Integrating Schools in a Changing Society: New Policies and Legal Options for a Multiracial Generation

17. Federal Legislation to Promote Metropolitan Approaches to Educational and Housing Opportunity

281 ELIZABETH DEBRAY & ERICA FRANKENBERG Federal Legislation to Promote Metropolitan Approaches to Educational and Housing Opportunity In this essay, we outline a proposal for new federal legislation to create a pilot grant program in selected southern metropolitan areas designed to promote voluntary approaches to expanding access to integrated education and housing.We argue that metropolitanwide solutions are critical to ameliorating school segregation, and we propose a regional combination of housing subsidies and interdistrict school transfers. Drawing on the findings from two housing-relocation programs, the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program (a court-ordered program referred to as Gautreaux hereafter) and the Moving to Opportunity program (authorized by federal legislation), as well as the experiences of existing school-transfer programs, we describe the duration, scope, and cost of this proposed program, explain how the housing subsidies and school transfers would work together to promote opportunity, and provide suggestions for program design, incentives, administration, and evaluation.1 The Need for a Federal Program Promoting Metropolitan Integration of Housing and Education Housing and educational opportunities are inextricably intertwined. As the suburbs have drawn tax revenue and political clout away from inner-citycores, urban students’ access to higher-performing schools has become further limited .2 Ever since the Supreme Court majority in Milliken v. Bradley (1974) overlooked evidence of metrowide housing discrimination in the Detroit area, however, federal courts have treated housing segregation as natural.3 In Milliken , the Supreme Court turned away from its prior position in the 1971 Swann decision, which both authorized cross-district busing and recognized the relationship between the location of schools and residential choice. Reflecting the Court’s most recent stance, however, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued 282 ELIZABETH DEBRAY & ERICA FRANKENBERG in Freeman v. Pitts (1992) that “where resegregation is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications. It is beyond the authority and beyond the practical ability of the federal courts to try to counteract these kinds of continuous and massive demographic shifts.”4 The Supreme Court rulings in this and other school desegregation decisions during the 1990s relaxed the requirements that districts had to meet to prove they had eliminated all vestiges of segregation, in part due to judicial acceptance of housing decisions perpetuating segregation as private actions. In this climate of federal courts’ retreating from recognizing an enforceable link between school and residential segregation, we argue that it is nonetheless a vital public policy issue—perhaps even more vital after the Court’s decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (PICS, 2007)—and that it is time for federal legislation to use new policy tools to address the link. Social science research on neighborhood effects supports the benefits of low-poverty relative to high-poverty neighborhoods on various dimensions of children’s and adolescents’ well-being.5 These include benefits in mental health,6 peer-group influence and educational achievement,7 and safety.8 This literature also highlights inner-city residents’ higher poverty rates, unemployment , and spatial isolation from the mainstream economy.9 In December 2008, the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity reported that hearings across the country had revealed that housing discrimination and racial and ethnic segregation remained alive and well and are “spreading steadily into growing sectors of suburbia.”10 The commission’s report recommended regional coordination to develop plans and measurable goals for fair housing, including Section 8 (the formal name for housing choice vouchers, designed to assist families in relocating from high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhoods) and public housing.11 Further, in addition to coordinating housing and educational desegregation initiatives, any such initiative should extend beyond the boundary lines of school districts; indeed, research demonstrates the strong contribution of between-district segregation to overall segregation at the metropolitan level.12 One reason why the South has had the lowest segregation for black students until recently is the extent of countywide districts, which often encompass city and suburban areas. Since the early 1990s, however, municipalities have formed nearly 1,000 new school districts; where such fragmentation exists, declines in intradistrict segregation are offset by increasing interdistrict segregation , which particularly threatens integration in the South, where countywide districts are most widespread.13 Approximately 70 percent of school seg- FEDERAL LEGISLATION TO PROMOTE METROPOLITAN APPROACHES 283 regation in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) was a result of segregation between districts.14 Even though many governmental services are administered...