Brooklyn by race (one dot = one person)
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Today on NRO, Reihan Salam writes about a controversy involving school district lines attendance zones [see correction below] in his Brooklyn neighborhood. A nearby public school (P.S. 8) is oversubscribed; another nearby public school (P.S. 307), which is located in another attendance zone, is undersubscribed. Officials are therefore trying to redraw the lines and move an appropriate number of households in the neighborhood – which is, no fooling, called “Dumbo” – from one zone to the other.
Easy peasy, right? Not on your New York life.
P.S. 8 is 59% white and 15% free/reduced lunch; P.S. 307 is 90% black or Hispanic and 90% FRL.
Salam notes:
More than one Dumbo parent has tried to explain to me how they’re totally different from other people who fight against integration. They explain that what they really want is a better world in which we spend far more on our public schools, not mentioning, or perhaps not knowing, that New York city spends $20,331 per pupil, almost twice as much as the national average of $10,700, and that much of this money is spent very inefficiently. Of course they want integration, they’ll tell you, but only if it entails no sacrifice on their part. “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children,” says one Dumbo parent. Well, yes, it is more complicated, and that is exactly what every parent believes, whether they are in Brooklyn or South Boston or Kansas City.
“Dumbo parents,” indeed.
There is more to this story than a political dilemma in Brooklyn. One of the biggest problems in the research on racial segregation in schools is getting the public – and, too often, the researchers! – to understand how school district lines, attendance zones, etc. are drawn in ways that ensure racial segregation in public schools. Research on racial segregation is often conducted in ways that ignore this, making public schools appear much better integrated than they actually are.
The only really viable solution is school choice. It not only breaks the link between place of residence and place of schooling, thus helping overcome residentail segregation; it entirely circumvents the political (and therefore racially fraught) process of drawing school district lines. Of the eight empirical studies examing the impact of school choice on racial segregation in schools, seven found that choice reduced segregation, and one found no visible effect.
Image: University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service (via)
Posted by Greg Forster 
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