New Davenport schools diversity plan may have unintended consequences

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By Sheena Dooley | Saturday, May 17, 2008 11:43 PM CDT | () comments

Davenport North High School physical science instructor Michelle Owens goes through an assignment with sophomore Trevor Sawyer Wednesday. Champain Nimmers works on the assignment in the foreground. (Kevin E. Schmidt/QUAD-CITY TIMES) Buy this Photo

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Elizabeth Blade didn’t lose sleep over her decision to pull her third-grade daughter out of Davenport schools.

She saw educational opportunities dwindle in her daughter’s three years at Truman Elementary. The school was too large for her liking, with class sizes hovering around 25 students.

After shopping around, she found the Bettendorf School District to be a better fit. The family transferred out of Truman last year — and into Bettendorf’s Grant Wood Elementary.

“The things she was expected to know at the beginning of the school year, students who had attended Bettendorf were already exposed to, but she was not,” Blade said. “I attribute that to the Davenport schools.”

Blade’s daughter was one of the 31 students last school year allowed to leave Davenport under its desegregation plan. Aimed at curbing “white flight,” the plan used a formula that looked solely at a student’s race to determine who was allowed to leave the district. Racial integration, district leaders said, better prepared all students for success.

Most often, the formula favored open enrollment requests from minority students, such as Blade’s daughter.

However, a new formula approved by the district this year could change that, if open enrollment requests remain consistent with the past five years. According to a study by the Quad-City Times, the new formula, which replaced race with student achievement and family income as determining factors, will make it harder for minority students and easier for white students to leave Davenport schools.

“(This plan) is a whole new feel for all of us,” said Julio Almanza, Davenport superintendent. “We try to get it right the first time, but there is no guarantee.”

When the district first tied open enrollment to its more than 30-year-old desegregation plan in 2003, school board members said it would keep schools from resegregating.

Then last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that plans using race as the determining factor in deciding where students go to school were invalid. However, its decision did not prevent schools from using race entirely.

In response, Davenport scrapped its formula.

A split school board voted in February to replace its desegregation plan with the new formula that decided where students attend school based on their academic performance and family income. The district expected it to continue to limit the number of white students leaving Davenport, Almanza said.

But the district developed the new “diversity plan” — limiting parents’ ability to send their children to another district — and the board agreed to it without knowing its possible impact, some board members and district officials said.

“My discomfort isn’t in respect to the shift (away from race),” said Ralph Johanson, a board member who voted against the new the formula. “It’s much more in respect to the fact there was insufficient discussion into what those changes really were and meant.”

More difficult for minorities

In their first time using the new formula, district leaders this spring found it was more restrictive than the old one in terms of the number of students allowed to leave Davenport.

The district received 75 open enrollment requests by its April 1 cutoff date. Using the new formula, it denied 38 applications, which came from its higher-achieving, higher-income students, according to recently released figures. Under the old formula, 34 would have been denied, said Ethel Reynolds, the district’s executive director of administrative services.

“There weren’t very many surprises,” Reynolds said. “It is quite restrictive, but that was something we did expect to see. We have to live through this and (it being restrictive), in and of itself, will not make a difference in us continuing the plan.”

Almanza and Reynolds said the district did not look at racial breakdown of the approved and denied applications to see the new formula’s effect on “white flight.”

However, the Quad-City Times study showed the new diversity plan will make it easier for white students — and more difficult for minority students — to leave the district if open enrollment requests remain consistent with those from the past five years. That’s because the new formula is aimed at helping the district keep students who perform well on state tests and have a higher family income.

About 37 percent of white students either come from low-income families or don’t pass the state test or both. That means they would have an increased likelihood of being granted open enrollment.

The Times studied the potential effect of the new formula using a database of every student’s race, free and reduced-price lunch status and performance on state reading and math tests. The information was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Also, the Times looked at historic open enrollment application denials and approvals under the desegregation plan. A racial breakdown of this year’s actual requests was not available.

Brad Thiessen, an assistant professor and chairman of mathematics department at St. Ambrose University, aided in the analysis.

More specifically, the study showed:

* All requests from minority students were granted under the old formula with the exception of one year. Under the new formula, about 75 percent of those students’ requests would be guaranteed for approval.

* All requests from white students were subject to denial under the old formula with the exception of one year. Under the new formula, 37 percent of white students fall into the category that is most likely to guarantee approval of their applications.

Those findings all hinge on the types of students who ask to leave the district.

The new formula is aimed at helping the district keep students who perform well on state tests and have a higher family income, instead of race. About 37 percent of the district’s white students are considered low-income, which means if they applied to open enroll out of Davenport the district would most likely grant their request.

