UPlace schools tackle economic desegregation

That’s no ordinary student shuffle happening in the University Place School District.

Usually, a decision to redefine school enrollment areas is largely pragmatic. School officials want to save money, or keep kids together as they move through the grades, or alleviate overcrowding.

All those objectives are also behind University Place’s plan to balance enrollment among its four primary schools. But there is another overriding concern, one that district administrators might find difficult to discuss fully in public but that is due a frank community conversation.

Simply put, University Place school officials don’t want any of their schools to be “poor” schools.

They’ve read research that says students, even those from more advantaged families, don’t perform well at schools with above-average poverty levels. They want to create an equal playing field for kids districtwide.

What they are after is economic desegregation. The district can’t accomplish that simply by redrawing school boundaries; such a tack would help reduce class sizes at Evergreen and University Place primary schools but would do little to promote socio-economic equity.

Instead, district officials figure they have to target the most concentrated pockets of poverty: apartment complexes. Some 200 University Place students who live in apartments will go to new schools next year unless their families request in-district transfers.

At first blush, the plan might sound unfair, even discriminatory. But it’s the kind of discrimination that might be ultimately fairest to the children affected.

Busing did a lot to racially integrate schools in the 1960s and ‘70s; now some school districts are using similar strategies to attack what some experts think is the bigger underlying threat to student achievement: economic status.

A leading researcher in the field, UCLA’s Gary Orfield, says, “Educational research suggests that the basic damage inflicted by segregated education comes not from racial concentration but the concentration of children from poor families.”

Such conclusions prompt the question: Can a school where nearly half of the children are poor still be a “good school,” or are those students inevitably disadvantaged? If the latter, then what does that mean for school districts such as Tacoma’s where “equality” would mean a city full of schools with student bodies that are predominantly poor?

University Place Primary – which has a 46 percent free and reduced lunch rate but posts WASL scores on par with schools far wealthier – would seem to give the lie to the idea that poor automatically equals disadvantaged. But the University Place plan is based on the belief that the achievement gap can’t be closed by good teaching alone.

What that means for our cities and communities with many poor students is the thorniest issue facing education – and something we’ve only begun to address.