Imagine if a town wanted to have something done and instead of hiring people to do the work, it required randomly selected residents to do the work for the town. Imagine if the time requirement was at least 90 hours a year, for six years, and there was also no possibility of exemption.
Imagine if the town also required those randomly selected citizens to pay expenses for the mandatory work. The biggest cost would be a loss of time, but imagine if the amount for supplies and equipment was hundreds per year, and that expense had nothing to do with anyone’s ability to pay.
Now, imagine these burdens actually fell more heavily on low-income people and African-Americans. Imagine if women were more affected than men. Imagine if the town knew that this program would be disliked, so it only required newcomers to go through it.
Finally, imagine if the mayor of the town said the people had to work under “shared burden,” and the only thing wrong about the system was their “angst.”
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The above scenario I've given is insane. No town official would ever propose anything like it. They violate basic principles of equal treatment. People would be outraged by disparities that were less severe.
Yet the above is what the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education is doing with the Intentional Integration Initiative, where the closeness of a child’s school, and thus the child’s safety, parents’ ability to get to work, necessity to get earlycare, money spent on a car, and time spent driving is determined by a random number.
While the Superintendent Taylor and BOE have emphasized how the outcome of the algorithm is the creation of racially and socioeconomically identical schools, the question of which students attend their neighborhood school and which ones attend distant schools is determined by a random number. As consultant Michael Alves, the co-designer of the SOMSD algorithm, explained:
"Another essential feature of a diversity-conscious algorithm that includes explicit assignment priorities is a procedure for providing each newly enrolling student with a computer or randomly generated number that would be used to determine the sequencing of their assignment. Best practices recommend that each of the newly enrolling K students for the 2021-22 school year would be randomly given a specific or unique computer-generated number based on the actual number of students seeking an assignment. If this procedure were employed for the 403 K students in the 2021-22 school year database, the random numbers would range from 1 to 403, with the students’ being cued or lined-up for assignment in ascending order from the lowest to the highest number."
So a family’s fate for six years, or longer than six years if they have younger children, is determined by what number a computer spits out.
Superintendent Taylor and the Board of Education had said they wanted burdens to be shared equally, but they define a “shared burden” in terms of socioeconomic and racial groups, not the individual family that transports children. Socioeconomic and racial groups are categories of people, but they are not collective entities or organizations, and families with good placements do not volunteer to drive kids with bad placements who belong to the same SES or racial group.
Moreover, the implementation of the Intentional Integration Initiative has severe socioeconomic and racial disparities anyway. As the Year 1 Recap Report revealed, African-American and low-SES children traveled the farthest of all.
With he average low-SES child who didn’t benefit from sibling placement traveling 1.7 miles.
This is unacceptable.
Other districts that have eschewed neighborhood schools in favor of an district-wide integration system, like Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berkeley, California, and Montclair, New Jersey have robust transportation support for students who are attending school outside of their neighborhoods. These districts don’t just pay lip service to shared burdens, they walk the walk (or “bus the kids”), so that if a student is placed at a school that is difficult for their parents to take him or her to, the district provides a bus, so that the student can arrive safely, and without the parents missing work or their ability to take care of younger children. Not every family in these districts gets their first choice placement (more about that later), but no family’s placement is a logistical crisis for them either.
These districts make transportation an equalizer. In Montclair, every elementary schooler who lives more than 1.0 mile from their school gets a bus. Cambridge uses the same 1.0 mile standard for elementary schoolers, plus has several hazardous routes. Berkeley provides a bus to students who live more than 1.5 miles away.
By contrast, South Orange-Maplewood only offers a bus to students whose distance exceeds the 2.0 mile state minimum for mandated bussing, but nothing to families at 1.99 miles. Transportation is so unimportant to the administration that some of Superintendent Taylor’s presentations on the Intentional Integration Initiative do not even mention bussing/transportation. The Board's March 2022 self-praise and expansion resolution on the Intentional Integration Initiative never mentioned transportation either.
Transportation is an integral part of education, especially for economically disadvantaged children. If children do not have someone to drive them and have to walk 1-2 miles to school, their ability to learn may be harmed by fatigue, or by having had to walk in cold, rain, or slush. If the child receives a free breakfast, they may miss it. Walking a 1-2 mile distance is not safe either for elementary children without adult supervision.
Controlled Choice vs Mandatory Random Assignment
The other major contrast between South Orange-Maplewood and successful integration programs like Berkeley, Montclair, and Cambridge is that parents in those districts are involved in placement decisions, so that every child goes to a school that is right for them, whereas in South Orange-Maplewood assignment is involuntary. In Berkeley and Cambridge parents rank their top three choices and in Montclair parents rank all six elementary schools.
The SOMA Taylor-Alves Intentional Integration algorithm has no provision for parents to indicate which schools are the most logistically feasible or infeasible for them. The Intentional Integration algorithm just assumes every family’s first choice is the nearest school, second choice is the second nearest school, third choice is the third closest school. The system produces proximate placements for families who get good lottery numbers, but distant placements for those with bad lottery numbers. It does not even use real-world road distance, since distance is based on “as the crow flies” ie “Euclidean distance,” which is less relevant in SOMA than other towns because we have only a few continuous east-west streets. (See Note 13)
In Berkeley 72% of children are placed at their first choice school in the first round. In Montclair, 94% of children are. In Cambridge 80% are. In conversations I had with administrators, I was told it would be rare for a student to be placed at even their third choice school. No child would ever be placed at a school that is the most logistically difficult for the parents.
If a student in Montclair, Cambridge, or Berkeley is placed at a school that is somewhat difficult for the parents, they can sign up for the waitlist to get into a more feasible school.
