Our View - Why school boards need to address poverty rates

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Feb. 6, 2010.

"In discussing the difficulties of making high-poverty schools work, it is important to draw a distinction between the problems associated with concentrations of school poverty and beliefs about the ability of poor children to learn. Many people confuse the first with the second. Evidence suggests that children from all socioeconomic groups can learn to high levels if given the right environment. High-poverty schools, however, do not normally provide the positive learning environment that children need and deserve." -- Richard D. Kahlenberg, "Turnaround Schools That Work: Moving Beyond Separate but Equal" (2009).

In the week since the Iowa City School District announced that its redistricting committee would be bringing "Scenario 2" for public forums, we've heard a number of questions such as:

• "Why are they focusing on tearing down 'good schools' rather than on building up 'bad schools'?"

• "Why don't they focus on improving the performance at the underachieving schools rather than messing up what seems to be working at other schools throughout the district?"

• "Why do they want to bring down schools that are performing in the top 90th percentile so that all the schools in the district wind up performing in a mediocre 70th percentile?"

Although we understand why many parents are concerned about so many boundary changes happening so quickly, we still agree that the time has come for the district to call for a districtwide boundary change. With eastside elementaries facing capacity issues and with west-side schools continuing to experience growth, major boundary shifts seem inevitable.

And after reporting the test scores and other data for the various elementary schools for the past few years, we agreed with the board's decision last year to take one step toward addressing an "achievement gap" between the schools by including "demographic considerations" as one of the criteria used for redrawing those lines.

But we also think it's necessary to have those demographic considerations (specifically free and reduced lunch rates) be balanced against three other criteria:

• keeping neighborhoods together when possible,

• using building space efficiently and

• not adding to the district's operational costs.

That way, it would be impossible for the committee or the board to recommend any large-scale "forced busing" plan that would severely disrupt neighborhoods and send transportation costs through the roof.

Balancing poverty numbers

"Scenario 2," at best, is a good starting template for showing what happens when school officials try to balance those criteria for the Iowa City School District. The scenario would help make school boundaries a little more geographically coherent, but it also includes some features that seem "unfair" and that smack a little too much of "forced busing" -- especially when it comes to reassigning the sections of Lemme to Wood and reassigning sections of Wood to Lemme.

It is a fair question to ask why the scenario includes such a busing swap between Lemme and Wood yet offers no similar busing strategy to increase the lunch-assisted rates at Wickham and Shimek. But after acknowledging that unfairness, it's still important to keep in mind that we're talking about relatively short distances between the eastside schools. While there has been a lot of talk about students "having to be bused across town," the busing distances involved in the proposal having nothing in common with massive distances that some families have been forced to travel in large metropolitan areas.

"This is a 15-minute town," Peter Hlebowitsh, UI professor of teaching and learning, said of Iowa City. "It really isn't overwhelmingly onerous to get your kid from one school from the next."

Hlebowitsh agrees that changing the demographics is a "necessary" step if the district wants to keep addressing the "achievement gap." But he also said changing demographics is not a "sufficient" step and that the district must still place an emphasis on preschool, after-school and summer learning opportunities.

Noga O'Connor, a visiting assistant professor of education at UI, goes even further when discussing what the education research says about the benefits of improving the balance of demographics.

"Even if we change nothing else -- not hiring more teachers, not providing additional teacher training, not making curricular changes -- we still will see results," she said.

O'Connor said studies show that students from higher-poverty schools will perform better when moved to a more mixed environment, and those students will not bring down the performance of the "strong students" already there. Although a school's overall scores may dip for a while, the performance of individual students -- and the district as a whole -- will be improved.

Luckily, the Iowa City area schools with high concentrations of poverty aren't suffering from inadequate facilities or lesser quality teachers. If anything, the district has been throwing everything it has -- including some of its more energetic, creative and idealistic teachers -- into working to help disadvantaged children not get left behind.

And when good teachers have a few students who are academically behind or challenged by severe poverty, they can work with the students individually to help them catch up. But when those numbers start ratcheting up to more than half of the class, then even the best of teachers face a struggle.

