Equality vs. quality in schools

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule this week on a case involving Seattle schools, and I think the odds favor a ruling that race can't be taken into account to address the impact of race.

Can you address the cumulative and ongoing effects of generations of race-based disadvantages without dealing with race? We may have to find out. One thing we know already is that whatever approaches we've taken have been plagued by the Law of Unintended Consequences, partly because race is polarizing. It generates actions and reactions that can turn the simplest problem into a conundrum.

This case is about who gets into which schools.

Until five years ago, one of the criteria Seattle schools used was race.

It didn't affect many placements, but a student's application had extra weight if her presence at a particular school would improve the racial mix.

The district stopped using that tiebreaker because of the suit.

Schools are pretty imbalanced, and some of that is even due to previous efforts to address the matter of inequity in education.

The more indirect the means, the more likely there are to be unintended consequences. For example, busing, which started in Seattle in the 1970s, cost the district a significant part of its middle-class, white population.

The district tried to woo those students back with magnet programs at certain schools, which caused imbalances among schools.

Garfield High School's academic programs make it a hotly desired school. But it draws students who might otherwise attend another school.

One of the schools I'm sure loses students to Garfield is Franklin High School in my neighborhood.

When my son was ready for high school last fall, people kept asking whether he'd be going to Garfield.

I don't remember anyone asking about Franklin.

The year the district stopped using race as an admissions tiebreaker, Franklin's student body was 79 percent minority. Last fall, the school reported 91 percent of its students were part of a minority group.

Cecelia Beckwith-Stanley is African American, and her husband, Doug, is white. They have two children: One attended Franklin High School, the other didn't.

Our sons have been close friends since elementary school. She has spent years working in schools as a nurse or nurse practitioner. I asked her about Franklin.

"It was clear to me when my daughter walked out the door [of Franklin] that my son would not be walking through that door."

Beckwith-Stanley was enthusiastic about Franklin in 2000 when she enrolled her daughter in ninth grade.

The humanities program was a big draw for her and other parents.

But by the time her daughter graduated in 2004, she said, much of the humanities program had been dismantled and school demographics were changing.

Everyone has a theory about what changed at Franklin, but several changes that happened around the same time affected the school.

A group of Franklin PTSA members stuck around after a meeting Saturday to talk about that with me. They said the end of the race tiebreaker, busing changes, demographic changes in the neighborhood, new school leadership and program restructuring all happened in the time span of a year or two.

It's hard to sort out which made what difference.

The PTSA members said the humanities program is solid but that outsiders might not think so because it is arranged differently.

Sarah Morningstar, a social-studies and language-arts teacher, is a 1995 Franklin graduate who went through the humanities program. She's white and says the program was all white, but it isn't now.

Now all freshmen get the same instruction, then they have a choice of five program groups for the next three years. Humanities is one of them. And she said it is just as rigorous now as then.

Busing, tiebreakers that take race into account, special programs to attract top-tier students.

They all have the goal of making education more equal. We fight over these indirect remedies so much we forget they are tools, not the goal itself.

I favor diversity, but education doesn't have to be integrated to work; and it doesn't need to be segregated. It just needs to be good. For too many kids it isn't good.

The goal of the lawsuit isn't to improve education for everyone.

That effort will be made more difficult if the courts decide that race can't be taken into account in formulating remedial policies.

But however the court rules, something deeper, more direct needs to replace indirect tools.

We know parents make a huge difference in how children do in school. There are groups in which children are much less likely to have well-educated and economically sound parents to give them enrichment and to advocate for them.

We can identify many by income and other nonracial markers.

We need to target those children earlier and with more help so they'll have the foundation they need to thrive later on.

Teachers need to take advantage of the latest psychological and educational research so they don't inadvertently discourage children.

Educators, and the rest of us, need to refocus on what should be the goal: to give as many children as possible the best education we know how to provide.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.