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

8. Regional Coalitions and Educational Policy: Lessons from the Nebraska Learning Community Agreement

151 JENNIFER JELLISON HOLME, SARAH L. DIEM, & KATHERINE CUMINGS MANSFIELD Regional Coalitions and Educational Policy Lessons from the Nebraska Learning Community Agreement In May 2007, Nebraska’s governor signed a law requiring 11 public school districts in the Omaha metropolitan area to form a cooperative “Learning Community .” The agreement is distinctive in that it secured the commitment of all 11 school districts across two counties in the Omaha metro area to an interdistrict choice-based socioeconomic desegregation plan without a court order. The plan is also unusual in that it is funded not through a legislative allotment (which can be politically vulnerable) but through a tax-base sharing plan.The Learning Community is governed by a regional governing council charged with implementing the agreement and overseeing the construction of new interdistrict schools of choice and early childhood centers in high-poverty communities. The governance council was established in January 2009, and the choice plan and early childhood centers will be established beginning in the 2010–11 school year. While cross-jurisdictional agreements to reduce inequality are not novel, to date few agreements have been designed explicitly to address educational inequality. Indeed, while regional equity scholars have examined the ways cross-jurisdictional collaboration on transportation, housing, and employment helps to reduce isolation for low-income families and families of color, few have paid serious attention to the potential of regional educational policy to promote opportunity for children. Regional equity experts acknowledge that schools and school districts are a keydriverof regional stratification; educational collaboratives offer an important and yet underexamined policy tool to counter these processes. This essay begins by discussing why regional agreements like the one enacted in Omaha are increasingly important as a mechanism to address stratification and segregation between districts in metropolitan areas. It then describes the features of the agreement and examines the process by which the agreement in Omaha unfolded. The essay concludes with an analysis of the 152 JENNIFER JELLISON HOLME, SARAH L. DIEM, & KATHERINE CUMINGS MANSFIELD current state of the agreement, an illustration of the fragility of such arrangements , and a discussion of policy recommendations. Toward Regional Educational Policy Characteristics of the Omaha Plan Problem Statement Although U.S. schools are more racially diverse than ever before, they are also growing increasingly segregated with African American and Latino students attending more segregated schools than at any time in the past 20 years. Poverty concentration has also worsened, as increasing numbers of students of color attend schools that have a majority of low-income students.1 While current levels of school segregation are reminiscent of the era before Brown v. Board of Education, the nature of segregation today is fundamentally different and poses a unique set of challenges for district administrators and state policy makers. Decades ago students from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds resided within the boundaries of the same school districts but were segregated into separate buildings; today, with the growth of metropolitan areas and the expansion of suburban development, students from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds are likely to reside in separate school districts entirely, resulting in high levels of “between-district” segregation.2 This between-district segregation is more severe in metropolitan areas with large numbers of school districts, where district boundaries exacerbate racial isolation and resource inequality by aggravating fiscal competition and stratification along racial and ethnic lines.3 In these metropolitan areas, urban and inner-ring suburban school districts most affected by racial segregation, poverty concentration, and dwindling resources have little power to address these issues alone. In such contexts, cooperative agreements between school districts are one of the few remaining policy tools available to reduce racial and economic isolation. As john powell observes, “The critical problems associated with the hollowing out of the urban core cannot be addressed without a regional approach.”4 Regional policies in education and in other public sectors remain few in number because they are so difficult to create. Many regional policies in the past were forged at the behest of urban politicians, who used their political power in state legislatures to force suburban cooperation.5 As a result, they have tended historically to run up against intense resistance from suburbs, which resent the loss of resources and fear the loss of political powerand iden- REGIONAL COALITIONS AND EDUCATIONAL POLICY 153 tity.6 Urban-core neighborhoods have also had reason to resist these policies, due to a fear of losing or...