After more than 20 years of living with a massive busing plan to achieve integration and the most pervasive court desegregation order in U.S. history, our community—the Brandywine school district in Wilmington, Delaware—voted by a wide margin not to return to neighborhood schools, choosing instead to maintain our schools' socioeconomic and racial diversity. Although some citizens voted with their pocketbooks after evaluating how much returning to neighborhood schools would cost, the dominant theme at public meetings was the need to ensure equitable access to the best possible education for all students in the district's schools.
Even though our district faced this issue because of a particular court desegregation order and its aftermath, we believe that other districts may be facing similar situations as racial and economic diversity increases across the United States. We do not know how well the process we used applies to other places or how long our community's commitment will last. But we are certain that the challenge of ensuring equitable access to high-quality education in the United States will continue and require fundamentally new approaches to leadership.
Desegregation in Wilmington
In the late 1970s, the U.S. District Court ordered desegregation measures in the communities in the greater Wilmington, Delaware, area. The court reconfigured 11 school districts into four large districts, each containing a portion of the largely minority student population in the city of Wilmington. The settlement required all students in grades 1–12 to attend school for three years in the city and nine years in the suburbs. The Brandywine district is the northern sector and enrolls approximately 8,500 suburban and 2,200 city students.
In the early 1990s, many citizens viewed the court order as a barrier to local control of schools and local accountability for student achievement. The state board of education petitioned the U.S. District Court to lift the desegregation order, and the Court granted the request in 1995. The area's elected officials heralded the lifting of the court order as a return to local control of schools. Many citizens expected to see rapid changes in school assignments. Nothing much happened, however. Given the lack of racial and socio-economic integration within neighborhoods, school boards were reluctant to draw new attendance lines that would resegregate the area's schools.
Neighborhood Schools Law Enacted
In the spring of 2000, the state legislature passed the Neighborhood Schools Law, which required that each of the four school districts develop new student assignment plans solely on the basis of geographic distance. We, the board and superintendent of the Brandywine district, knew that nearest-school assignment would result in significant racial and socioeconomic resegregation in our schools. Although we were concerned about the likely impact of the decision on the education of low-income students, we knew that many parents wanted to end the bus rides. Two local legislators quoted constituent surveys showing that 80 percent supported nearest-school assignment.
The board debated its seemingly conflicting responsibilities—to ensure quality education for all students, to abide by the law, and to be responsive to the community. We believed that we had only two options: to move ahead with neighborhood schools and re-distribute resources to minimize education inequities, or to challenge the law. The second option seemed about as promising as placing a finger in a dam. If the community really wanted neighborhood schools, it would get them.
Board Turns to the Community
A board member who had been studying Heifetz's Leadership Without Easy Answers proposed a third option: Take the questions straight to the public. In other words, develop plans for neighborhood schools, lay out the educational and financial impacts, and ask the public what they wanted done through a formal public vote. People would naturally focus on the impact on their own children, it was argued, unless given the opportunity and responsibility to review the larger implications.
Heifetz contends that the traditional model of leadership—in which leaders provide solutions to problems—can no longer meet the many complex challenges facing our society. Those who promise to deliver solutions may seem attractive at first, but these leaders often skirt, rather than face, the issues. Communities cannot effectively address the complex problems of environmental pollution, rising crime, and failing schools, for example, without engaging in difficult, fundamental work on the underlying causes and sharing responsibility for the solutions. Heifetz provides a framework by which leaders can engage constituents in understanding a problem and the trade-offs involved in any solution, and in sharing the process of making the tough changes required for long-lasting improvement.
The school board decided to hold a public vote. But how could we help people see beyond the immediate question of bus rides and engage them in the fundamental issue of ensuring equitable, high-quality education for all students? We charged the planning committee with developing at least two neighborhood schools plans for public consideration and the district staff with providing comparative data on them. We also decided that the ballot would ask two questions: which neighborhood schools plan was preferred, and whether that neighborhood plan was preferred over our current student assignment plan.
The planning committee came forward with three nearest-school assignment plans, and the district staff generated school-level demographic data for each. As predicted, each plan created at least two high-poverty schools in the district.
Meanwhile, the board began investigating the educational impacts of the plans. For a special public work session, a panel of experts presented research showing that without equitable access to high-quality, experienced teachers, the students in high-poverty schools (those with at least 50 percent of the students on free or reduced-price meals) could never be expected to reach the same levels of achievement as those in low-poverty schools, and most would be unlikely to pass the state's new high-stakes exams. Voluntarily creating high-poverty schools could significantly increase the odds of student failure. Each of the experts advised the board that significant additional resources would be essential in high-poverty schools but still might not be sufficient to provide equity.
