Worried public school parents in Seattle, Portland and Eugene are clinging to "school choice" in their districts.

Meaning they'll be damned if their kids will go to the schools closest to their homes, because everyone knows "neighborhood" schools is too often code for low-achieving "minority" schools.

Bucking this tendency, Eugene's Superintendent George Russell has bravely put forth a plan to repurpose the city's alternative schools, making them less an escape hatch for white parents, while increasing racial diversity by inducing white students to attend the neighborhood schools so many parents have fled in Eugene.

The Eugene Register-Guard (prior link, above) reports:

..Russell's recommendation earlier this month (was) to consider merging, relocating or closing some of the district's nine alternative elementary schools.....Russell's suggestions were included in a 38-page report that also suggested providing extra money to struggling neighborhood schools; favoring low-income students in alternative-school admission lotteries; boosting the enrollment of special education students in alternative schools...

Russell said he has become convinced that the district's 30-year-old system of alternative schools and open choice had weakened some neighborhood schools, leaving them "browner and poorer" than they otherwise would be as many of the most involved and affluent parents opt to leave.

As you'll see in the article, he has drawn a sharp response from alternative school parents in Eugene, who aren't willing to commit to neighborhood schools with too many minority students.

Writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last weekend about a host of problems facing the Seattle Public Schools, commentator Ted Van Dyk made a few passing points that bear special emphasis here:

There are fewer school-age kids in Seattle than in any major city but San Francisco. Many are enrolled in private schools. Newcomers with kids bypass Seattle automatically in favor of nearby communities with better schools. .....neighborhood schools are where effective school systems begin....If the system is to make a comeback, neighborhood schools must be there for Seattle kids to attend.

And they must be prioritized in the school assignment scheme. Our city's "99 flavors" approach (99 schools, of ALL bizarre varieties, heavy emphasis on "choice") undermines good neighborhood schools. In Washington, we are deprived of real school choice such as charter schools (which were enacted by the legislature last spring and then rescinded last fall in a ballot initiative); and vouchers (difficult or impossible under current state law).

While there are charter schools in Oregon, the "choice" plans offered in Portland and Eugene, as in Seattle, are largely a way of dodging the need for cohesive neighborhood public schools, where involvement of middle- and upper-income parents and students could be part of the rising tide that lifts all boats.

A "no choice" policy should be instituted in places like Seattle, Portland and Eugene, with a few possible exceptions allowed for students at the extreme upper and lower ends of the capabilities spectrum, and for neighborhood-based charter schools, where legal. This approach would cause more flight to private schools in the near term, no doubt. But things probably have to get worse before they get better.

If I knew that all the public school students in my Seattle neighborhood were going to the same neighborhood schools (K-5, junior high and high school; or better yet, K-8 and high school); I'd certainly be more willing to take the plunge with my own kids.

Liberals love to score brownie points for sending their kids to public schools, sanctimoniously talking up "diversity," but then game the system to isolate their kids from minority students as much as they can.

When on any given city block, kids from 20 different homes go to 15 or 18 different schools, you don't have a community anymore; nor do you have desirable neighborhood schools.

There's no way back without dramatic change. Less choice, and more consistent, academically rigorous curricula, that's what we need. As opposed to the rootless crosstown "choice" scam, and shoddy gimmicks like Seattle's "Mall Academy," or the schools for clientized troublemakers; navel-gazing Native Americans; and teens seeking parity with whole-grain teachers.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at February 24, 2005 12:30 PM

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