This Thursday, the Montgomery County (Maryland) School Board is slated to vote on a proposal that would begin to address a long-festering problem in the state’s largest school district. The Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) system is, as a whole, wonderfully diverse, and yet for too long, many of its individual schools have been highly segregated. A promising new plan would use regional public school choice among magnet and specialty programs, rather than compulsory busing, to bring children of different backgrounds together to learn.
The school system’s student population boasts a stunning array of races and ethnicities: It is 35 percent Hispanic, 24 percent White, 22 percent Black and 14 percent Asian American. Systemwide, 45 percent of pupils are eligible for subsidized meals (which is available to students in a family of four making about $60,000 or less). The remaining 55 percent students are middle or upper class.
And yet the student populations in the system’s 25 high schools range dramatically from a 7 percent low-income and working-class population at Walt Whitman in Bethesda, where most students are White or Asian, to a 71 percent low-income and working-class population at John F. Kennedy in Silver Spring, where most students are Black or Hispanic.
This matters because segregation thwarts the central goals of public education: to promote academic achievement and social mobility and to foster good democratic citizenship and social cohesion.
When I met with schools superintendent Thomas Taylor in October, he told me he visited all Montgomery County high schools and saw tremendous disparities. He recently offered a plan—on which the school board is slated to vote March 26—to reduce inequalities by allowing greater choice of public schools programs within six carefully-drawn regions.
By creating several zones of choice, Taylor says he can cut down on long commutes required under the existing system of county-wide magnets. And he can offer free transportation to students, something MCPS has not always provided in the past. That’s important because, for struggling families, choice without transportation is not really choice.
Importantly, the six regions are consciously drawn to provide the opportunity for students to choose an integrated school population. In the past, in addition to county-wide choice, MCPS offered some regional choice programs within a consortium of schools that were demographically similar. The new choice system, however, purposefully crosses divides.
Region 1, for example, includes both affluent Whitman and Northwood, where 60 percent of students are eligible for subsidized meals. Region 3, meanwhile, includes both Kennedy High School, with its concentrations of poverty, and Walter Johnson, where just 20 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. Each high school will offer specialty programs such as International Baccalaureate or public service for students in the region. Taylor says that when a regional program proves highly popular and cannot accommodate everyone who wants to attend, slots will be filled with an eye to integrating the schools by income.
The new plan is backed by loads of research. Reducing concentrations of school poverty is one of the best ways to raise academic achievement. Some of the strongest evidence comes from Montgomery County itself. In 2010, Heather Schwartz, a researcher at the RAND corporation, published a study that compared two strategies: efforts by the school board to spend an extra $2,000 per pupil in higher-poverty schools and a housing initiative that allowed low-income students to live with their families in lower-poverty neighborhoods and attend lower-poverty schools. The integration strategy proved far more effective and cut the achievement gap between low-income and middle-income students by half in math, and by one-third in reading. Most of the positive results stemmed from the student’s school rather than their neighborhood.
Research also strongly supports the idea that integrated schools reduce racial prejudice and produce higher levels of social cohesion. In integrated schools, students of different races, religions, and income levels can learn what they share as Americans. To take advantage of this approach, MCPS will need to move away from a controversial idea adopted by the prior administration that sought to reinforce “students’ sense of racial, ethnic, and tribal identities” rather than commonality.
The regional choice program has strong support from Montgomery County’s Black and Brown Coalition and the Montgomery County NAACP, but critics of the plan raise a couple of important objections. Some worry that with a proliferation of magnet schools, quality will be diluted. In particular, skeptics are concerned about the fate of three selective county-wide magnet schools, the highly-regarded STEM magnets at Montgomery Blair High School and Poolesville High School, and the International Baccalaureate program at Richard Montgomery High School. Under a regional magnet system, these programs, and other similar programs, will each draw upon a pool of about 26,000 students, rather than the full complement of Montgomery’s 157,000 students. Detractors point out that those programs will become less competitive and conceivably hurt some high-achieving students. But districts much smaller than Montgomery’s support superb selective high schools. San Francisco’s legendary Lowell High School and Boston’s fabled Latin High School, to take two examples, each draw upon a pool of about 50,000 students.
More generally, the conscious design of the regions to be integrated greatly increases the chances that offerings will be strong across the regions. Affluent families, who have the time and resources to fight for excellence, are found in each of the six regions.
Another concern raised by a group of parents and teachers is that the particular themes chosen by administrators (such International Baccalaureate, humanities, and language and medical science and health care) may not end up being attractive to students and parents in each of the regions. But a system of public school choice should always be dynamic. If, in fact, some magnet themes prove not to be “magnetic”—that is, they don’t attract sufficient interest from students—the menu of options can be tweaked to reflect more precisely what families in a particular region desire. The most important first step is for the school board to establish a sound regional choice structure that allows for free transportation to economically and racially integrated schools. Over time, the district should remain open to refinements in programming based on data about which programs are over-chosen and which are under-chosen.
The bottom line is this: Integrated schools are better for kids and for society. MCPS’s plan for regional magnet programs are a big step in the right direction.
