Where’s all the reporting about educational redlining?

The underreported story about attendance zones and systemic inequality.

By Tim DeRoche

In recent years, education journalists have taken a leading role in drawing the public’s attention to the borders between school districts. Numerous stories have shown how district boundary lines reinforce the ongoing racial divisions in our schools and contribute to disturbing disparities in spending between the haves and the have-nots.

But there’s a related issue that seems tailor-made for local education reporting, yet too often escapes the serious, ongoing scrutiny that it warrants. That issue is school attendance zones. These are the lines drawn by school district staff, showing which district kids get into which school – and who is kept out.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), almost 80% of public school students attend the school they’ve been assigned to by the district based on where their families live.

Invisible and ubiquitous, district school attendance zones define what a neighborhood school is supposed to be. They are baked into the system. And they do as much or more damage as district boundaries. But they are hard to see, somewhat difficult to report on, and frequently left out of the conversation about how to make school systems work better for all kids.

Above: The author’s book, A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools.

For the past five years, I’ve been looking closely at attendance zones for my book A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools. I was curious about what I saw in my family’s neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles, where wealthy families often bid up the price of certain homes because those addresses guarantee their children admission at a “special” public school. I wondered if these dynamics played out in other cities.

What I learned is that attendance zone boundaries are a huge driver of inequality in almost all of our cities. And these zone boundaries are linked – across decades – to our nation’s discriminatory past.

Look, for example, at two schools that serve the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Lincoln Elementary is one of the crown jewels of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), with 80% of the students proficient in reading. Just over a mile south is Manierre Elementary, where not a single graduating 8th grader tested proficient in reading in 2019. Lincoln is 61% white and 16% low-income. Manierre is 0% white and 100% low-income.

Why are the two student populations so radically different? CPS draws an attendance zone boundary that divides the neighborhood and keeps the populations separate. Children who live north of North Avenue are assigned to the elite Lincoln Elementary. Children south of North Avenue are not allowed to enroll in Lincoln and are assigned to the under-resourced Manierre. For a child in Old Town, your fate turns on whether you live on one side of the street or the other.

Above: Coverage of district boundaries like 2019’s A New Study Shows Why White School Districts Have More Money (D Magazine) has been relatively robust. 

There’s been no shortage of stories about the corrosive effects of school district boundaries. Take this story in D Magazine in Dallas: A New Study Shows Why White School Districts Have More Money. Or this one on NPR: Hundreds Of School Districts Nationally Deeply Divided Based on Race and Funding.

Many of these stories have drawn from the groundbreaking research by the nonprofit EdBuild, which shut down in June after several years of producing tremendous work on the divisive and unequal effects of school district boundary lines.

However, school zones are too often left out of stories that could easily include them. Consider this 2016 story about Lincoln and Manierre by Sarah Karp at WBEZ. Karp captures the inequalities between the two schools and reports on the effort to build an annex at Lincoln in order to accommodate more wealthy families. But she fails to mention that it is the attendance zone boundary on North Avenue that keeps the two populations separate.

Karp writes about the district’s plan to “consolidate schools,” but a more accurate description would be that the district intended to redraw the lines and merge the zones. Indeed, the district only considered building the annex at Lincoln because the existing school was overflowing with upper-income families who had flocked into the zone. The annex was necessary to appease parents who objected to a redrawing of the zone lines.

Given the recent focus on systemic racism, it’s especially surprising that reporters almost never report on the similarities between these attendance zones and the racist redlining maps of the early 20^th century that prevented many low-income families from qualifying for federal housing assistance. Attendance zones, like the redlining maps before them, appear to be designed to keep the races – and classes – apart. See my recent piece in Education Next.

A new analysis by The Hechinger Report even shows that there are significant spending discrepancies within districts, not just between them. A school serving a higher-income population will often have much higher per-pupil spending than a school down the street in the same district, primarily due to the tendency of the district to assign more experienced, highly paid teachers to the “nicer” neighborhood.

Above: Impact of school attendance zones reinforcing racial segregation, according to former Vox data journalist Alvin Chang

Despite the importance of attendance zones for millions of American families and the obvious connection to vital issues of social justice, in-depth reporting on these zones is difficult to find. For models, take a look at this 2018 analysis by Alvin Chang in Vox or the Pulitzer-winning series “Failure Factories” in the Tampa Bay Times. They highlight how the concept of “neighborhood schools” is doing harm to lower-income families. They also make the connection to the racist redlining policies of the past and consider policy changes that could ameliorate their negative effects.

