Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Space, Time, and Inter-District Choice
Just to amplify a few points Erin makes below about Education Sector's new report examining inter-district school choice: One of our main goals in conducting this analysis was to try to get a handle on how the generalized--and very worthwhile--idea of expanding school choice across school district boundaries plays out given real world contraints like geography, transportation infrastructure, and the uneven distribution of high-performing schools.
For example, in an upcoming report Erin will be running the same Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis for the city of Chicago. It will show that only a limited number of students there could benefit from the opportunity to transfer to other districts, particularly in high school. This is partly because of issues like capacity and distance. But it's also because Chicago was built next to a gigantic lake that contains no schools, good or otherwise. So while Chicago students might be able to travel north, south, or west to find better schools, they pretty much can't go east. These things matter.
The way school districts are designed also makes a big difference. Some states--Illinois is one--have hundreds of small districts. Marion County, Indiana, where I used to live, contains eleven separate school districts, including the traditionally urban Indianapolis public schools along with various large and small township school districts, including the tiny district of Speedway, which enjoys unusual wealth owing to its ability to levy property taxes on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where the Indy 500 is contested. Inter-district choice in Marion County would undoubtedly benefit many students.
On the other hand, many southern states operate large, whole-county school districts. The map below shows a low-performing school that happens to be located in the middle of the Polk County, Florida district, which encompasses over 2,000 square miles. It takes 45 minutes just to get to the county border from that school, much less find a better school on the other side. Inter-district choice isn't really an option there.
Some critics of the report have raised the issue of our school capacity assumptions. It's true, as Dianne Piche notes below, that some schools may have more capacity than they'd like to admit. But others have suggested that, absent any definitive empirical evidence of how much successful schools could theoretically expand to accomodate new students, we should have either (A) made no assumptions at all, which is methodologically the same as assuming that schools have infinite capacity to expand, or (B) treated all possible assumptions as equally valid. Frankly, that doesn't make much sense, and the map below shows why.
The starred school in middle is located in Piedmont School District, which is very affluent and literally built on a hill surrounded on all sides by Oakland Unified School District, a high-poverty district with rock bottom test scores that's been subject to state takeover in the past. There are four low-performing Oakland schools within a five minute drive of the Piedmont school and at least nine within 20 minutes. I think we can all agree that even under the rosiest of scenarios, the Piedmont school couldn't quintuple in size, or more, to accomodate transfer students. There are limits, and any responsible analysis of inter-district choice has to acknowledge that. Piedmont is, of course, somewhat of an extreme example, but that's why we ran the numbers for every single school in California (and Texas and Florida) using a moderate capacity assumption, to see how things play out in the aggregate. -- |
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