What do we mean by good schools in Detroit?
Living in Detroit, I attend many public lectures and expert panels on the future of the city. At most, someone in the crowd inevitably says that none of the positive changes happening in the city make any difference if we don't "fix" our schools. The young folks moving in will move right back out when they have school-age children.
At face value, this argument is unassailable — of course we need good schools. But what do we mean by good schools? And which comes first, the city or the schools?
A first talking point in any discussion on school quality is test scores. By this metric, Detroit has a long way to go. On the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), fewer than 8% of the city's fourth- and eighth-grade students were labeled proficient or above in math and reading. Top cities like Austin, Texas; Charlotte, N.C., and San Diego were closer to 40%.
One could take this as an indictment of Detroit's education system. But this is where things get tricky because the "quality" of a city's education system, as measured by test scores, marches in lock-step with the income of the families living there.
If we look at the percentage of families in a city making less than $30,000 per year, and the percentage of students in that city proficient on NAEP tests, we find that the two variables have an almost perfect negative correlation. In other words, the higher the percentage of families in a city making less than $30,000, the lower the test scores.
In Detroit, where around half of families have an annual income of less than $30,000, and only a quarter are earning more than $60,000, just 8% of fourth-graders were proficient in reading. In Charlotte, where only a quarter of families make less than $30,000 per year and more than half earn more than $60,000, 40% of fourth-graders are above proficiency. The 2013 NAEP exam didn't tell me anything I couldn't have learned from the census.
This leaves me wondering: In those wealthier cities, which came first — the city or the schools? Did a city's education system improve drastically, causing middle and upper income folks to move back or stay in the city and help improve test scores?
Or does it work the other way? Young, educated adults move in to the city, find the best school possible when they have kids, recruit their friends to join them, and work to make the school better. And as this cycle continues, test scores rise, both because of the new wealthier kids, but also because low-income students perform better when going to school with their wealthier peers.
Rather than waiting for a top education system to somehow take form in a city with high levels of concentrated poverty, maybe we need a greater mix of folks to all build this system together.
This is obviously easier said than done. New parents with a choice of where to settle may be worried about sending their children into a school system consistently labeled the worst in the nation. And even an influx of middle-class families into the city is no guarantee that any of the low-income students currently in the school system would gain any of the benefits that come with greater socioeconomic diversity, as middle-class parents would likely center around a few schools, leaving the vast majority of the city's schools untouched.
So my response to that person at the panel discussion is "of course we need better schools in the city." But the path to those better schools is long and winding. Our best hope of systemically improving our schools long-term, both in Detroit and in our nation as a whole, is to get a greater mix of incomes and races going to school together. For a variety of reasons, getting low-income students into classrooms with middle and high-income students results in better outcomes for those low-income students.
But this will only happen if all students are able to attend those schools. To break our system of de facto racial and economic segregation in schools, we need housing policies that encourage a greater mix of incomes to all live together, followed by progressive education policies that push for schools to be more demographically representative of the entire community in which they're situated.
Until then, Detroit schools will never be "good" enough for those on the sidelines saying we need better schools. We need all those folks to help build that school system. And that's the hard part.
Patrick Cooney is college success manager, focusing on college readiness at high schools in Detroit run by Michigan Future Schools.What do we mean by good schools in Detroit?:
