Incentivizing Integrated Schools

Since white parents will do everything possible to not send their kids to schools with Black kids (well, maybe one or two from upper middle class backgrounds so that little Connor and Maddie can have just the right kind of diversity in their lives), what if, like with vaccines, we started to provide incentives to whites to actually be willing to accept some level of equity in education. I found this quite interesting out of North Carolina. I don’t know all the local details and there are some things in here that make me raise my eyebrows. But hey, it’s at least worth a conversation.

This week, Rep. Cecil Brockman introduced a first-of-its-kind bill to add measures of school segregation to North Carolina’s School Report Cards. If passed, H948 would provide policymakers, families, and students with new data to identify racially segregated schools and those in which opportunities and resources are being denied to certain student groups.

The bill is based on the maxim that “what gets measured, gets done.” By measuring and publicizing the extent to which our schools are segregated and the extent to which certain student groups are denied equal access to resources, leaders at all levels of government can then take steps to address these problems. Publishing the data on the School Report Card page would make this data transparent and widely available to students, parents, and other advocates invested in school integration.

First, the bill would assign each school a “proportionality score.” The proportionality score measures the extent to which the demographics of an individual school differ from the county in which the school is located. The bill would assign each school in the state – including charter schools – a designation of “highly proportional,” “proportional,” “somewhat disproportional,” or “highly disproportional” to identify which schools are the most racially segregated.

Additionally, the bill would gather information on the extent to which resources are disproportionately provided within a school. That is, H948 would require reporting on the equality of access to gifted programs, advanced courses, and experienced and credentialed teachers.

Finally, the bill would examine the equitable distribution of opportunities and resources across schools and student subgroups within a district. It would measure equality of access to instruction in arts and music, as well as access to support personnel such as psychologists, counselors, and nurses.

The bill stems from the work of the Center for Diversity and Equality in Education New Jersey, which developed the proportionality score metric to identify racially segregated schools, and the National Coalition on School Diversity, which created model legislation off which H948 is based (full disclosure, this author contributed to the NCSD report). H948 represents the first state effort to incorporate measures of school segregation into a state’s accountability system.

I’m skeptical any of this work–after all Maddie and Connor just deserve the best and we all know what that means in reality. But you have to keep trying.