Too often, however, highly coveted attendance zone schools escape scrutiny altogether. For example, I can find no evidence that the LA Times has ever run a story about the admissions policies of Mount Washington Elementary or Ivanhoe Elementary, two coveted schools with attendance zones that still mirror the racist redlining maps of the past (and that still exclude the vast majority of minority children in the vicinity of the school). Many other schools I highlight in my book have received only cursory or occasional coverage by local journalists.

There’s a whole genre of education writing devoted to exposing how charter schools contribute to racial segregation. But it shouldn’t be possible to write a story about the causes of school segregation without mentioning neighborhood attendance zones.

If all charter schools were banned tomorrow and those kids were sent back to their assigned schools, our urban districts would still be divided starkly along racial and economic lines. Because of attendance zones.

Above: In Nice White Parents, journalist Chana Joffe-Walt examines her own role in perpetuating neighborhood school segregation.

If these discriminatory lines are so important, why are the well-reported stories so rare?

For one thing, it requires real digging. There is no EdBuild for attendance zones. In my research, I often had to start with parent tools like GreatSchools and then follow up with calls to the school district. While districts will often have a “School Finder” tool, they very frequently choose not to publish the maps, perhaps preferring to avoid scrutiny about the placement of the lines.

What’s more, attendance zones may be public, but they are most often drawn behind closed doors. And the zone lines don’t change very often, so there are fewer opportunities for timely stories. The lines have become calcified over time. Why? School districts have learned that the parents in these zones will fight tooth and nail to avoid any changes that would lead to reductions in their property values. So, the lines are simply left alone.

I also believe that education journalists may have some unconscious biases that make them less likely to write these stories.

An anecdote: When my book came out in May, I got in touch with a local journalist who was outraged to learn that the attendance zone maps could often be traced back to the racist redlining maps of the early 20^th century. It was around the time of the George Floyd protests, and she seemed to be excited about the social-justice angle. She said she wanted to pitch stories to the Atlantic, The Week, and several other outlets.

But then she figured out that her children attend one of these elite public schools that is benefitting from the redlining maps. She suddenly got very sheepish, and I never heard from her again. She did not write any stories.

Not every journalist is as brave as Chana Joffe-Walt, who – in her podcast “Nice White Parents” – was willing to call out her own peers (and even herself) for their ongoing role in educational inequality in the public schools in Brooklyn.

Above: Education consultant and writer Tim DeRoche (center) looked at how school district lines are drawn and how they impact the education students receive. This event was hosted by Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. (May 2020 C-SPAN)

For those who do decide to take a brave look at local attendance zones, here are a few suggestions about how to start:

1. Interview a real estate agent. A good agent will be able to tell you which school zones command a premium in the market. Where are the elite, coveted public schools in your city? How much are parents willing to pay to guarantee their kid a spot in these “free” and “public” schools? What does that imply about the quality of the other nearby schools?
2. Look at the GreatSchools website. In many cases, the districts do not publish the zone maps and instead offer a “School Finder” tool that asks you to input your address. However, by using the “Neighborhood” section of GreatSchools, you can often see the attendance zone and identify failing schools that share an attendance zone boundary with an elite school. You can also compare demographics.
3. Compare the zone to the local redlining map from the 1930s. Spend some time exploring your city with the University of Richmond’s fantastic tool, Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. Do the elite school zones match up with the “desirable” areas on these maps from 80 years ago? Are people of color still excluded? Have the lines shifted? Have the demographics changed?
4. Call the school and ask about how admissions work. The school can confirm where the lines are and how important they are. One staffer at an elite school in Seattle told me that “you have to have lines” no matter how unfair they seem, because “no one would go” to the failing schools if the lines didn’t exist.
5. Use an FOIA request to go back in time. Because the existing lines were often drawn in secret many years ago, you may have to use an FOIA request to uncover information about how the lines were drawn and who influenced that process.
6. Read your district’s “Student Assignment” and “Open Enrollment” policies. The zones are frequently enforced via official policies published by the school district. Look behind the seeming banality of these policies and ask how they impact student who live outside the privileged zones. Open Enrollment policies, in particular, will often articulate high-minded goals of “openness” and “equal access” but will also set out a number of exceptions designed to protect the best schools from having to open their doors.

For those willing to do the work, there are important, compelling stories to be written about PS 8 Robert Fulton in Brooklyn, Hay Elementary in Seattle, Mary Lin Elementary in Atlanta, Lakewood Elementary in Dallas, Penn Alexander in Philadelphia, and Peralta Elementary in Oakland. These elite public schools are in every American city.

By taking a closer look at attendance zones, education writers can help show the public how seemingly banal policies have life-altering consequences for many middle-class and lower-income families. These stories are waiting to be told.