Diversity policy evades the hard questions

The school board finally released the latest draft of the proposed diversity policy yesterday, less than a day before the scheduled “listening post” on the proposal.  Unfortunately, the “policy” reminds me of the Romney-Ryan budget “plan”: “We’re going to reach these great outcomes—but for God’s sake, don’t ask us how!” 

The policy is an attempt to address a real problem: Some schools have a much higher percentage of economically struggling families than others, as measured by the number of kids receiving free and reduced-price lunches (“FRL”).  For example, at one elementary school, 79% of the kids receive free and reduced-price lunches; at another, only 6% do.  Packing that many kids from low-income households into one school can’t help but affect the educational experience.  It makes sense for the school board to look for ways to make the experiences at different schools more equitable.

The difficulty is that attempts to address those inequities can conflict with other values that the district also considers important.  All the candidates in the last school board election, for example, emphasized the value of preserving neighborhood schools.  But since high FRL percentages tend to be concentrated in certain geographical areas, any attempt to make FRL percentages more equitable through redrawing school boundaries would eventually mean that more kids would have to travel farther from their homes to school.

It’s the school board’s job to decide how to prioritize competing values.  Unfortunately, the proposed diversity policy doesn’t do that job.  The policy sets numerical goals for FRL disparities among schools—it requires that there be no more than a ten-percentage-point disparity among high schools, and no more than a fifteen-percentage-point disparity among junior highs and among elementaries.  But it says nothing about how the district should reach those goals, and to what extent (if any) it should balance those goals against other values.

If the policy simply asked the superintendent to propose a plan to meet those goals, which the board would then vote on, it would make perfect sense.  It wouldn’t mean much, since it wouldn’t commit the board to anything; the hard decisions about what values to prioritize and what sacrifices to make would be for another day.  But it would at least start the ball rolling.

But the proposal doesn’t just require the superintendent to propose a plan.  It requires him to make a plan and implement it.  It says that the “superintendent shall not . . . Fail to achieve the diversity goals” by specified dates—without taking any position on how he should achieve them.  It even implies that the superintendent has the power to alter attendance zones (as long as he does not create new non-contiguous zones), though one school board member assured me that the board would have to approve any boundary changes.  What the policy is authorizing the superintendent to do on his own, and what would require further board approval, is completely unclear.

School board members have said that they do not want to use large-scale busing of kids to meet the goals, and the policy does contain some language suggesting that “non-voluntary movement” should not be a first resort.  But just how they do want to achieve the goals is a mystery, and it’s not at all clear that the superintendent can achieve them without a lot of “non-voluntary movement.”  The policy delegates the entire question to the superintendent to figure out and implement, and requires him to meet the goals no matter what it takes to do so.

A list of desired outcomes is not a plan or a policy.  It’s a cop-out.  It’s not the superintendent’s job to choose among different priorities and conflicting values.  It’s the school board’s job.  Almost everyone agrees that the FRL disparities are harmful.  All the disagreement is about what—and how much—we should be willing to do to alleviate them.  The proposed policy stops with the easy part, and evades the hard questions.  What did we elect the school board for, if not to decide hard questions?

The board should develop some concrete proposals, let the community respond to them, debate them publicly, then make a decision.

Chris Liebig blogs about local and national school issues at A Blog About School.  You can also follow him on Twitter.