Five years ago, the Jefferson County board of education flirted with a new idea for integrating the district's 150 public schools — one that factored in family income as well as race.
It was an attempt to eliminate high-poverty schools. But board members quickly dismissed it, deciding they didn't want to tinker with their current plan.
Now, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down the county's desegregation plan is forcing the district to look at other options for assigning students to schools — including plans based on students' family income.
"It may be one of the few ways" to effectively maintain diversity, said school board member Steve Imhoff, who proposed income-based assignments in 2002. "At the time people thought, `Why change something that's working,' but now we've got to do something else."
Thursday's Supreme Court decision sharply limiting the use of race to integrate schools has many districts scrambling to find new ways of assigning students, with income-based plans getting new attention nationally as a way to help maintain diversity.
And a new national study by the Century Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says that income-based or socioeconomic plans can help keep schools integrated — depending on how the plans are implemented.
...About 40 U.S. districts serving more than 2 million students already use socioeconomic assignment plans.
...such plans might be hard to manage, partly because families' income levels change.
...said those plans are less effective in districts where most students are middle class.
...it could work in such districts so that no schools surpass 75percent subsidized-lunch enrollment, the point at which "schools tend to go downhill pretty fast."
This from the Courier-Journal.
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