By contrast, South Orange-Maplewood allows no transfers. Policy 5120, passed unanimously during the presidency of Annemarie Maini in 2020, includes this:
The Board of Education recognizes that well-intentioned efforts to accommodate families can yield unintended consequences that manifest in inequities. Accordingly, other than ELL status or special needs indicated in Individualized Education Plans or 504 Plans, the district shall make no exceptions to the district’s student assignment method.
So once placed at a school, the family is stuck there for at least six years.
Taylor himself has demonstrated a lack of empathy. “We want our families to be happy, but at the same time we cannot offer even a single exception, because that would be inequitable and against the policy of the board and also against the spirit of intentional integration.”
Taylor says this is “equity,” but placement has nothing to do with parental ability to transport kids. As mentioned above, placement of an individual child is by random number. Randomness is unpredictability, disorder, and lack of a pattern. Randomness is arbitrary action, it is not “equity.”
Even if most SOMA parents would prefer their closest school, not everyone would, especially for 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th choices. Some parents would prefer a school that is not in their neighborhood if it has an earlier or later start time. Some parents would prefer a school on their way to work, so their trip might as well be 0.0 miles. Some parents would want a distant school that came with a bus because a bus is childcare coverage, or they lack a car, or the kids are watched by an adult who cannot drive. Some parents might be neutral on some of their choices too.
Since the Ronald Taylor-Michael Alves algorithm doesn’t let parents have any input, it assigns kids to schools at bussing distance (>2.0 miles) whose parental schedule doesn’t allow using a bus, while assigning kids who are watched by a non-driving adult and who absolutely need a bus to schools that don’t provide one. Since the system never inquires about a family’s needs, it assigns kids to schools that start at 8:45 whose parents desperately need 8:05, and kids to schools that start at 8:05 whose parents’ schedules are more flexible or who want that late start.
Since South Orange-Maplewood has so many train commuters who are at the mercy of NJTransit's schedule, placing kids at schools that are 15-20 minutes from home creates greater problems than it would in a town where people drive to work, since a train-commuter parent cannot leave directly from their child's school.
If a child is assigned to an 8:45 start-time school (Marshall, Boyden, or Tuscan) that is 15-20 minutes from home, the earliest train a commuter could take would leave at 9:37 from Maplewood/9:40 from South Orange and get into New York Penn Station at 10:25 AM. Since earlycare is at capacity at every elementary school, a family in this predicament would be forced to hire a driving nanny.
Why the Board of Education went with a mandatory-assignment plan instead of the controlled choice plan hasn’t been fully explained. In 2018 and 2019 when the program was developing it seemed like we would choose a controlled choice system. The NYTimes even characterized SOMA’s effort as a “new bussing plan,” which is ironic since the Board of Education has now cut bussing.
The change from Controlled Choice to just “Control” happened suddenly in 2020. Superintendent Taylor claimed it was because choice could lead to worse segregation, like the slide below claims:
But the Harvard GSE report that comes from, as well as the Century Foundation, praise controlled choice.
Harvard GSE singles out Cambridge for praise:
Starting in the 1980s, Cambridge has been using a "controlled choice" model that takes family preferences into account while also making sure that proportions of "free and reduced lunch" and "paid lunch" at given schools reflect the district proportions. Bucking trends towards re-segregation seen elsewhere, Cambridge districts became more economically and racially integrated
As the Century Foundation, through Richard Kahlenberg, said:
Many districts are able to marry choice and integration quite successfully. In Champaign, close to 90 percent of kindergartners receive their first choice school. In Jefferson County (Louisville), the first choice placement rate is also 90 percent. The reliance on choice rather than compulsory busing in Louisville may be one explanation for the dramatic uptick in community support over the years. In the 1970s, 98 percent of suburbanites opposed the busing plan, but by 2011, 89 percent said the school district’s guidelines should “ensure that students learn with students from different races and economic backgrounds,” as Kimberly Quick and Rebecca Damante explain in a separate Century Foundation report on Louisville.
What the Harvard GSE did warn about was residential choices being segregative and vouchers being segregative, it didn't criticize the controlled choice option that was originally on the agenda in South Orange-Maplewood.
The SOMSD would say it cannot provide bussing due to budgetary reasons and there is truth to that, but there are also solutions that they are not attempting.
First, there is the solution of raising taxes for transportation. New Jersey’s tax cap law allows a district, after the vote of its electorate or Board of School Estimate, to exceed the 2.0% tax cap if the spending is for something unrelated to “core curriculum content standards,” as transportation is.
Second, there is state transportation aid available if a child travels over 2.0 miles, which is actually over $500 per student. Since state transportation aid is available if the trip is over 2.0 miles, the proximity assumption in the algorithm is a budgetary problem in addition to something that produces absurd outcomes. Since state aid makes it cheaper for the district to bus a child over 2.0 miles than 1.5 miles, distances in the 1.0-1.99 range should be avoided.
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| Note, there was no "transportation concern" utilized in planning the III unless you consider the attempt to get as many children placed as possible within the 2.0 mile radius. |
When the Intentional Integration Initiative started to develop 2018-2020 there was a lot of support and very little opposition to it, compared to what typically happens in school districts that implement integration plans that eliminate neighborhood schools. I think the lack of opposition in SOMA was because people truly supported the idea of intentional integration, but also because people expected a level of competence and empathy that Taylor and the Board of Education haven't demonstrated.
Getting the Intentional Integration Plan right requires money for transportation, a sensitive algorithm that respects parents' difficulty in managing non-neighborhood school assignments, and humility from Ronald Taylor and the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education. Right now what we have with the Intentional Integration Initiative is something to be fixed, not celebrated.
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Regina Eckert, Nubia Wilson, and Bill Gifford are the reform candidates in the 2022 SOMA BOE election. I hope SOMA people reading this vote for them.
https://www.votesomaboe22.com/
