Income not always perfect school tiebreaker

About 40 school districts across the country use students' economic status to decide who gets into popular schools — with mixed results. Even before Thursday's U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Seattle Public Schools was considering joining them as it seeks to achieve diverse schools.

Many districts may turn to income and other student demographics after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Thursday that race-based student-assignment plans in Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky., are unconstitutional. Seattle stopped using its so-called "racial tiebreaker" in 2002, and since then its high schools have become more dominated by a single race. Now district officials say they will pursue diversity in other ways as they revamp their student-assignment plan in the next year.

"This ruling clearly affirms the door for racial diversity in public schools remains open," said School Board President Cheryl Chow.

All over the country, education policymakers and lawyers are studying Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion, which said districts could make "race-conscious" decisions to encourage diverse schools but not base them on race itself, as many districts do.

Research shows that economic status makes a big difference in how well students do in school, said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a New York-based education think tank. Children from low-income families typically enter kindergarten less-prepared, and their parents often have less time to be involved in school.

"It's not that minority kids do better sitting next to whites, but rather that low-income kids do better in a middle-class environment," he said.

Wake County (N.C.) Public School System, which includes Raleigh, in 2000 started using income instead of race to assign students to schools. Analysis there shows that even though schools' racial and ethnic mix stayed about the same, students did better on tests under the new plan. The plan survived a 2003 challenge to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights.

But other districts have struggled more.

A lawsuit settlement forced the San Francisco Unified School District to stop using race to assign students in 2002. Instead, the district uses a "diversity index" that includes family income and other factors, such as the language spoken at home and test scores.

Although the district has a stated goal to make sure no school has more than 40 percent of students from a single race, "our whole diversity index was not a proxy for race," said district spokeswoman Heidi Anderson. "It was intended to create a socioeconomic balance."

And it has come under fire recently because some schools are becoming less racially diverse, she said.

Income helps Portland Public Schools decide who gets into oversubscribed schools. If two students are competing for the same slot at a popular school, the district gives preference to the student who helps bring the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch closer to the district average. Districtwide, about 45 percent of students in Portland qualify for subsidized lunch, higher than Seattle's 38 percent.

The issue doesn't come up often, said Judy Brennan, Portland's assistant enrollment director. If anything, some schools have become more "isolated," she said, because more students want to transfer out of low-income, low-performing schools than in to them.

That's always a risk when you have a choice system like Seattle's, said Kahlenberg, the senior fellow at The Century Foundation. The key is to be more aggressive. He pointed to the Cambridge, Mass., system, where the district caps the number of each school's students who are not disadvantaged. The rest of the seats are set aside for low-income kids. At some schools, it's the other way around.

The plaintiffs in Seattle's Supreme Court case oppose the district's use of income to assign students. But their attorney, Harry Korrell, said such a tiebreaker would probably be constitutional.

"It really requires that a white child from an impoverished background is considered the same for that tiebreaker purpose as a nonwhite child from an impoverished background," he said. "If that's what's happening, that seems fine."

Emily Heffter: 206-464-8246 or eheffter@seattletimes.com