Education Week - January 9, 2019 - 23

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students from all over the city, including those who attend
the more affluent districts. Attendance zones can be drawn
to exclude certain tracts or include certain residential
developments to ensure a diverse student body, bypassing
the legacy of red-lining and other discriminatory housing
and lending practices that impact attendance boundaries to
this day.
Offering attractive academic programs: The district
is developing new schools and programs like Montessori
schools, dual-language programs, and STEAM and STEM
programs to woo parents who have left the school system
for more affluent districts or for private or charter schools.
Those schools not only attract middle-class families, but
they also offer the kinds of programs that require peer-topeer interaction and collaboration to create truly integrated
spaces.
Putting a heavy emphasis on outreach and access: For
parents who aren't in the know or who don't know how to
jump through hoops, the district has made it easy for them
to find out about new schools and programs, and how to
apply. A family engagement team is in charge of outreach.
There are hubs at schools across the city where parents can
find out more about the new programs. Parents can register
in person, on the phone, online, or using an app.
Keeping it up: If the initial student demographic of a
diverse by design school is not what the district seeks, the
district returns to its applicant pool or goes in search of

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the families whose children qualify for those slots. And it
has policies that will allow it to take steps in future years to
restore the socioeconomic and racial balance in schools.
Choudhury has seen positive results, with applications far
outpacing the number of available slots in those schools,
and he believes there are lessons for other districts.
When San Antonio opened its first in-district Montessori
school last year with the 50-50 enrollment model, an
attendance zone that spanned a 3-mile radius around the
school, and 25 percent of the seats set aside for non-district
families, it was flooded with 750 applications for just 62
slots.
The San Antonio initiatives are not a panacea and will not
magically transform schools overnight. For one, they are
directed at new schools. The intentionally diverse schools
are also currently serving a small number of students. When
the new schools are completed, they will serve about 7,500
of the district's 48,500 students. A drop in the bucket.
Districts can take steps to diversify already existing
schools, including examining their choice programs to
remove barriers or hurdles that have allowed schools to
choose students and not students to choose schools, which
is what San Antonio is seeing. And they can also funnel
resources to existing schools-from additional dollars to
their best teachers and principals.
But a great deal of segregation is rooted in housing
patterns, so it's not up to districts alone. Municipalities must
also play a role. Until they do, districts can take steps like
San Antonio has to avoid exacerbating the problem. n

PERSPECTIVE
Redefining 'Good'
BY AMY STUART WELLS

S

an Antonio's integration program Diverse by Design offers a new
strategy to address a separate and unequal educational system.
This is a bold approach to targeting concentrated poverty and
segregation-two key predictors of low student achievement-in
public schools. But more emphasis must be placed on a central
issue that perpetuates inequality in education: How do race, ethnicity, and
culture shape the way we define "good" students, schools, and communities?
And how do those definitions reproduce segregation time and time again?
In our research and the professional development at Teachers College,
Columbia University, we are learning about the process by which racial,
ethnic, and economic segregation is reproduced and legitimized by a
hierarchical understanding of different races and cultures in our society.
This racial hierarchy, which is often vehemently denied by many who
perpetuate it, fosters implicit racial biases that shape the choices of
educators, parents, and home buyers.
We learned in our research on Long Island, for instance, that property
values for virtually the same house in different school districts can vary
as much as $50,000 based on the percentage of black students enrolled.
Without any knowledge of the quality of the public schools or the education

they provided, home buyers we interviewed assumed schools with more
black students were not as good.
Similarly, the white and affluent parents moving into now-trendy
urban neighborhoods their ancestors fled 50 years ago, have many school
choices-public, private, or charter schools. Too often, they bypass
the neighborhood public schools that have served students of color for
decades, assuming they are not good schools. At one meeting of these
gentrifying parents when I talked about the strong early childhood
program at the predominantly black and Latinx public school nearby, one
parent yelled that it was a "terrible" school, before admitting that he had
never set foot inside of it.
This research makes me wonder if educators should spend less time
reassigning students to diverse public schools that their parents may or
may not ever enroll them in and more time examining a racial hierarchy
in how we define "good" students, schools, and communities. How do
our curriculum and assessments perpetuate this hierarchy and doom
certain schools and students to "failure" as defined through one narrow
lens of success? The ethnic studies movement in the Southwest and
the culturally relevant pedagogy movement in the Northeast are two
reform efforts that are beginning to address these issues. However,
true integration may be elusive without this reexamination. Schools are
the best sites for transforming our understandings of "goodness" and
dismantling the racial hierarchy. n

AMY STUART WELLS is a professor of sociology and education and the director of
Reimagining Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the president of
the American Educational Research Association.

10 Big Ideas

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Education Week - January 9, 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - January 9, 2019
