It is about time that someone raised this issue. The segregation between the Springfield area’s cities and towns is incredible, with some suburban schools having just one or two black children in them, and others with no Latinos in them. The desegregation efforts via busing that started in the 1960’s were a failure — they simply pushed whites across town lines where they couldn’t be bused, so instead of segregated neighborhoods, we have segregated city/town groupings. What makes that worse is that there is now no “equal funding” requirement which existed when neighborhoods were segregated. Many towns spend far more on their students than urban areas. We have gone backwards.
Although this manifests itself as racial segregation, the real problem is economic segregation. Poor families, many who happen to be black or Hispanic, do not have the ability to live in a suburban community with better schools because those communities only allow high-end single-family housing. Their children are stuck in schools with a lot of problem children, they don’t get the attention they need, and don’t do well in these schools. The lack of economic mobility in our country over the past 30 years — 50 years ago it was reasonably easy to move from the poor to the middle class, it is much more difficult today, especially since education is integral to doing so — has entrenched many in a repetitive cycle that crosses generations.
The solution to the problem is not a return to forced busing (now done via county schools, which exist in many other parts of the country). It is to make urban schools more attractive to wealthier people by offering more there, it is to diversify housing so that suburban communities have places for people up and down the economic ladder, and it is by giving more cross-border opportunities for movement such as intra-city school choice (which many districts seem to be eliminating). Maybe the latter could be achieved by tying a higher school construction reimbursement rate to the number of intra-district students a city or town accepts.
One thing that I did find interesting was that there are proposals for more cross-district charter schools in the Springfield area this year. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the themes behind them. For example, one proposal was for the “Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter”, centered on the teachings of a Brazilian social justice activist, another was the “Barbara Rivera Regional Community Action Charter School”, which seems to actually be a school to attract only Hispanics.
However, done right, this could be a good way to integrate schools, by giving people a common interest to organize around rather than neighborhood or race/ethnicity. For example, the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts school could have done this, had it not been built in a community that is mostly white and wealthy and nowhere near the poor non-white neighborhoods of the region.
(also, as a caveat, I’m still not completely sold on charter schools specifically because of their ability to draw away the best kids from public schools, weakening them and defunding them in the process)
I am glad that this issue is getting some press, because it is integral to the future of this state, yet no one wants to talk about it. Schools in many communities are being set up like segregated private country clubs, with a high entrance fee (expensive house) that discourages poor and non-whites from entering. This actually is a tacit selling point of those communities. Those schools are increasingly the ones where successful students are coming from, whereas 50 years ago the successful schools were all in urban areas and the surrounding communities actually sent their children to the cities to get a better education. How times have changed.
With 10% affordable housing in every community, it makes it easier for some poor families to move out of Boston and Springfield and into local suburbs, particularly around Boston where there is more public transit options in suburbia.
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p>If some poor families (who happen to be non-white) interested in good education for their kids are able to move into these affordable housing units in towns with good (and typically very white), you get more integration both in schools and in the towns themselves, a double-good.
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p>Or, we could just vote yes on two and take away the single most effective tool in stimulating the growth of affordable housing using private investment.
40B has been the law during the time this situation developed. If it’s helping to mitigate economic/racial segregation, it’s not doing a very good job.
C’mon sco, you know that there are many influences… and the 40B positive* influences might well be overwhelmed by other negative influences. Take away 40B, and there’d be a net result of even more in the negative direction.
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p>I don’t know if that is correct, but it is my hypothesis.
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p> * think of positive and negative in the physics sense, indicating direction instead of better or worse in terms of values.
Surely the poverty rate is less than ten percent! And of course the poor will qualify for mortgages to buy such houses! And with all the foreclosures, these new unaffordable units will just FLY off the shelves!
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p>BEST OF ALL – by having such a law on the books, we can point to it and ignore the need to stop using development and building to solve such a problem! It’s worked just as well as bussing for thirty years!
it’s simply the minimum requirement for a town to avoid 40B developments. There are a number of communities with more than 10% affordable housing.
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p>Of course, that’s the technical term. There is other housing which is relatively cheap but doesn’t qualify as “affordable.”
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p>PP, you’ve really brought your B game to this debate. You’re usually a reasonable, reality based debater… but on this issue, you’ve checked that at the door. PPourquoi PP?
