Dive Brief:
- A recent report from Baltimore's Fund for Educational Excellence found that, even with the city designated as a choice district that allows students and their parents to select any of the city's high schools, entrance into the city's best schools is still largely reserved for students from higher income backgrounds.
- Factors like lack of access to more rigorous courses in the younger grades — meaning no weighted GPAs to offer a competitive advantage — keep students from low-income backgrounds from accessing the district's best schools.
- Parents reported a lack of communication and support during the application process and said there were few desirable options for their students if they were not selected for one of the top schools.
Dive Insight:
Opening a district to allow students and their families more options than just their neighborhood school sounds like a good idea, but without the proper supports and policies in place, it can actually perpetuate greater inequities. For example, as the report authors and several others have noted, in cities like Baltimore and Washington, DC, the best schools are often disproportionately located in the higher-income neighborhoods, meaning students from other neighborhoods are enduring often long commutes on public transportation just to get to and from school. Such a policy sends a message to these students and their families that attending a quality school is a privilege, not a right, and draws clear lines about who the district values more.
Some have suggested that making an intentional effort to place top schools with competitive IB and magnet programs in the lower-income neighborhoods would not only reverse these psychological impacts, but would also help truly promote diversity in these schools, which often remain very segregated, even in cities in which black and brown students are the majority, such as New York.
Since it well recorded that college aspirations and success in college are directly tied to pre-college factors, there is a national economic imperative to solve this access issue — and it isn't as complex as some policymakers claim. In fact, the report lays out recommendations for Baltimore that seem intuitive, but with which districts seem to continue to struggle: provide students in all schools, beginning in elementary and middle school, access to more rigorous courses; provide better coaching and clearer information about the high school application process to middle grade students in the district; and improve customer service to students and their families. These are not things that are cost-inhibitive or require a significant amount of time or human resources to provide. They simply require district leaders to have a commitment to the success of every student therein.