Education Week - February 12, 2020 - 9

tion, a group of education and civil
rights groups that oppose public
funding for private schools, said in
a statement.
After the speech, groups including advocates for the separation of
church and state and national teachers' unions were quick to criticize the
Trump administration plan.
"Parents and educators have rejected these programs, knowing
that a child's opportunity for success
should not be left to chance," National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García said in a
statement. "They agree that if we're
serious about every child's future,
elected officials need to listen and get
serious about doing what works. This
means providing resources to our
neighborhood public schools so that
students have inviting classrooms, a
well-rounded curriculum, class sizes
that are small enough for one-on-one
attention, and support services such
as health care, nutrition, and afterschool programs for students who
need them."
Civil rights organizations have also
sounded alarms that private school
choice programs may support enrollment at faith-based schools that
may bar or restrict admission to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
students or students with LGBTQ
parents.
The Education Freedom Scholarship Bill, sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz,
R-Texas, and Rep. Bradley Byrne,
R-Ala., prohibits states participating
in the federal program from actions
that "discriminate against, or otherwise disadvantage" faith-based
schools.
Trump's push for its passage comes
after his administration supported
Montana parents who argued in a
major education case before the U.S.
Supreme Court that the state violated
their religious liberty when it prohibited recipients of state-level tax-credit
scholarships from using them at religious schools. The court is expected
to rule in that case by late June.

Do White Parents Really Want Integrated Schools?
New studies find they
opt for whiter schools
By Christina A. Samuels
Ask parents if they value ethnic, racial, and economic diversity in their children's schools, and entrenched social and political barriers often melt away.
Strong majorities of men and women, Democrats and Republicans, and parents of different
economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds say in
a new survey that it's important for children to attend highly integrated schools.
But for white parents, those principles often take
a back seat to their actions, which are explored in
two new studies.
When presented with options, white parents
choose schools that are more white and more
wealthy than other choices available to them,
according to a report from Making Caring Common, a project of the Harvard Graduate School of
Education. In addition to the survey, the report
draws from focus groups and individual interviews with families, most of whom are liberal and
affluent, according to the report.
The second study looks at parents in North Carolina who moved their children from traditional
public schools to charter schools. It found that the
gravitational pull between white parents and predominantly white schools dominated among other
concerns, such as the charter schools' academic
performance or any special programs that it offers.
Overall, white, advantaged parents appear to
be measuring school quality by how many other
white, advantaged parents send their children to
a given school, said the Harvard report.
Integrated schools are seen as educationally inferior, even as, paradoxically, parents recognize
their value in the abstract, said Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at the Harvard graduate
education school and a study co-author.
In the survey, a majority of parents expressed
that they were most comfortable with a school
that was 50 percent white and 50 percent students
of color. They also said they were most comfortable with a school that was half students from lowincome families, and half students from more affluent backgrounds.

That is what people in all likelihood will be presenting with, particularly if they have no travel
history."
There have been just over 11 confirmed cases
of coronavirus in the United States, according to
the CDC, but no deaths at the time Education
Week went to print.
Globally, there were more than 24,500 confirmed cases of coronavirus and some 500
deaths, most of which are in China, according
to the World Health Organization.
If a school nurse suspects a student may have
coronavirus, the school should contact the state
or local public health agency to report the case,
according to guidelines put together by the AFT.
Moline and Weingarten also recommended
that principals encourage sick students and staff
to stay home and that there should not be any
repercussions for doing so.
The AFT's other recommendations for
schools include:
*Evaluating ventilation systems to ensure
they are delivering adequately fresh air to classrooms;
*Isolating students with fever and respiratory
symptoms as much as possible from their peers

"They spoke a lot about having their kids come
to understand in meaningful ways people who are
different from them," Weissbourd said. "They
talked about it being important for their kids to
understand that some people don't have some of
the privileges they have."
Part of the solution, the Harvard paper contends, is for parents to look outside their own
bubbles when it comes to making decisions about
schools. That means visiting schools for themselves, talking to teachers, or talking to parents
outside of their own friend group. Looking at data
such as test scores offers an incomplete picture,
said Eric Torres, an author of the Harvard report
and a doctoral student in the graduate education
school.
Parents are "failing to recognize they could be
making better decisions about the schools that are
available to them. If parents are speaking primarily to people in their own social circle, they may
miss out on a wonderful local school," Torres said.

