“Quality, Close to Home” and Invisible Zero-Sum Politics: Boston’s Home-Based Student Assignment Policy

Abstract

In 2013, the Boston Public Schools (BPS) adopted the Home-Based Student Assignment Policy (HBSAP), which replaced elementary and middle-school choice within three large geographic zones with an algorithm that generates a choice basket of schools for each address based on proximity to the student’s home and a guarantee that all baskets will include at least four schools in the top two state test-score quartiles of BPS. Adoption of HBSAP broke a long political stalemate. BPS invited broad public participation in the process but also shaped the agenda to favor what middle-class neighborhood participants wanted. The process obscured the zero-sum politics of student assignment by permitting current students and their younger siblings to continue in their schools after adoption of HBSAP and because the algorithm does not produce winners and losers as obviously as geographically defined student assignment policies do. BPS has not produced a comprehensive evaluation of HBSAP’s effects, but early evidence suggests that it is making enclave schools more white.

Notes

1 This article draws upon research funded by a Small Research Grant from the Spencer Foundation. The School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts also supported the second author’s work on this project.

2 From the landing page, select the year of interest in the drop-down box labeled “Enrollment Data.” Then select the file called “Enrollment by School/Race.”

3 “Grandfathering” is the language used throughout this debate, so we use it here. However, it is historically problematic when contemporary Americans talk about grandfathering as a positive adjustment to a policy. “Grandfather clauses” were part of the denial of voting rights to African-Americans during the Jim Crow era. People whose grandfathers had been registered voters were exempt from new voting eligibility tests. This exemption kept white voters on the rolls while requiring black people whose grandfathers had been enslaved to take tests designed to disenfranchise them.

4 Readers familiar with the Boston Public Schools’ kindergarten program should keep in mind throughout this paper that when we refer to “Grades K–2” we are not referring to the grade known as “K2” in BPS (kindergarten for 5-year-olds, to distinguish it from K0 for 3-year-olds and K1 for 4-year-olds). Our “Grades K–2” analyses include students in K2 (called “kindergarten” in this paper for simplicity), first grade, and second grade.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn A. McDermott

Kathryn A. McDermott is a professor of education and public policy and chair of the Department of Educational Policy, Research, and Administration in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on racial inequality in public education, including student assignment policy and school discipline.

Anna Fung-Morley

Anna Fung-Morley is an analyst in the Academic Deans’ Office at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. She earned a master’s degree in public policy and administration at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and previously worked in the Collins Center for Public Administration at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.