School Choice Trade-Offs

By R. Kenneth Godwin and Frank R. Kemerer

As every school administrator knows, the operation of a school involves making trade-offs among competing educational goals. Time spent on teaching math cannot be spent on teaching history, resources devoted to gifted-and-talented programs are not available for remedial programs, and money spent on gymnasiums cannot be spent on books. Trade-offs like these are routine.

Other trade-offs, however, are more difficult because they involve conflicting core values. For example, should schools be balanced by race and class across the district to equalize capital and human resources and maximize the opportunity for social interaction? Or should students be assigned to their neighborhood schools? A neighborhood-attendance policy will almost always mean that schools will be racially and economically segregated. Data from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University show that the average white student attends a school that is more than 80 percent white, the average black student attends a school that is 55 percent black, and the average Latino student attends a school that is 53 percent Latino. The poverty rate tends to be high in schools with large concentrations of minority children. Poor children, often in poorly funded schools, lag far behind their peers in schools with average or above-average funding and below-average child-poverty rates.

While legislatures and courts may adopt policies that encourage or even force integration, neighborhoods will not. Wealthy and middle-class families are unlikely to support bringing low-income children of color into their schools. They are even less likely to support a system that would send their children to inner-city schools. Should a neighborhood-school-attendance policy or racial and income balancing take precedence? Most school officials find it best to...