October 7 Quality Schools, Healthy Neighborhoods, and the Future of DC Event
Panel moderator Alice Rivilin called his comments provocative and audience members protested their implications, yet Institute for Education Science commissioner Mark Schneider asserted his academic prerogative to question assumptions and recommendations of the newly released report, Quality Schools, Healthy Neighborhoods, and the Future of DC. Challenging the report’s central premise that more families are inherently good for DC, Schneider suggested that the District could be healthy without more school children, or for that matter, more children. Furthermore, the report, he said, attributed unrealistic powers to government to ensure people settled in specific neighborhoods and possibly one recommendation – to link communities and schools — would slow down school improvement.
Schneider might as well have been challenging his own boss, the Department of Education. The report was commissioned by the Office of the State Superintendent for Education (OSSE) following a “federal directive for the city to study how quality public school options can retain and attract families to live in the District of Columbia.” Prepared by the Urban Institute, the 21th Century School Fund and the Brookings Institute, the report does just that, outlining actions that would attract and retain families in the District and does not weigh the quality of city life with or without more or less children. However, the report does sound an alarm over the District’s dwindling school-age population and the decreasing share of its children attending the public schools and argues that high quality public schools, strategically placed affordable housing and revitalized neighborhoods will make the District more family-friendly and “potentially attract as many as 20,000 additional students to public schools by 2015.”
Schneider’s comments, he maintained, were not anti-children, but rather, based on developments in other cities similar to DC that are both dynamic and have a relatively low student/child population. He noted the costs of families and the comparative advantage of singles or childless middle and upper income couples and tax rates and services. But cost was less a part of his argument than the concept of a “creative class” and what is happening in cities that have large numbers of individuals who are “creating new forms, molding new ideas.” Schneider noted that cities with a large creative class are among the most affluent in the nation, “and maybe not coincidentally they have low numbers of children.” He also noted that DC is ranked 8th in terms of the size of its creative class.
As for his second point of overestimating the power of social engineering, Schneider said, “People never act the way we want them to. They constantly thwart all our best desires. And government policies are often designed to run counter to fundamental economic and demographic trends that are often so much stronger than any policy tools we have.” In other words, “My bet is that we should continue to expect a shrinking population of children in DC and that we should plan for closing more schools in an orderly fashion, taking into account the reality of a vibrant charter school movement.”
This brought Schneider to his third point that linking communities to schools could slow improvement. He pointed out that some charter schools, serving a citywide population, have built strong internal school communities and would have been distracted if they had been required to reach out to their geographically close non-school community. Schneider said, “I admit that I, like many others, am struggling with how this balance might work, but this report should get credit for raising the issue, but this is a question that will require lots of thought and work and, yes, experiments, to see how best to build the bridges between quality schools and healthy communities.”
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Specifically, the report urges the District to:
• Target increased educational and out-of-school time investment to neighborhoods of greatest need: where lots of families already live and do not have high-quality school options.
• Move quickly to preserve and expand affordable housing in neighborhoods that are currently undergoing gentrification as well as in historically high-priced neighborhoods that are already served by quality schools; and promote a welcoming environment for racial, ethnic, and economic diversity in all schools.
• Ensure that the public education system supports parents and students in using options to their advantage.
• Provide support for families and students to establish long-term commitments with schools and for schools to maintain a long-term presence in their communities.
