How Seattle can move on schools and race

By Richard Startz
Special to The Times

The issue of race continues to bedevil decisions about which Seattle student attends which Seattle school. In recent months, the courts have ruled that race-based assignments are perfectly OK, are not allowed at all and, uh, check back with us later.

The confusing and unsatisfactory upshot is that race will not be a factor for the upcoming school year and the entire system is on hold for at least a year until the state Supreme Court can rule. This gives Seattle a chance to rethink the way it places kids in schools.

An 80/20 school-assignment plan, with 80 percent of seats assigned just as they are now and 20 percent reserved for students who cross the Lake Washington Ship Canal, will preserve racial diversity and dump racial preferences.

The trick lies in understanding Seattle's peculiar racial geography. Our geography explains much of the failure of diversity in our schools. The same geography provides a mechanism for increasing racial diversity without using racial preferences.

Seattle is much more segregated than we would like to think. A line drawn along the ship canal divides Seattle into a city that is overwhelmingly white in the north and minority in the south. And under the current school-assignment system, where you live largely determines where you go to school and whom you go to school with.

The current school-assignment system (let's stick just to high schools for simplicity) operates according to a simple rule: Students living closest to a school get first dibs on going to that school. (There are some minor exceptions for siblings and special programs.) This geographic preference determines who gets to attend Seattle's five high-demand high schools: Ballard, Nathan Hale and Roosevelt in the north, and Franklin and Garfield in the south.

While the rule has some peculiar side effects — for example, some North End students are guaranteed admission at both Hale and Roosevelt while some Queen Anne students have no shot at any of the top five — geography is generally accepted as a valid criterion for school assignments. It makes sense to give some neighborhood preference because that's what most parents want.

We can greatly increase racial diversity with a small modification to the current school-assignment system. We drop all racial preferences (avoiding an expensive and unpleasant court fight in the process) and change from a 100-percent neighborhood preference rule to an 80/20 near/far rule. Draw a line right down the center of the ship canal. Under the 80/20 plan, 80 percent of seats are allocated just as they are now. First dibs on the remaining 20 percent at each school go to kids from the opposite side of the canal. (If the 20 percent is oversubscribed, a lottery would apply.)

For the vast majority of families, nothing changes. South End (mostly minority) families who want it will get a good shot — but not a guarantee — at North End schools. North End (mostly white) families interested in Garfield's world-class music program and Advanced Placement courses will have a good — but also not guaranteed — chance.

Our current assignment system is not racially neutral — most of the desirable seats are located in white neighborhoods. So, unintentionally, white families have a better chance of getting into a high-demand school. Discrimination on the basis of race was not the intended outcome in setting up the assignment system, but discrimination is the result nonetheless.

While it makes sense to give substantial neighborhood preference, we have gotten carried away with the importance of locale and ended up giving preference based almost entirely on neighborhood.

Most Seattle parents value racially diverse schools for their children. At the same time, many Seattle citizens are uneasy with the explicit use of racial preferences in school assignments. It turns out that if we are willing to ease up on being ideologues, it's not too hard to find a pretty good solution to the question of race and school assignments.

Geography lets us pay attention to race without using race as a preference factor. Fortunately, it's not hard to do a "pretty good" job of increasing racial diversity by turning the lemon of Seattle's semi-segregated neighborhoods into lemonade.

The 80/20 plan is simple to understand, cheap to implement. We keep mostly neighborhood schools, we achieve significant racial diversity, and no student is advantaged or disadvantaged on account of his or her race.

Richard Startz is the Castor Professor of Economics and Robert & Larina Davis Distinguished Scholar at the University of Washington.

Seattle Times, August 20, 2002