As education scholar Richard Kahlenberg writes, "Research has long found that integration is not a zero-sum game: low-income students can benefit from economically integrated schools and middle-class achievement does not decline so long as a strong core of middle-class children are present."

Endogenous effect

Not everyone agrees that benefits of improving the balance of poverty numbers would outweigh the social costs involved with so utterly disrupting longstanding school communities in the Iowa City area.

Gerard Rushton, the UI geography professor who has been working with the district on enrollment projections since the 1980s, said he is concerned that implementing the boundary changes proposed in "Scenario 2" would be undermined by the "endogenous effect." That is, the decisions made by the board to solve a perceived problem may, in fact, actually cause or worsen the problem.

District officials, for example, have proposed changing the boundaries because they want to create a better balance of poverty rates. But the changes may not have the desired effect, Rushton said, because they could trigger a new round of "white flight" in which more affluent families decide to open enroll out of the higher-poverty schools to which they've been reassigned -- especially if those newly assigned schools are "in need of assistance."

And even if the poverty rates were evened out successfully among the schools, Rushton said that implementing Scenario 2 would still undermine the benefits that are supposed to come with successfully balancing out the rates.

After all, educators focus on lunch-assisted rates only as a means of improving the educational environment offered in a school. This is because:

• Recent court opinions have upheld the right of districts to use socio-economic factors -- as opposed to race -- as a means of determining what students go to what school.

• Because there are the strong associational links between behavioral problems -- including poorer academic performance -- in schools with a high concentration of children who live in poverty.

• Because there are strong associational links between academic success in low-poverty schools and higher rates of parental involvement. (A 2008 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, for example, found that low-income parents are four times less likely than more-affluent parents to be members of PTA and only half as likely to volunteer in the classroom or to serve on a committee.)

Rushton said he thinks the process should include a fifth criterion asking the committee to recognize the value of the traditional communities and educational structures that have been built around schools for decades. If those long-standing ties are severed by sending families to other schools -- even to nearby ones -- then all that collected institutional memory gets lost. Suddenly every school has to start over at square one when it comes to finding out the best way to involve parents in the educational process.

"The costs are not just in the schools where you are increasing the percentage but also where you are reducing the percentage," Rushton said. "You are going to have to adapt to that new composition. And that will take a lot of work. That will take a lot of effort. ... So it basically becomes a non sequitur."

Moving forward

Our community has long recognized that high-concentrated poverty harms children. And many in our community recognize that ending high-poverty, concentrated schools is a must.

Because the research shows that dispersing poverty rates helps poor children without hurting middle-class and affluent children, we think the school district does need to include "demographic considerations" when redrawing boundary lines. It's not an issue of being "politically correct," it's an issue of helping to improve the learning environments for the district overall.

"It's the starting gate analogy," Hlebowitsh said. "It's not that poor kids can't learn or are less capable, but they do have to run a lot longer to make it. ... There are real deprivations with poverty. It's not just an abstract idea."

"Scenario 2" meets the board's criteria in that it would bring down lunch-assistance rates in the high poverty elementaries of Hills, Kirkwood, Mann, Twain and Wood. Unfortunately, it does so by dramatically increasing the rates at Horn, Longfellow and Lincoln and while not changing the single-digit rates at Shimek and Wickham.

"Scenario 2" is far from a perfect balance of the board's four criteria. But it does represent a large step in the right direction precisely because it views improving socio-economic rates to be as important as the other three criteria.

As the redistricting committee and the board address the public's concerns about the scenario, they should not lessen the importance of improving the balance of poverty rates throughout the district.

Our View: How to read the district's redistricting scenarios

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Feb. 3, 2010.

On Thursday and Friday, the Iowa City School District will be holding public forums on one of the scenarios under consideration by the 38-member redistricting committee.

The good news is that the district and the committee have made the maps for "Scenario 2" available to the public nearly a week before the forums. Besides the small versions of the maps printed today, the Press-Citizen printed a full-size version of the elementary school map on Saturday. And electronic versions of the elementary, junior high and senior high maps are available on the district's Web site, www.iccsd.k12.ia.us/district/redistrict.