One reason 40B doesn’t work is that it allows senior housing to count toward the goal. It is possible to have plenty of affordable housing counting to your score, but virtually none of it devoted to families.
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p>In the Springfield area, single-family homes are where the money is at in the suburbs. Developers routinely get $400k+ per house in the towns with good schools. I doubt that multi-family housing would fetch as much per unit. Although it seems permissible under 40B, I have never heard of a developer proposing to take a 10-acre parcel and make it into 20 2-family duplexes on 1/2 acre each. That parcel usually gets carved up into 10 single-family McMansions.
Harwich and Chatham are planning to merge their high schools for the same reason – not enough childen with families.
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p>The Town of Orleans has a majority of year round residents who are over 65.
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p>If you don’t allow senior units to qualify, how can you get to ten percent when your population is the oldest in the state?
Might those towns be closing their schools because the high cost of housing on the Cape is preventing younger people from moving there?
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p>If they opened 500 units of housing on the Cape, reserved for people in the 25-45 age bracket, with a price in the $100k range, income restrictions of 80% of the median household income, would they sit empty?
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p>It seems to me that the Cape is an example of a skewed housing economy, not a reason that 40B is no longer needed.
could it be the lack of jobs? The Cape isn’t exactly known for its job creation, apart from the tourist industry. I think this issue is more than just affordable housing.
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p>http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=eh…
I do not think progressives should be too happy with 40B, which confers most of its benefits on developers in exchange for very modest–and temporary–gains in affordable housing.
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p>As a tool to combat segregation in schools, it just flunks out, period. (But I do agree that it’s important to define “segregation” as more than just town- or city-wide.)
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p>I do not blame housing advocates for defending this law, as it is currently the only game in town. But honestly, is this how anyone would design an affordable-housing program from scratch? Anyone besides a developer, I mean.
Adding housing to the market, even luxury housing, lowers costs for everyone. For example, the existence of the those giant condo buildings near Kendall square means less rental housing in Somerville is taken off the market through condo conversion.
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p>Affordable housing in and by itself should not be the primary goal of housing advocates. Rather we should push for diverse and vibrant communities. Detroit, for instance, has plenty of affordable housing – so affordable that you couldn’t pay people to live there.
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p>Question 2 is being pushed by anti-growth NIMBYs who would be perfectly happy to see the middle class families of Massachusetts priced out of the market and forced to move to Cary or Scottsdale. Fighting it is not just about protecting affordable housing for the poor, it’s about protecting our middle class as well.
I’ll go further than your first paragraph. In the U.S. today, private developers are the engine by which low-income housing will be built, if at all. They have to be able to make money doing it. The right question for us is how best to align their interests with that of the public. The current regime falls short.
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p>But when you say,
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p>I challenge that. John Belsksis, who chairs the Question-2 committee, lives in my town. He is nothing like the caricature you proffer. His concern for affordable housing is genuine and his criticisms of 40B deserve serious attention whether you share his conclusion or not.
I don’t doubt your characterization of Mr. Belsksis. However, his efforts to “fix” affordable housing have resulted in him aligning with exactly the folks who have no interest in anything but Mr. Norquist’s bathtub, or at the very least have no interest in those people living here. And, if he wins, what does he get? Less affordable housing growth. Way to go.
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p>Fixing good but flawed legislation is hard, and nobody will claim that 40B isn’t flawed. Still, it’s a far more productive route to fix the flaws than to chuck it out and simply hope for the best.
I’m not part of the repeal effort, just trying to keep this conversation useful. Which it stops being as soon as we start hunting for bedfellows. (Which both sides certainly have.)
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p>I’ll leave where I came in: Progressives should not be too happy with 40B. It’s a raw deal.
The anti-40b movement is very much centered preventing high density development in the suburbs. This article, which argues in favor of question 2, gives a good summery of this history.
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p>http://www.milforddailynews.co…
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p>Short version: Developer uses 40b to build an apartment complex that is denser than allowed by Milford zoning. Residents fight bitterly to try to stop it. This morphs into a movement to repeal the law.
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p>As to Mr. Belskis himself:
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p>Which doesn’t match your description of his heartfelt desire for more affordable housing in the Commonwealth at all.
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p>Supposed concern that affordable housing is getting short shafted is a ruse. The real desire is to keep the middle class and the working poor out of wealthy suburbs.
