Fragmenting of Our Neighborhoods by School Choice

My View

Debate continues to rage on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of parental choice in K-12 education. Regardless of where you stand on the issue of school choice, there are real, negative effects on sending and receiving schools and societal implications for the local communities extending well beyond what the policy set out to do.

We’ve been dealing with the impact of choice in Michigan since 1996. Competition for students has been engineered by design to allocate funding to school districts based on the number of students in attendance. The competition is intended to improve the academic performance of students and raise the quality of academic programs in the public schools. However, with the power of choice in the hands of parents and students as individuals, a social experiment is eroding the sense of community.

In the 2015-16 school year, just over 30 percent of the resident students in the Holland Public Schools elected to attend either a school outside of our district’s boundaries or one of two charter schools located within our 17-square-mile district. This is on top of the families with children who attend one of two prominent faith-based schools in the attendance area. The end result — a public school district more segregated by ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, language and academic needs, all placing additional strain on the system.

Harmful Findings

As part of my doctoral dissertation thesis, I studied the impact of school choice in my local community. Two tragic findings emerged that I am highlighting here. These extended beyond the scope of my original research question.

First, relationships between families that exercise choice and those families that do not, within the same neighborhood, often become conflicted. In some cases, families even have accused each other of exercising bad parenting by staying in their local neighborhood school. This is more prevalent if the neighborhood school is perceived as failing. Even today, parents involved in this 12-year-old study reported that they still do not talk to parents who made different choices back in 2003.

Second, families attending different schools within their neighborhood leads to a lack of social and community engagement that carries over into the school system. In some local neighborhoods, there are cul-de-sacs with a dozen homes where families send their children to nearly as many different schools. Parents do not volunteer together, serve on the same parent-teacher organizations, car-pool or participate in the same school-related extracurricular activities.

In addition, I’ve sensed a new lack of trust or feelings of safety among neighbors. When children do not attend the same schools and parents do not know one another, children are less likely to participate together in neighborhood play. You may simply not know the family four houses down the block. Students who are not learning together are not playing together, and families are not growing together.

Entitlement’s Effects

As school choice policies become more commonplace and gain greater political traction across the country, public school leaders will need to make special efforts to build a sense of community and to engage parents in different ways. As communities become more fragmented, local schools will follow.

I often wonder if those who penned the original concepts of school choice or those who have successfully changed policy to expand schools of choice in recent years ever considered the social implications. Local neighborhoods similar to Holland are being affected negatively. As more families abandon their neighborhood schools, I am left wondering about the impact of entitlement and personal aspiration on the state of democracy and community. This is a social policy experiment with devastating effects that will take a generation or longer to undo.