The bad news is that the maps are not readily understandable just by looking at them. They require some time, examination and explanation to understand fully.

The printed school names and purple boundary lines featured on the maps, for example, represent the existing school attendance areas. And it's sometimes confusing for readers to realize that they need to pay attention solely to the color coding for the different schools if they are going to understand the proposed new boundaries.

It's also important to remember that the scenario represents the efforts by the committee, consultants and district officials to balance the four redistricting criteria set by the School Board last year:

• Keeping neighborhoods and neighborhood schools intact (assigning students to the nearest school as much as possible).

• Demographic considerations (elementary boundaries are designed to reduce socio-economic percentages to no more than 20 percentage points above the district average of 30 percent).

• Addressing projected enrollments and ensuring that available building space is used efficiently.

• Ensuring that the proposed changes won't add to the district's operational budget.

The scenario addresses much of the strange gerrymandering that been part of the current school boundaries for far too long -- such as sending students from the west side's Hawkeye Court and Hawkeye Drive across the river to Mann (and to South East and City), sending students from north of Interstate 80 across other school's attendance areas to get to Lincoln and sending Pheasant Ridge students past Horn to Roosevelt. We're happy to see that the proposed junior and senior high boundaries are, at least, all contiguous.

But the scenario also adds some strange gerrymandering of its own. Students from Windsor Ridge, who currently get bused to Longfellow, would continue to be bused but now would go to Hoover. Students from the Lakeside area would be pulled from the Wood attendance area and bused over to Lemme. And at the same time, the Lemme attendance area would be reduced dramatically and some its current students would be divided among Mann and Hoover (which makes geographic sense) as well as Twain and Wood (which would require driving them right past Lemme and Lucas).

District officials say that partitioning the current Lemme attendance area was necessary in order to address the demographic and building use criteria. Because Lemme is already over capacity, its boundaries needed to be contracted. And since the students from the east side of Scott Boulevard already were being bused to Lemme, they could just as easily get bused a little further to Mann, Hoover, Twain and Wood.

But the partitioning of Lemme seems to be a quick jamming of some final pieces into a puzzle that's otherwise fairly complete. Yes, "Scenario 2" utterly fails to balance out the single-digit free and reduced lunch rates among the student populations at Wickham and Shimek. But the plan does help balance out significantly the rates at Horn, Longfellow and Weber as it brings down the more than 50 percent rates at Hills, Kirkwood, Mann, Twain and Wood.

The elementary with the biggest change, of course, is Lincoln. Under Scenario 2, Lincoln's free and reduced lunch rate would shoot up an order of magnitude from about 4 percent to more than 40 percent. And its students would go on to South East and City rather than to Northwest and West.

We can understand how the Lincoln community would be concerned about such drastic changes to their neighborhood school. But because the new Lincoln area would be both contiguous and within close geographic proximity to the school, Lincoln would actually become a "neighborhood school" -- in the strictest sense of the term. If anything, the Lincoln portion of Scenario 2 demonstrates what happens when the four criteria work together well.

District officials emphasize that Scenario 2 is still open for comments and changes. But they also say that the scenario does the best job so far of balancing the board's four criteria. Although the committee may change some boundaries here and there, the committee's final two or three recommendations probably will rely on Scenario 2 as a basic template.

That's why it is important for all district families and other concerned citizens to take part in the public forums at 7 p.m. Thursday in Parkview Church, 15 Foster Road., and 7 p.m. Friday in the Amos Dean Ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel, 210 S. Dubuque St. Please visit the district site, read the maps and proposals carefully and come ready to ask questions and provide comment.

If you can't attend the forums, you can still send your written comments to the district's designated e-mail account at redistricting@iccsd.k12.ia.us. (And please feel free to copy the e-mail to opinion@press-citizen.com as well.)

Our View -- Boundaries are now dynamic, no longer static

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Jan. 30, 2010.

Whatever recommendations the 38-member redistricting committee makes next month -- and however the Iowa City School Board decides to redraw school boundaries -- one thing is certain: The Iowa City School District is at the beginning of a cultural shift in how it determines and updates school attendance areas.

Last year, "several members" of the High School Enrollment Task Force called on the district to fundamentally change the way it thinks about boundaries. Rather than consider attendance areas as static entities that should largely be left alone except for an occasional tweaking, the district should start thinking about "boundaries as fluid and change them periodically, perhaps as often as every five years."

And the current redistricting debate is a perfect example of why district officials need to listen to the recommendation of those "several members."

For decades, the only times that district officials would even dream of redrawing school boundaries was when they decided to open a new school. With the opening of Weber, Wickham and Van Allen elementaries and North Central Junior High (and with the scheduled openings of Garner Elementary and the elementary on Camp Cardinal Road), attendance areas were shifted as a means of addressing growth in the north and west sections of the district.

Those focused changes allowed administrators and board members to avoid an all-out, dragged-out fight over changing boundaries districtwide. Although there were pointed comments and raised emotions in the boundary-setting meetings over those new schools, the heated discussions took place in a relatively small sections of the district.

Because eastside families haven't seen widespread changes in more than a generation, many long-term district families have come to view school boundaries as somehow written in stone. They've come to consider the elementary and secondary schools their family attends (or attended) as a legacy that they have a right to pass on to future family members.

With enrollment projections showing that eastside elementaries are soon facing capacity issues, however, that sense of stability was bound to come to end -- even if the decision to close Roosevelt hadn't triggered a passionate call for redrawing school boundaries districtwide. And by avoiding boundary changes except for new schools, past administrators and board members have all but ensured the current redistricting effort will be more difficult than it ever needed to be.

We understand that, in practical terms, changing boundaries districtwide every five years may introduce too much chaos into the mix. But the current redistricting debate shows why the district needs to begin reconsidering boundaries on a more regular basis. That way, district officials can respond more directly to population shifts and to inequities among facilities.

In the meantime, we encourage all district families to follow the process on the district and the Press-Citizen redistricting Web pages (www.iowa-city.k12.ia.us/district/redistrict and www.press-citizen.com/redistricting) and to attend the public forums at 7 p.m. Thursday in Parkview Church, 15 Foster Road., and 7 p.m. Friday in the Amos Dean Ballroom of the Sheraton Hotel, 210 S. Dubuque St.

And maybe if district officials can start thinking about school boundaries in such fluid terms, they also can start thinking about school curricula in more fluid terms. Then they could begin addressing underperforming schools, not only through improving poverty rates and other demographic considerations but also by developing magnet programs and other innovations.

Our View: A primer for discussing how to redraw boundaries in the Iowa City School District

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Jan. 27, 2010.

As the redistricting process continues for the Iowa City School District, we thought our readers would benefit from some quick definitions of the terms being thrown around by district officials and committee members.

Capacity issues

Capacity is simply the number of students that can be served within a single facility. What constitutes a "capacity issue," however, depends on whom you're talking with. Everyone agrees that overcrowding is an issue, but under-use of available space also seems, at best, a waste of resources and, at worst, an excuse to cut back the number of programs and educational services available.

Committee

The district has pulled together a 38-member committee to deal with redistricting issues. (Some people, amazingly, wanted the committee to be even larger.)

The committee is charged with coming up with two or three recommendations for changing boundaries among elementary and secondary schools. The committee members are scheduled to present their recommendations to the board Feb. 23.

Concept

In the November and December meetings with the redistricting committee, the district's consultants introduced a number of "concept" maps to gauge the committee members' gut-level reactions. These concepts have been described as "views from 50,000 feet" rather than attempts to draw lines where the new boundaries will be.

In order to be open about the process, the district has opted to make the concept maps available on its redistricting Web page (www.iowa-city.k12.ia.us/district/redistrict). But those early concepts are not to be confused with the "scenario" maps that the committee is beginning to discuss and eventually will be presented in public forums on Feb. 4 and 5.

Consultants

The school board hired Kansas-based consultants RSP and Associates to help it through the redistricting process. The school board members say the consultants are well-experienced in working on redistricting issues and are necessary facilitators for this local discussion. Some critics worry that the consultants are pushing for a pre-arranged final scenario. Still others wonder whether the consultants are "snake-oil salesmen" hawking a process only they understand.

But as Executive Editor Jim Lewers writes today, "There are so many moving parts -- or possibly moving parts -- involved that this process could be overwhelming without the consultants."

Criteria

The board determined that the 38-member committee would discuss redrawing boundaries based on the following criteria: demographic considerations, finances, keeping neighborhoods intact and projected enrollments. The board hopes that, by delegating to the committee at this stage of the process, it is providing an effective means for community input. Critics accuse the board of abdicating its ultimate responsibility for developing a redistricting plan.

Denial

Too many local residents seem to be in a state of denial as to whether redistricting is actually going to happen. It is. And most likely, it is going to affect every family in the district in some way.

Hopefully, by the time the public forums roll around on Feb. 4 and 5, more residents will have moved out of denial and into the next stages: bargaining, anger and acceptance.

Free and reduced lunch

Free and reduced lunch rates -- as the main indicators of poverty -- are the most important "demographic consideration" to be considered by the redistricting committee. Much of groundswell behind the call for redistricting came because the district's elementary schools have such widely divergent rates -- from 2 percent at Lincoln to 62 percent at Wood. School board members stress that they are working to improve the balance of rates among the elementary schools. They are not trying to achieve a perfect balance among the schools, they say, because that would require too much busing.

Isolated

"Isolated" is the euphemism the state Department of Education uses to describe lopsided statistics for race, ethnicity and poverty among schools. It's a label the state used when describing Roosevelt Elementary -- isolated both racially and socioeconomically -- which was one of many reasons why the board chose to close Roosevelt and redraw boundaries among several west-side elementaries. That discussion led directly to the current redistricting discussions.

Magnet schools

Schools that highlight specific types of curriculum -- music and art, math and science, foreign language immersion, etc. -- often attract students from beyond their local geographic area. In the early discussions of redistricting, there was some talk of addressing lower-achieving schools by transforming them into such magnet schools. And Superintendent Lane Plugge has said the planned third comprehensive high school would exert some magnetic attraction to students throughout the district who may prefer attending a smaller school.

Throughout recent history, however, the district has been committed to the idea of providing equal opportunities for comprehensive learning in each and every school. Talk about developing magnet programs has not moved much beyond mere talk.

Neighborhood schools

Geographic proximity and keeping neighborhoods in tact are among the criteria for the redistricting committee to consider when recommending how to redraw boundaries. The problem is that those criteria are at odds with the committee's emphasis on improving the balance of demographic factors.

The problem is made worse because no one can agree on a definition for "neighborhood school." The common sense definition of the phrase would be "schools located in and serving specific city neighborhoods."

Even if the redistricting committee comes up with a plan that corrects past injustices and makes some school boundaries more contiguous or coherent, people still will react emotionally to being assigned to a different "neighborhood school" -- even if their previous school was located nowhere near their neighborhood.

Projections

District officials stress that numbers used in planning documents are only "projections" and not crystal-ball predictions. As such, the numbers are subject to change and reevaluation. Since the early 1980s, the board has relied on the projections offered by University of Iowa geography professor Gerard Rushton and his graduate students. During the redistricting discussions, those projections are supplemented with data from the district's consultants, RSP and Associates.

Public forums

On Feb. 4 and 5, the redistricting committee will hold a public forum in which it will explain the different scenarios under consideration and give the public a chance to weigh in. The committee then has a few weeks to process the public input and make changes to the proposals before bringing two or three recommendations to the board.

Scenarios

The redistricting committee discussed its first possible "scenario" during its Jan. 21 meeting. Prior to that, the maps and data presented to the committee were mere "concepts" for provoking discussion and for helping the consultants begin developing scenarios.