Dear NoPolitician,
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p>I think your concerns are valid about charters drawing away motivated families, weakening and defunding traditional public schools in the process. And I agree with you that there’s too little attention paid or discussion of the problem of resegregation.
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p>And our current education policies seem more likely to exacerbate than resolve the problem. As someone posted to the Globe story today, No Child Left Behind’s demands for 100% “proficiency” on state tests means any affluent community that wanted to open its doors to students from poor districts who could benefit from suburban school resources would run the risk of lower average test scores. Suburban students could benefit from schools and classrooms that better reflect our diverse society, but property values might suffer if the scores look like they’re going down.
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p>In addition, the research on charters and segregation show them to be more part of the problem than the solution. For example, a study released by the Civil Rights Project in Feb. 2010 found that, nationally, 70% of black charter students attend schools where at least 90% of students are minorities. That’s double the figure for traditional public schools. The researchers found that the typical black charter-school student attends a campus where nearly three in four students also are black.
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p>Another study by researchers from the U. of Colorado and Arizona State found charters exacerbating economic segregation.
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p>Both groups of researchers warned that Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top could worsen these problems by encouraging charter expansion.
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p>It seems that a problem that isn’t even acknowledged, though, is unlikely to be addressed.
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p>Lisa Guisbond
Citizens for Public Schools
I tend get to these ed threads after my esteemed colleague Lisa takes any mention of K-12 and gets an anti-charter comment in.
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p>and then of course i want to respond to that, since i work for a charter. but the original post is what i wanted to comment on.
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p>oookay so 2 quick thoughts
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p>1. you know those people who say “HOW DARE YOU HAVE THE GALL TO….”
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p>well i realize they’re annoying, but i feel like one of those folks. therefore at risk of being annoying….
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p>…the gall of the charter critics in this one policy area is almost shocking. make your argument that charters loot the district or kids don’t actually learn in charters or parents are dumb for choosing them. fine. we disagree, but reasonable argument on your side.
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p>but the segregation argument is just too much.
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p>a. when charters first hit boston in 1994, critics screamed “charters will take all the white kids!”
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p>so charter leaders did MAJOR outreach to black churches, black community groups, etc.
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p>so boston charters ended up about 60% black students, while the district is about 35%.
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p>b. a decade later, some of the SAME PEOPLE (like gary orfield) who said charters will “cream the whites” back in the 1990s decided TO FLIP THEIR CRITIQUE around 2005.
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p>the NEW charge was that instead of too many WHITE kids, now charters have TOO MANY BLACK kids!
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p>they framed it as
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p>”Charters segregate”
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p>and
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p>”Charters don’t serve enough Hispanic and Asian kids who are ELL” (not mentioning that’s because charters were over-serving Roxbury born illiterate black kids)
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p>it doesn’t seem like an intellectually fair approach. okay, off soapbox momentarily.
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p>2. No Pol
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p>YES to “diversify housing so that suburban communities have places for people up and down the economic ladder”
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p>BIG YES to “more cross-border opportunities for movement such as intra-city school choice”
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p>YES to not being impressed at all with “Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter” – me neither
NH was forced by its courts to adopt a statewide property tax to fund education and I’ve said for years I would like to delink services from the property tax. In my town we have a gamit of school facilities in terms of age and accomodations, but as a very white town it’s not divided by race, but somewhat by class and definitely by geography within the town. To be honest a school’s racial and ethnic make up per se doesn’t really bother me one way or the other.
real solution to segregation. There are and will continue to be almost no desire on the part of communities to accept significant numbers of poor children–most of whom are children of color in the Springfield area. It’s the poverty of students, much more than their race, that communities will object.
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p>I teach in East Longmeadow, one of the three Springfield suburbs NoPolitician seems to be suggesting. These towns are expensive to live in and lack much, if any, affordable housing. Longmeadow is richest community in Western Massachusetts. Lower middle-class people would have a hard time just paying the property taxes. Compared to the per capita incomes of EL and Wilbraham ($26,000), Longmeadow is $12,000 higher ($38,000). All three communities, however, have METCO students; we also have students of color–most middle-class–who live town.
I don’t think this an affordable-housing problem, and so I don’t think fixing 40b will help much.
