News out today shows that our schools are more income-segregated than ever before. This national trend is only a broader reflection of the same forces that have fostered Wake County, North Carolina’s recent decision to favor “neighborhood schools.”
North Carolina is one of the states with the lowest share of elite schools. By the measure that drove this study, there were less than 3 percent of students on free-or-reduced lunch in only six schools in North Carolina. Perhaps that is factored by our states ongoing battle to reverse its high share of poor families, but it also reflects well on decision-making that has avoided narrow zoning to separate elites from the rest of the community.
The location of affordable housing is driven by land-use planning. My review of some of the schools where elite private-public schools (PPS) have been created suggests that they are most often in white suburbs with very high incomes. Those districts exist even when a larger MSA is well-off. Certainly, Boston and San Francisco harbor plenty of wealth. That is why it is so bad that so many of their schools act as filters of opportunity.
The study did not release specific data for any MSA in North Carolina. I’ll offer a more narrow example for Alameda County, California. The largest city in Alameda County is Oakland. Oakland is poor and heavily minority. Its schools are well-known for their efforts to deal with the challenges of poverty. While Oakland struggles, the community of Piedmont has developed its own “private” school system. Fewer than 3 percent of its young people live in poverty, compared to more than 28 percent in Oakland. Median household income in Piedmont is $134,000. In Oakland, it is just a shade over $40,000.
Without a systematic effort to shape the housing stock in Piedmont, that outcome could not occur. Only nine percent of households in Piedmont rent, and most rents are greater than $1,500 per month. There are only 69 multifamily units in the entire city!
Is Wake County near that situation? Certainly there is no Piedmont within its borders. Yet, it seems all too likely that the County has enough Piedmont-style school zones to bring about some of those same results. I counted 25 census tracts in Wake (in 2000, summary file 3) where less than 3 percent of the residents aged 5 to 17 lived in poverty. In those tracts, there were only 241 school-age children in 2000, compared to more than 10,500 living above the poverty line. Back in 2000, Wake had about 111,000 school-age students. Roughly 9.7 percent of them lived in a census tract with fewer than 3 percent of school-age children in poverty. Race is worth mentioning, too: those low-poverty districts have, on average, less than one-third of their share of African-American residents compared to the County as a whole.
Granted, school districts are much larger than census tracts. Still, elementary schools can sometimes draw from a handful of census tracts. Some of those tracts overlap. The possibility seems very real that Wake would quickly fall into a new regime where there were a handful of elite schools for the very wealthy.
Affordable Housing is a Determinant of Income Segregation
The Thomas Fordham Institute has published a report entitled America’s Private Public Schools that tracks where public decision-making has led to public schools with few or no poor students. Their indictment is compounded by the perspective of its authors. Fordham is a conservative research group. Their concern is coincidental to the outcries of groups like the NAACP or Wake parents with a compassionate interest in diversity. Their prescription for this problem is more charter schools, rather than reform through traditional public school systems.
Fordham concluded that New Jersey was the worst offender for income-segregation. That is interesting, as New Jersey was the site for the seminal affordable housing case. In Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Mount Laurel Township, the NAACP argued that zoning rules conspired to keep affordable housing outside of the municipal boundaries of Mt. Laurel township, thereby excluding low-and-moderate (LMI) residents from obtaining housing in that community. The decision created a new standard for implementing the goals of affordable housing. Eight years (more…)
