Diversity Is A Good Thing
But what is it? Like pornography, it seems to be something folks “know” when they see, but aren’t very comfortable defining.
For one thing, there’s the question of what kind of diversity we’re talking about. It’s used commonly as a proper noun, without explanation as to what particular sort of diversity is alluded to. Not nailing down a definition means there’s always room to squirt the other direction when challenged: “No, I meant ethnic diversity not racial”….
Socioeconomic diversity is often conflated with racial diversity, entwining racism and prejudice and all manner of unexamined presumptions. But the federal government provides a tolerably good way to quantify a school’s socioeconomic diversity. By using their surrogate measure of poverty, qualification for the free-or-reduced-price-meal-program (FRPM), schools in LAUSD are ranked by the proportion of their students who are Title I-eligible, or “poor”. This proportion though subject to considerable measurement error and bias, becomes a rough measure of the school’s poverty concentration. Title I is the federal program that supplements the budget of schools serving highly concentrated populations of impoverished children.
A school where more than 3 in 4 children are Title 1-Eligible (T1 > 75%) is in such high need that the federal government mandates these “T1” schools receive T1 monies first. Schools with a high T1 ranking can be understood to be “segregated” by socioeconomic status because so comparatively few children attend who are not low-income.
Conversely, as the proportion of T1-eligible kids drops in a student body, the “diversity” of the school goes up, by definition. Schools of middling T1 Diversity Is A Good Thing – redqueeninla: