If you listen to local school-reform activists, the October 9 elections for positions on some 500 local school councils were a triumph of school reform.
That is also the central conclusion of the controversial foreword Orfield has written to a study recently completed by U. of C. student Peter Scheirer. The study, entitled “Poverty, Not Bureaucracy: Poverty, Segregation, and Inequality in Metropolitan Chicago Schools,” examines the relationship between poverty and performance on standardized mathematical achievement tests.
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“I’m not saying that poor students can’t learn–indeed, quite the opposite is true,” says Orfield. “The study shows that students from low-income families can learn much easier if they are not concentrated in one school.”
Such statements are heresy to most school reformers, who dismiss as condescending the notion that poor students would benefit from sharing classrooms with the well-to-do. They maintain that if Chicago’s teachers and administrators weren’t so incompetent and corrupt the system’s low-income students would score as well as the rich kids in the suburbs do.
As for the low-income black and Hispanic kids who do live in the suburbs, most of them are concentrated in a handful of schools. The average suburban minority student (for the purposes of the study Orfield has used “minority” as a synonym for “black or Hispanic”) attends a school that is at least 52 percent minority and 33 percent low-income. The average white suburbanite attends a school that is only 11 percent minority and 8 percent low-income. Orfield and Scheirer contend that the results of this segregation can be measured in performance on standardized test scores for math.
The remedy Orfield proposes is integration. Aside from building more low-income housing in the suburbs, he suggests that inner-city children be allowed an opportunity to attend the finest suburban schools–as is the case in other metropolitan areas, such as Saint Louis, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis. Orfield writes, “Desegregation and inter-district choice plans that would make access by poor minority children to more effective middle-class schools deserve attention.”
