Schools segregated, study finds

The U.S. Supreme Court desegregated schools in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education. But a recent study shows that the task of integrating schools by race and income level is not yet complete.

Researchers in UW's Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs released a study this month that found the separation of white and minority students in public schools has increased since 1988. Researchers also found that the most expensive and experienced teachers tend to cluster in the nicest neighborhoods and wealthiest schools.

The findings, released in this month's Education Policy Analysis Archives, show that middle-class and white students are three times more likely to enroll in advanced-placement or gifted programs, while those from lower socio-economic levels and minority students are three times more likely to enroll in less challenging classes or special education.

Co-authors Paul Hill, research professor and director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, and Kacey Guin, research coordinator at the Evans School of Public Affairs, began studying current school inequalities to better understand the limits of the public-school system versus the possible school-choice program of vouchers and charter schools.

Opponents of voucher and charter programs claim that school choice would only increase segregation, but the study shows that segregation and inequality already exist in the public-school system. With good program design, a school-choice program could remedy these inequalities, according to Hill and Guin.

"If you're going to say that you're afraid that choice will cause segregation, it's not right to assume that the system we have won't cause segregation as well," said Hill.

If parents are able to select their child's school from all the schools in the area, segregation might not be so prevalent, she said.

"There's a lot of segregation here in Seattle," said Guin. "I think that it is a reflection of housing segregation. Lower-income housing is often in the south part of the city and you have these upper-class white neighborhoods in the northeastern and northwestern parts of the city. Because the district boundaries dictate who children go to school with and where, I think the schools in Seattle are segregated by race and income."

Inequalities in teacher experience and qualifications also affect the quality of education in lower-income schools.

"Poor children in high-poor, high-minority schools tend to get the cheapest and youngest teachers -- also the teachers with the least measurable qualifications," said Hill. "We discovered that it is basically wired into the way the school district hires teachers because of the collective bargaining agreement. Teachers can choose the school they want to be in ... they tend to prefer wealthy schools. The money that's saved (from hiring cheaper teachers) doesn't go to those low-income schools -- it goes to the other schools to pay the expensive teachers' salaries."

School districts across the nation cover up this unequal distribution of teacher salaries by averaging the salaries for all the teachers in the district and reporting those numbers, according to the study.

Parent competition also adds to the unequal distribution of resources, with more competitive, higher-educated parents requesting more for their children or for their children's schools.

"When you have very active educated parents who are able to make the demands for their child and their child's school, those are the schools that are going to receive higher levels of allocation," said Guin. "When parents aren't as involved or aren't a voters' presence, then they're less likely to get the money for their school."