"I'd propose that each central-city child should have an entitlement from the state to attend any school in the metropolitan area outside his own district - with per pupil funds going with him"
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James S. Coleman, the sociologist behind the landmark 1966 Coleman Report, argued that equal educational opportunity could not be achieved as long as schooling remained tied to residential segregation. He found that a child’s peers and family background mattered more for achievement than most in-school resource differences, which led him to favor policies that would change the social composition of schools rather than simply pour more money into isolated districts. The proposal here is a metropolitan remedy: allow central-city students to enroll in any school across district lines, with funding attached to the student so that receiving schools have both the incentive and the means to educate them.
This idea directly challenges the political and legal structures that keep city and suburban schools separate. After the Supreme Court’s Milliken v. Bradley decision in 1974 limited interdistrict desegregation remedies, city-only plans often accelerated white flight and left urban schools more segregated and poorer. Coleman’s solution bypasses those traps by making the state, not local district boundaries, the guarantor of access. By letting funds follow the student, it functions like a voucher or portable entitlement, addressing fears that suburban districts would bear uncompensated costs while urging them to open their doors.
The aim is not simply consumer choice but integration and social capital. Coleman believed that exposure to different peer groups and norms could yield academic and civic gains that targeted spending within high-poverty schools struggled to produce. Yet the proposal also invites hard questions. Who provides transportation, and at what scale? How are admissions managed to prevent cream skimming or new forms of exclusion? What safeguards protect the educational ecosystem of sending schools so they are not hollowed out? The tension between local control and statewide equity is unavoidable. Still, the core insight endures: if where a child lives determines the quality of school available, only policies that cross residential lines can undo the structural roots of educational inequality.
This idea directly challenges the political and legal structures that keep city and suburban schools separate. After the Supreme Court’s Milliken v. Bradley decision in 1974 limited interdistrict desegregation remedies, city-only plans often accelerated white flight and left urban schools more segregated and poorer. Coleman’s solution bypasses those traps by making the state, not local district boundaries, the guarantor of access. By letting funds follow the student, it functions like a voucher or portable entitlement, addressing fears that suburban districts would bear uncompensated costs while urging them to open their doors.
The aim is not simply consumer choice but integration and social capital. Coleman believed that exposure to different peer groups and norms could yield academic and civic gains that targeted spending within high-poverty schools struggled to produce. Yet the proposal also invites hard questions. Who provides transportation, and at what scale? How are admissions managed to prevent cream skimming or new forms of exclusion? What safeguards protect the educational ecosystem of sending schools so they are not hollowed out? The tension between local control and statewide equity is unavoidable. Still, the core insight endures: if where a child lives determines the quality of school available, only policies that cross residential lines can undo the structural roots of educational inequality.
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| Topic | Student |
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