“Using free lunch and academic performance is a benefit, but it does not necessarily produce racial integration,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA and a leading researcher in the benefits of integrated schools. “One of the things that we’ve seen is there is a big increase of white poverty going on in the country in terms of the school-aged population.

“It’s important that race is one of the factors in these plans. Racial integration is a compelling interest — it’s important. They (Davenport school officials) are being more conservative than the Supreme Court. I don’t think that’s necessary.”

Stopping ‘white flight’

Davenport adopted its voluntary desegregation plan in 1975 at the urging of the then-Iowa Department of Public Instruction.

At the time, the state said minority students could not make up more than 30 percent of a Davenport school’s student population. Lincoln, Jefferson and Hoover elementary schools exceeded that threshold with 63 percent, 39 percent and 32 percent, respectively.

Overall, almost 10 percent of students in the district were minorities.

The plan was meant to bring those schools into compliance in three years. It allowed students to transfer to schools in the district only if the move would decrease a building’s minority enrollment. That plan remained in place until 2003.

Iowa lawmakers passed legislation in 1989 giving students the opportunity to enroll in a district if they didn’t live within its boundaries. Davenport adopted its own version a year later, allowing any student to transfer out of its schools.

But by the early 2000s, the district saw a significant increase in the number of students leaving — most of them white. The cost: More than $4,000 in state aid for every student who left. Today that number exceeds $5,400.

The district’s answer was to take advantage of an exception in the state’s open enrollment law that allowed districts with desegregation plans to deny requests if it negatively affected the racial balance of schools.

“When you have open enrollment that allows for white flight, you are, by your very action, contributing to the isolation of kids,” Almanza said. “The state created the allowance for districts with desegregation plans as a way to mitigate it. It became a way to maintain a balance.”

Educators in Davenport, along with Orfield, said racial integration in schools is important. It leads to increased learning and achievement, greater career ambitions and success, a stronger sense of engagement in the community and an improved understanding of other races, among other things.

And Orfield’s research shows segregated schools lead to lower school attendance and grades, and it can lend itself to fewer opportunities to learn from members of other racial groups.

“You don’t really learn how to understand and work across cultural lines if you don’t cross them,” Orfield said.

Reacting to court decision

When administrators and school board members are asked to measure the effect of linking the plan to open enrollment, most put its accomplishments in financial terms.

In the five years it was in place, Davenport kept $1.8 million in the state funding it would have lost, according to district and state figures. Iowa doles out money to districts based on how many students they serve.

But in terms of student numbers, the 16,200-student district has denied only 146 children the chance to leave since 2003, according to the district.

Almanza said those numbers most likely have not had a huge effect on creating racial diversity in schools. But having it in place has kept the number of open enrollment requests from growing to the point where the loss would negatively affect it, he said.

“We have not prevented people from leaving,” Reynolds said. “We haven’t made it better, but we have controlled it from becoming worse.”

Despite not knowing its exact effect on desegregation, school board members still saw the old plan as a useful tool.

After the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its ruling, the state adjusted its policy to allow the five Iowa districts, including Davenport, that had desegregation plans to replace them with a diversity plan. One of the only limits placed on the plans was that race could not be the determining factor in their formulas. It could, however, be one of several.

Davenport leaders opted to avoid race in their new plan, saying it could lead to legal action. Instead, the board adopted a plan that is aimed at creating schools with students from diverse economic and academic backgrounds.

At the time, district officials used Orfield’s research to back the benefits it would have in the classroom. His research showed an academically and financially diverse mix of children positively influenced student performance, among other things.

However, Orfield said, the payoff to those students is different when they are in racially integrated schools.

“Race is not the same as class,” he said. “They are very different schools typically. And the free lunch line isn’t a very good way of thinking about class. There is a much deeper poverty below the free and reduced-lunch (income cutoff). It’s a very crude measure that doesn’t work well, especially in high schools where most students don’t eat lunch at school.”

Sheena Dooley can be contacted at (563) 383-2363 or sdooley@qctimes.com.

Reasons for leaving Davenport schools

Each year, Davenport School District sends a survey to parents who have opted to transfer their children out of the district to see their reasons for doing so. The following are compiled results of those surveys from the 2002-03 school year through the 2006-07 school year. Not all families return their surveys, and district officials say the results are subjective.

Continuation (of previous year’s open enrollment)   57 percent

Convenience   16 percent

Education   9 percent

Child care   6 percent

Class size   4 percent

Personal   3 percent

Dislikes Davenport School District   2 percent

Athletics   1 percent

Year-round school   Less than 1 percent

Farming   Less than 1 percent

Community   Less than 1 percent

Source: Davenport School District