ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, August 21, 1996 TAG: 9608210017
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
TWO ROANOKE mothers, each with a race-related beef about city schools. In the abstract, both are right. In the real world, both can't be.
Cathleen Duley's mixed-race daughter can't start kindergarten at the school of her choice, Forest Park, because that would boost minority enrollment in a school that's already 90 percent minority.
"I didn't think you could decide things by race," Duley was quoted in a news story the other day. "I don't think it's right. They're not looking at her as an individual, but at her color."
What fair-minded person couldn't sympathize?
Kaye Hale has a different complaint: Roanoke isn't doing enough to push elementary-school integration. At her white son's neighborhood school, Raleigh Court, 90 percent of the other students are also white.
"Failure to integrate all schools will continue to deprive all races the benefit of each other's experience and wisdom," she said this past spring. "Many of our students are not exposed to children of other races until middle or high school. This makes them less accepting of each other and less able to work together as adults."
What broad-minded person couldn't sympathize?
But which is it to be? Pay no attention to race, as Duley asks, or pay more attention to race, as Hale urges?
The dilemma in Roanoke is a microcosm of the national debate over affirmative action and the future of race relations in America. The ambivalence arises because, while race shouldn't matter, in the real world it does.
It matters, moreover, for reasons beyond the powers of a local school system to control. The Roanoke schools can't control history. They can't control the persistence of voluntary housing segregation.
School-attendance policies can aim, however, to adapt to the real world while working to foster a better, more racially integrated one. Give credit to Roanoke for doing an excellent job of trying.
In Roanoke, all schools are neighborhood schools in the sense that any child can attend the school for his or her attendance zone. (It's not as though Duley's daughter, for example, was prevented from attending her neighborhood school. Forest Park is outside their attendance zone.) But racial balance is a consideration in defining the zones. And a number of neighborhood schools are also magnet schools, with specialized and enhanced programs to encourage voluntary enrollment of other-race students from other attendance zones.
This voluntary system has produced measurable if incomplete successes. Hale's concern notwithstanding, Forest Park and Raleigh Court are unusual; most schools come closer to the city's overall enrollment ratio of 3-2 white-minority despite Roanoke's segregated housing patterns. Roanoke's system remains in any case a model of diversity in comparison with the valley's suburbs and most American cities.
But the system requires trade-offs. School officials now are seeking to expand the magnet concept to schools serving predominantly white attendance zones. But so far, for practical reasons as well as for compliance with rules accompanying federal funds, most magnet schools have served predominantly minority attendance zones. Thus, white students generally have a better chance of gaining admission to a magnet school of their choice in another zone, while minority students have a better chance of living in an attendance zone served by a magnet school.
For school officials, one lesson of the two complaints is that school-attendance policies shouldn't be cast in concrete. Attendance zones should be continually monitored, for example, for opportunities to make them more closely conform to genuine neighborhood boundaries; at a minimum, hardship exemptions should be kept available for particularly egregious anomalies.
Another lesson is the need to more aggressively explore opportunities for expanding public-school choice. While the concept of neighborhood schools should be strengthened and access to them safeguarded, the Roanoke Valley needs to more effectively regionalize school choice and, as soon as it is permitted, experiment with charter schools.
The most important lesson, though, is that schools cannot do it alone. Particularly as social tinkering reaches the limits of its efficacy, Duley's complaint warrants more attention than Hale's: As values, fairness ultimately must trump diversity.
Public institutions exercising explicit preferences need to start shifting the basis for policymaking from race to class. Even so, race will continue to matter in schools so long as it continues to matter to society at large.
LENGTH: Medium: 82 linesby CNB