Who Should Be Allowed to Cross the School District Line — Bureaucrats or Parents?

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This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley, which is regarded by many academics and observers as one of the most consequential judicial decisions in our nation’s history. The 1974 decision overturned a desegregation plan in Detroit that would have encompassed both the Detroit Public Schools and 53 nearby suburban districts, transporting kids across district lines in order to achieve racial balance in the schools.

Milliken has been called “one of the worst Supreme Court decisions” in the Washington Post, which decried its “awful legacy.” According to the New York Times, in the view of those who had fought for the end of segregation, it “killed any hope of integrating the public schools.” And, in 2014, the Harvard Graduate School of Education published a series of essays calling the decision “dreadful” because it “betrayed the promise” of Brown v. Board of Ed, the historic ruling that outlawed racial segregation in the public schools.

Our organization, Available to All, fights educational redlining, and we often make the case that assigning children to schools based on where they live (using exclusionary maps) is morally wrong. 

District boundaries are one of our primary targets, as they often keep low-income kids trapped in failing schools, even while coveted public schools in nearby districts are allowed to turn those kids away. So you might think that we would join in the chorus denouncing the Milliken decision for these same reasons.

But that’s not quite right. In our view, Milliken was an unexpected but important decision by the Supreme Court. It was right on the law. Just as importantly, it put the brakes on a potentially disastrous social experiment. Hundreds of thousands of children, living in an area of over 800 square miles, would have been put on buses taking them far from their families and their homes every day. While many in the establishment supported bussing, it’s easy to see that the cost would have been born by the children, who would spend hundreds of hours on buses every year, robbing them of precious time with their family and friends. Those who designed the plan ignored this very real cost.

What’s more, such a plan likely would have had deleterious effects on public education in the Detroit area. A parent — of any race — would have been very eager to avoid such a fate for their children. You can imagine that many families would have moved to places like Utica, Trenton, and Northville, cities just out of reach of the social engineers. Others would have put their kids into private schools. 

Of course, the poorest of the poor would have been unable to afford either of these options, leaving them to bear the brunt of the reassignment plan.

That’s the key word in this whole saga: reassignment. Everyone involved in the case — and most commentators today — just assume that the government needs to assign children to public schools. Governor Milliken and his allies argued that kids should be assigned to schools based on race, while their opponents argued that kids should be assigned to schools based on their address.

Here is the huge moral problem with both of those positions: Whenever the government takes on the role of assigning children to specific public schools, then it also takes on the role of enforcing their exclusion from other public schools. This is why parents, in the 21^st century, can be put in jail for using someone else’s address to get their kids into a high-quality school. This is why school districts hire private eyes to spy on kids and to conduct residency checks.

The answer to this conundrum is so simple: We need to move away from school assignments. Parents, not bureaucrats, should be allowed to ignore the arbitrary school district lines that divide our communities. 

Public schools should be required to be open to the public.

In practice, this means we need more and better Open Enrollment policies. In many states, public schools are not required to consider applications from students who live outside the district boundary. We have also argued that every public school should be required to reserve 15% of its seats for children who live outside of the attendance zone or the school district. But no child should be forced to attend a school outside his or her neighborhood.

The creators of the Detroit plan were right about one thing: Educational boundaries have indeed been used to separate Americans, and they have indeed contributed to the racial divisions in our schools. But the way to fix the problem is not to give bureaucrats the ability to ignore the school district lines as they determine the fate of hundreds of thousands of children.

It is American families who ought to be allowed to cross the lines.

Disclosure: Stand Together Trust provides financial support to Available to All and The 74.

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