “over the course of four decades, segregation and the concentration of poverty in Milwaukee grew even more severe.” They conclude, “These segregation patterns are important to educational policy because they correspond closely with perceived patterns of school ‘failure.’ ”

In “Education Next,” a quarterly based out of Harvard and Stanford, Steven Riskin, a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, concludes that the average black student nationwide now goes to public school with more white students than a half century ago, but fewer white students than 30 years ago. “The rate of exposure has declined markedly since 1988,” he wrote.

Does segregation hurt education? “The best answer, in my view, is that the consequences of racial segregation for student learning are probably adverse, but not severely so,” Riskin concluded.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, a nongovernment group, issued a paper that concludes that poor minority students in segregated schools are more likely to get involved in crime than those in integrated schools.

The Milwaukee picture

So what about the Milwaukee area? Several points:

We’ve earned a nationally recognized reputation for a high degree — some claim the highest in the U.S. — of racial segregation.

When court-ordered racial desegregation of Milwaukee Public Schools began in 1976, MPS was about two-thirds white. In following years, hundreds of thousands of white people left the city. MPS is now 13% white.

As segregated as the Milwaukee area is, some suburban communities and their schools have changed significantly in recent years. West Allis-West Milwaukee schools are now 45% nonwhite. Wauwatosa schools are 35% nonwhite. For Brown Deer, the figure is 71% nonwhite.

But for suburbs further from the central city, student bodies remain overwhelmingly white. For example, Port Washington-Saukville and Oconomowoc are each 89% white. Muskego-Norway is 91% white and less than 1% African-American.

The long-standing Chapter 220 program supporting voluntary city-suburban transfers to promote integration has declined for years. Legislative action in 2015 stopped new students from enrolling. Only 1,300 previously enrolled students are going from the city to the suburbs now, down from more than 5,000 in the 1990s. There is substantial evidence that the open enrollment options that allow students to go to school in other districts actually increase segregation.

Who’s in favor of doing something to increase integration these days? Around here, almost no one in any community.

Yet it’s so easy to see the prices paid for the chasms in our midst. It makes you wonder if some fresh thought and action is needed.

Alan J. Borsuk is senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. Reach him at alan.borsuk@marquette.edu.