SINA

District officials are unsure how provisions of the No Child Left Behind law will affect their final decisions on redrawing boundaries. Schools that have been labeled "Schools In Need of Assistance" will continue to bear that label for at least a year, if not longer, depending on future test scores.

Under the law, the district is required to provide transportation to any students who want to opt out of the SINA schools they've been assigned to. But the district can limit which non-SINA schools the students will be transferred to. And with so many schools having capacity issues, there might be a very limited number of options for schools accepting such SINA escapees.

Survey

In order to better gauge public input, the district contracted out a random phone survey of hundreds of district residents, offered an online survey to which nearly 2,400 community members and more than 700 staff members responded and had more than 2,600 high school students fill out their own surveys. The overwhelming consensus is that the board needs to make sure the process is fair to everyone. The many other preferences identified in the surveys, unfortunately, offer the committee and board somewhat contradictory advice.

Third high school

For years now, we've been advocating for the district to move toward building a third comprehensive high school somewhere in the northwest growth area. And during last year's public forums and task force meetings, the overwhelming sentiment seemed to be: It's not a question of "if" the district will build a third comprehensive high school; it's a question of "when."

Although current economic conditions may have pushed back the "when" by a year or two, we agree with the school board that any discussion of redistricting must start with viewing the third high school as a "given" and not as a mere possibility up for discussion.

With so many other factors already in motion, the redistricting committee shouldn't waste time coming up with scenarios and recommendations that don't include a third high school.

Our View: Redistricting about to kick into high gear

Printed in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Jan. 14, 2010.

When the Iowa City School District began the process of redrawing school boundaries back in October, we wrote, "Regardless of how well-designed this process looks now, it will work only if regular members of the community make use of the opportunities to share their thoughts and opinions." We called on Iowa City area residents to keep coming out in large numbers to meetings and forums, and we called on the School Board to "make sure it is publicly building on this momentum, not quietly stifling it."

Follow the Iowa City Schools redistricting process on our redistricting home page...

In the past few months, the redistricting process has been making some progress. The district has hired consultants to ensure that it has accurate information and that the process moves along. And the district has chosen a 38-member redistricting committee to work with the consultants and to ensure that the deciding making is guided by input from teachers, staff and parents as well as from the different local governments included in the district boundaries.

Unfortunately, as reported in today's Press-Citizen, there have been concerns that committee meetings have been dominated by the consultants' presentations -- leaving an extremely small amount of time for any substantial discussion from the dozens of community members who are volunteering their time and expertise. Rather than facilitate discussion, the consultants have seemed overly focused on collecting the committee members' gut-level reaction -- as conveyed through electronic clickers -- to the "concepts" and complicated data presented to them just moments earlier.

District administrators say they have responded to the committee members' concerns and have added a committee meeting to the schedule. The committee now has two scheduled meetings -- tonight and Jan. 21 -- "to refine concepts to scenarios" and an additional meeting -- Jan. 28 -- to "discuss scenarios, consensus" that it can then take to the public forums scheduled on Feb. 4 and 5.

We hope these remaining committee meetings will allow the process to kick into gear and begin winnowing the concepts, plans and proposals to a number of good options that can be made public a few days before next month's public forums. Although the consultants have the enrollment projections and estimated costs that will be essential for the committee to understand the consequences of their proposals, these boundary decisions need to be based on more than mere numbers alone.

And we hope the list of options for redrawing boundaries still includes more creative possibilities, such as establishing some schools as year-round schools or magnet schools, re-designating some K-6 schools to become K-3 and 4-6 schools as well as building new schools and possibly closing or repurposing schools.

We know that it will be impossible for the committee to present the board with a proposal that will please every group. Yet we think it is very important that these committee meetings start allowing the committee members to speak out more.

In the meantime, the committee meetings are broadcast on the district's cable channel, and all the information presented to the redistricting committee is available on a special Web page on the district's site, www.iowa-city.k12.ia.us/district/ redistrict. The Press-Citizen also has consolidated all of its coverage of the redistricting process on www.press-citizen.com/redistricting.