There was no clear relation in the data between
the academic performance of the charter school
and enrollment decisions. Black families valued
subsidized meal programs at their charter school
more than white parents; charter schools in North
Carolina are not required to offer lunch.
Helen F. Ladd, a professor emerita of public
policy at Duke University and the study's lead author, said in the conclusion that it could be easy to
ascribe these differences to racial prejudice, but
the study wasn't set up to answer that question.
What it did show, though, is that charter schools
contribute to racial isolation among schools in
North Carolina.
"There's a public interest involved," Ladd said.
"I have no problem with parents trying to make the
best decisions, as they see them, for their individual
children. But there's a collective interest in trying to
promote racial integration. If the government sets
up a policy mechanism that they know is going to
lead to racial isolation, that's inappropriate."

Choosing Schools in North Carolina

Reversing the Trend

The North Carolina working paper, in contrast
to the Harvard study, did not ask parents about
their beliefs in the value of integration. Instead,
it described their "revealed preferences" through
the actual choices that they made.
In this study, the researchers looked at about
7,400 North Carolina students of all races who
left a traditional public school in the 2015-16 school
year to enroll in a charter school. North Carolina
has seen its number of charter schools double
since legislators lifted a 100-school cap in 2011.
The study focused on students who had at least
two charter school options within 20 miles.
Nearly two-thirds of white elementary school
students, and 72 percent of white middle school
students, moved to schools that had more white
students than the traditional public schools they
left behind. In contrast, only about a third of black
students who switched at both the elementary
and middle school level chose charter schools
that had more black students than the schools
they left behind.
In other words, white students were more drawn
to schools where white students made up most of
the student body than black students were drawn to
schools where black students were in the majority.

There are parents who are working at the grassroots level to push against these trends. Integrated
Schools, an organization established in 2015 with
chapters around the country provides support
to white parents who are seeking to enroll their
children in predominantly minority schools in a
thoughtful way.
Andrew Lefkowits, an Integrated Schools leader
in Denver, chose to enroll his two elementary
school-age children in high-minority schools, similar to the one he attended when he was a child.
"My experience at my elementary school was so
formative for me and something I was so grateful
for," Lefkowits said. Integrated Schools encourages parents to take a "two-tour pledge" to visit
their neighborhood schools, rather than rely on
secondhand information.
He believes parents have power to affect the
larger systems of school district bureaucracy.
"We have not put enough stock, as a country,
in the power of the parental push on those systems," Lefkowits said. "Without society pushing
on lawmakers, on judges, I don't think we get the
decisions that have been helpful to push toward
desegregation in the first place. There's a role to
play for us, if we have skin in the game."

until they can be picked up from school;
*Coordinating with the local health department to develop a response should the coronavirus spread in their community;
*Educating and providing students, staff, and
parents with reminders-such as posters-on
preventing the spread of virus including washing hands, not touching faces, and staying
home when sick;
*Instructing custodial and classroom staff to
follow appropriate disinfection practices that
focus on keeping high-touch areas such as doorknobs disinfected without overusing cleaners
that could harm students with asthma.
The AFT has compiled additional recommendations for school nurses and custodians.
Weingarten said the lack of information on
how to respond to the coronavirus is contributing to panic and the likelihood of profiling
people of Chinese descent. She said her core
message to educators is this: "No panic, no profiling, and wash your hands."
Although there are a handful of confirmed
cases of coronavirus in this country, some
schools have had to grapple with the possibility
that their students were exposed.

In Florida's Palm Beach County, a group of
30 high school students and three teachers
were told to stay home after having been potentially exposed to coronavirus while attending a Model United Nations event at Yale University, according to local media. The last day
of the event was canceled when a Chinese student was taken to a local hospital with a cough
and a fever. The student turned out to have the
flu, not the coronavirus, and the Palm Beach
students and teachers have returned to school.
A charter school in Philadelphia also had a
scare when a Chinese exchange student got
sick, but tests later showed the student did not
have coronavirus. The school, however, told
parents it was ending the exchange program,
according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Finally, some schools in Arizona have been
dealing with the opposite problem: coronavirus hoaxes, report local media. A fake breaking-news alert claiming that students who
attend Mesa Public Schools, the state's largest district, had contracted the coronavirus
was circulating on social media, forcing the
district to warn families to be on the lookout
for hoaxes.

We need to make sure
that we realize there
have been 10,000
deaths from flu and
19 million cases
of the flu so far this
year here in the
United States."
JAQUELINE MOLINE
Northwell Health

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Education Week - February 12, 2020

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