5.1 Where Do You Live?
Where a child attends school usually depends primarily on where he or she lives. California is organized into about a thousand geographically defined school districts. These vary from tiny, rural districts serving only a handful of students to sprawling urban districts. Los Angeles Unified School District, America’s second-largest, serves about two-thirds of a million students.
In any district large enough to have more than one school serving a grade level, the question of which children go to which school is automatically a matter of great interest. Parents will go to great lengths to get their kids into the school they believe will best serve them. Those with the means to do so will move. Those who cannot afford to move sometimes lie about their address, even at the risk of being sent to jail for it.
Schools within a district are usually organized into “attendance areas” whose boundaries guide school assignment decisions. Assignment may also be determined by lottery, by ranked choice, by test scores, or by complex hybrid solutions defined at the district level.
California is a very diverse state, but its ethnic, racial and economic diversity looks more impressive on paper than in person. Many communities are not diverse at all.
The role of race in school assignment has long been a matter of critical national concern. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that to separate children in school “from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may effect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” The court held, therefore, that “separate” education was “inherently unequal.”
The Brown decision led to court orders that required many large districts in California to take specific steps to integrate the schools within their boundaries. In some large districts such as Los Angeles, this included forced busing to bring children to schools outside their own neighborhood.
Over time, additional court decisions and voter initiatives (proposition 209) ended court-ordered busing and disallowed the use of race as a factor in determining school assignment. For a good summary of recent Federal civil rights rulings related to education see the UCLA Civil Rights Project documentation of
McFarland v. Jefferson County Public Schools & Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS)
Social science indicators of poverty, well-being, educational attainment and more are notoriously correlated with zip code. Organizing school enrollment strictly by geography is not the only option. One of the major school reform themes of the last decades has been the idea that families should have choices about where their children attend school. The next post will explore school choice.