On the basis of the experiences of other school districts, the staff then generated conservative estimates of the resources needed to ameliorate the effects of high-poverty schools under each plan, including resources to recruit and retain quality teachers, provide smaller class sizes, extend learning opportunities, and bolster student and family support. The staff then calculated the net financial impact of each neighborhood schools plan by deducting both the resources currently dedicated to these purposes and the transportation savings. By viewing the actual investment levels of other school districts in their high-poverty schools, voters could see that we were not trying to sway them by exaggerating the costs but rather informing them of the consequences in advance.
We then mailed a 16-page voter's guide to all district residents. The guide provided an overview of the law, assignment area maps for each plan, our current assignment patterns, a summary of the educational impacts cited by experts, a summary of the costs that the district would incur, information about the public hearings and the vote, and a copy of the ballot. Finally, we prepared a 30-minute TV segment with this information and aired it on a local cable station five times.
A few weeks before the vote, the local newspaper published a parent's opinion piece that asked people to join her in protecting diversity in the schools. The result was the formation of the KIDS (Kids in Diverse Schools) Coalition, which quickly gained more than 200 members. These individuals wrote numerous letters to the editor and peacefully picketed public hearings.
On the day of the vote, two local legislators who had sponsored the law ran an editorial criticizing the voter's guide and arguing that a return to neighborhood schools would improve student achievement. An article from the school board president reviewed the financial impact of the neighborhood schools plans on the district and urged residents to vote so that the board could be guided by the results.
Tension was high that day. We had no way to predict how the vote would turn out. We saw many senior citizens at the polls, people whose children had been in school when the court order had been imposed in 1978. How badly did they want to return to neighborhood schools? How many suburban parents believed that their children's school and classroom would be more orderly and focused on learning if the poor, minority children were assigned elsewhere? How many city parents were just plain tired of sending their children on buses to suburban schools?
The results were surprisingly clear and consistent. Seventy percent of residents, and a majority at every polling place, preferred to keep the current assignment patterns with racially and economically diverse schools.
To obtain an exception to the closest-school assignments required by the Neighborhood Schools Law, we submitted our current assignment patterns and a review of the research on high-poverty schools to the state board of education, the entity charged with approving plans. We argued that any nearest-school assignment plan would result in education inequities to those assigned to high-poverty schools and cause hardship to the district because of the additional funding that such schools would require.
Before rendering a decision, the state board held a public hearing in each district to allow residents to express their views. We expected that only those who were upset with what we had submitted would attend. We were in for another surprise.
Although the neighborhood schools hearings in the other three districts had each drawn no more than 30 people, roughly 200 attended Brandywine's public hearing. For nearly two hours, we listened to one person after another, most of whom had never attended a school board meeting, speaking passionately about the need to stand by all students in the community. Several high school students spoke, outraged that resegregation would be considered. Kate Bradley, a high school senior, said,Yolanda Bluestein, Beki Bartow, Dominic Rivera, Latifa Williams. These people are black, white, Hispanic, Christian, and Jewish. These are people I consider my friends. These are people I would never have met if Neighborhood Schools were in effect today. Under Neighborhood Schools, the children of Brandywine will grow up never knowing the different and important aspects of other cultures and races.
We learned that the senior classes at two of the district's three high schools had voted, and in each school more than 93 percent opposed implementation of nearest-school assignment.
Many residents said that they had initially had a positive reaction to the concept of neighborhood schools (who could oppose the basic concept?) but that their views changed as they learned of the larger impacts. One parent said,A crucial thing I want to instill in my own children is that character is not related to socioeconomic status.
The state board unanimously approved our submission. A strong commitment to ensuring that all children would receive a quality education had developed in our community. The process of a public vote, accompanied by information on the educational and financial impacts, allowed people to come to their own conclusions about the trade-offs that they were willing to accept to meet the more important goal of quality education for all.
Six weeks later, our district held a referendum to raise local taxes for school operations. Within the request were targeted funds for recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers and for aggressively addressing the achievement gap that currently exists in our schools. The referendum passed with the highest approval level on record in the state.
In retrospect, the ill-conceived Neighborhood Schools Law gave our community the opportunity to come to some important decisions. Our deliberations brought closure to two decades of forced busing. We now bus only because we, as a community, have chosen to do so. Our choice is founded on our belief that equity requires that all students have access to effective teachers and schools.
Will this commitment to all students continue as the pressures of high-stakes accountability set in? Only time will tell. Very likely, we will need to periodically revisit our core values and commitment. Such conversations seem not to occur spontaneously in the daily hubbub of activity; they require that those in leadership raise the issues for thoughtful discussion.
Throughout the United States, the challenge of ensuring equity in our schools will increase as the income gap widens and pressure for high achievement increases. The U.S. Supreme Court no longer plays the central enforcement role it once did. What, then, will prevent our communities from dividing (or continuing to divide) into schools for the “haves” and schools for the “have nots”? Perhaps our district's experience points to the possibility of turning to ourselves, within our own communities, to grapple face-to-face with what we want for our children.