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p>I think the problem is that people tend to segregate by economic class when they choose where to live — with all the ethnic implications that come along. When we leave control of schools in the hands of those 351 towns, and combine that with our over-reliance on local property taxes to fund schools, this outcome is inevitable.
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p>Poor towns have bad schools. Minorities tend to be poor. People who can afford to live in towns with good schools do so, and those who can’t are left with terrible schools.
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p>I think the best way to fix this problem is to shift school funding to larger regions (county? state?) and shift it away from property taxes to more progressive income and/or estate taxes. Maryland uses local (income) surtaxes based on residence.
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p>When schools in poor cities and towns can get the funding they need to rebuild, those schools will improve. That will solve the segregation problem.
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p>Just my two cents.
Thanks for checking in from Brookline on the problem of school segregation, Tom. Any other limousine liberal suggestions?
Brookline has always been an active participant in METCO. Nevertheless, Brookline does exemplify the problem I identify. Glad to see you once again adding your pithy and deep insight to the conversation.
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p>How do you propose to solve the problem?
Even I couldn’t take this conversation further off the rails than it’s already gone.
I would start by asking the kids if they think this is a problem and what they would do to change it.
The kids don’t vote and don’t pay taxes — they are, after all, kids. While I grant you that what passes for “debate” these days seems to take place at a ten year old level more often than not, I nevertheless feel that this is something we grownups should solve.
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…solve it by attaching it to whatever our pet project is.
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p>I think you would be surprised by what the kids would say. Maybe desegregation is not the first thing on their agenda.
I work in BPS and I can say that the elephant in the room is class and the role of Catholic schools. There are plenty of middle class Black and Latino kids in Boston, and their families often still send them to public schools. But ALL the middle class white families in Boston send their kids to private, mostly Catholic schools. Which means that BPS winds up with mostly Black and Latino kids, who are economically diverse, and then a small percentage of very poor White kids. Part of the solution has to include figuring out how to convince middle class white families they too should send their kids to public school. Making the schools better is a good start, but at this point families don’t believe they are better. Boston Latin, ACC, Match Charter, and BCLA have been as good as any Catholic school for years now, but that doesn’t mean white families believe it.
Although probably generally true. There are a handful of public schools, primarily for the lower grades (“grammar schools”), that have been attracting middle class and even upper-middle class whites.
..would you say, is now “tradition”? So, for example, my dad went to this school, he sent me there, now I send my kids there.
I ask because in Worcester, we have many families that send their kids K-6, and then leave for the Catholic schools at 7th grade. Trying to trace how much of that has to do directly with the public school, and how much has to do with family tradition, is something we’re trying to work out internally.
Hi Tracy,
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p>I’d be more inclined to think of it as a “tradition” thing if I hadn’t read so many of the online Globe comments these past two days. Maybe that was a bad idea (and a skewed sample)!
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p>bobcatsr, for example, shared this in response to Derrick Jackson’s oped today:
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p>I assure you this comment was not exceptional in content or tone. There’s tradition and then there’s traditional racial animus, and sometimes it seems there’s a fine line.
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p>My husband experienced Boston’s efforts at desegregation through busing and notes that the suburbs and the children of the affluent were held harmless from all the turmoil. Somehow he emerged relatively unscathed and unwilling to blame poor minority families for their plight. The same does not seem to be the case for the current crop of Globe commenters.
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p>I grew up in Syracuse, NY, where my parents actually chose to send me to an inner city, predominantly black “magnet” school. It was an imperfect effort at desegregation, but an exciting educational opportunity for me. My younger brother, on the other hand, felt unsafe in the school five years later. Even in the same family, it seems, experiences and take-home lessons may vary.
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p>My own experience with a desegregation effort, though, left me feeling that it is a valuable goal that should not be abandoned.
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p>Lisa
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The comments on the Springfield Republican’s online forums are mainly similar to that. For example:
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p>I found this comment the most amusing:
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p>Maybe it’s possible that many people like the poster above, just don’t understand the facts. 97% Caucasian is the very definition of a segregated school, and the school choice in Wilbraham is a handful of slots per grade, and I think it was eliminated last year.
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p>But more likely is that there really is a lot of deep-seated racism in this country, because many of the posts were more like this one:
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p>Online forums allow people to say things that they believe, but would never say in public…