Is the diversity policy causing school closings?

In January, our school board adopted a diversity policy, which requires the superintendent to even out the disparities in the number of low-income families in each school attendance area.  Even though I agree that reducing income disparities among schools is a worthy goal, I was against the policy, because the board was committing itself to specific numerical goals without any discussion of what it would take to reach those goals.

Now, only six months later, the diversity policy appears to be having its first unintended (or at least undiscussed) consequence: it turns out that school closures would help the superintendent meet the diversity goals.  By closing existing elementary schools and building big new ones in other parts of town, the district can use the resulting redistricting process to even out the economic disparities between attendance areas.

Such a plan also enables the district to get around a quirk of federal law that complicates its implementation of the diversity policy.  Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools that fail to meet test score goals are designated Schools in Need of Assistance (“SINA schools”).  If your school is a SINA school, federal law permits to you to transfer out to another school in the district.  As a result, any effort to diversify a SINA school by redrawing boundaries is futile: any new families assigned to that school can transfer out if they want to.  But if the district builds a new school, the new school is not a SINA school, and the families in its (newly drawn) attendance area can no longer transfer out.  Building big new elementaries on the far east and southeast sides of Iowa City thus enables the district to enforce its boundaries again, and to use redistricting to achieve its diversity goals.

There are good reasons to reduce economic disparities among school populations.  Whether that justifies closing existing neighborhood schools and building new schools elsewhere, though, is another question – one that was never mentioned or debated when the diversity policy was being considered.  School closings are particularly hard to justify because there is good reason to question whether we will actually need three large new elementaries even ten years from now.

When the diversity policy was adopted, its supporters argued that it would be achieved not by major redistricting but by voluntary movement in response to incentives such as magnet schools.  But the board committed itself to the policy without discussing how that would happen, and the policy itself puts almost no limits on how it can be implemented.  There was no discussion of how the board should balance diversity against other possibly conflicting values, such as the value of keeping existing neighborhood schools open.

The board shouldn’t just skip over that discussion.  If people had known that the diversity policy could cause school closures, the debate about it might have been very different.

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