Transportation, Land Use, and Environmental Planning by Elizabeth Deakin;

Author:Elizabeth Deakin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780128151686
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd.
Published: 2020-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

4. Attempts to address urban school decline and school sprawl

4.1. Addressing school decline through in-school reforms and school choice

States, cities, school districts, and various programs of the US federal government have attempted to address urban school decline. Most programs work to improve low-performing schools, but others have closed or reformed the schools, and higher-level policies have attempted to move children from low-performing to high-performing schools either through various approaches to school choice or through housing assistance programs that help families to move. The following sections briefly review these strategies starting with the in-school strategies.

As education historian and former US Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch has observed, education scholars have watched and warned against the “grand ideas” and “fads and reforms that sweep through the educational system” since at least 1907 (Ravitch, 2010, 3). From open classrooms, to small schools, scripted curriculums, strict accountability measures, teacher incentives, and market mechanisms that position parents as consumers of schools that compete for their business, few of these reforms have had significant positive impact, and many have been harmful (Cuban, 1990; Grubb, 2009; McGuinn, 2006; Ravitch, 2013). Further, they tend to be short-lived and disruptive, entailing high implementation costs but few benefits.

An exception to policies that are passing fads is school choice—the ability to enroll a student in a school outside their neighborhood attendance area. Though choice has been hotly contested since the desegregation policies of the 1950s and Milton Friedman’s proposals to promote school competition through school vouchers, the idea of choice remains popular in dozens of countries (Friedman, 1955; Miron & Urschel, 2012). In the United States, choice options that replace neighborhood assignment policies span the political spectrum from vouchers to attend private schools, to competitive admissions or lotteries for specialized magnet schools and academies, to public charter schools (which receive public funding but operate independently and are exempt from certain local and state policies), to intra-and inter-district open enrollment policies. The inter-and intra-district form of school choice has been growing in popularity since it was promoted for underperforming schoolsg by the Voluntary Public School Choice Program under the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act of the US Congress (Phillips, Hausman, & Larsen, 2011). Instead of school districts assigning students to a neighborhood school, students may enroll in any school within their district, or even anywhere else in the state (as in the state of Colorado), if there are seats available. Rules and policies about applications for enrollment, student admission policies when seats are limited, and allocating funding across districts vary by school district and state. Most of these school-attendance policies do not come with student transportation funds or commitments so students who choose a school outside their neighborhood are often driven by their parents if they cannot walk, bike, take or afford public transit.

There has been extensive research on the effectiveness of school choice policies. Most studies find little to no improvement for most students, and even negative outcomes for individual students, schools, or the district (Carnoy, Jacobsen, Mishel, & Rothstein, 2005; Ladd, 2002; Miron, Welner, Hinchey, & Mathis, 2012; Zimmer et al.

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