After replacing an Obama-era guideline that it claimed went beyond Supreme Court precedent for race-based admissions standards with a Bush-era document, the Trump administration sparked the ire of colleges and universities concerned about diversity.
Yet, this decision potentially impacts K-12 education even more than higher education.
As neighborhoods have become more racially homogeneous, so too have the K-12 public schools within those districts. Efforts aimed at integrating schools since Brown v. Board of Education have been, and continue to be, a major challenge for public school districts across the nation.
The Obama-era document read that school districts have the liberty to “use race-neutral approaches only if they are workable.” If these are not, the document notes that “school districts may employ generalized race-based approaches.”
Thus, under the Obama-era guidelines, schools adopted various strategies to increase diversity in public schools. Two were drawing zoning lines to include racially diverse neighborhoods and pulling students into schools from different neighborhoods.
Now, however, it is questionable whether either practice could withstand a legal challenge after the Trump administration’s reversal to the previous guidelines.
Some districts, most notably those in New York City, have begun to give admissions priority to students with a lower socioeconomic status, in foster care, or affected by incarceration. Often this has the ancillary effect of increasing racial integration as many children fitting these categories are not white.
A more obvious solution to the traditional school districts’ integration problem would be to provide parents a choice over their child’s education, rather than zoning them based on zip code and then forcibly reassigning them to fit a quota. Charter schools and private schools can be more intentional about the makeup of their student body, and in states with school choice programs, parents can freely choose to enroll their children in a certain school based on its diverse population.
Thus, the unintended effect of the Trump administration’s dismissal of the Obama-era guidelines could, in fact, be a recognition that parental choice provides a solution to segregated schools.
