Attendance Zones Research Articles

Some Points on Choice in Education

The movement toward choice is the first step in a movement toward getting the incentives right in educationincentives for both the suppliers of educational services, that is, schools and their teachers, and for the consumers of education, that is, parents and children. The incentives for schools that a voucher system would introduce would include an interest in attracting and keeping the best students they could. The incentives for parents and students would include the ability to get into schools they find attractive and to remain in those schools. These incentives already exist, of course, but in the absence of choice by parents and schools, they can be implemented only by moving. That is, parents can implement their interests by moving to a school district or attendance zone within their financial reach that they find most attractive. Principals and teachers can implement their interests only by trying to get transferred to a school with a student body that is more to their liking. The results are unfortunate in several respects. For both the schools and the parents and child, an important incentive to improve is missing: The school cannot attract students by improving itself and cannot dismiss students who do not live up to its standards, and the student and parents have no incentive to perform and behave well for the student to be in the school they aspire to. This absence of appropriate incentives on both sides of the educational process means that an important source of educational improvement is missing. A second consequence of the absence of choice in education is that there is extensive stratification of schools, but unlike the comparison used by Astin of Caltech and low-status colleges, this stratification is based entirely on income and race. For example, the incomes of parents of children at New Trier High School in a wealthy Chicago suburb differ far more from those at Chicago's inner-city Dunbar High School than do those at the most selective colleges from those at the least selective. The result of choice in elementary and secondary education, whether confined to the public sector or including the private sector through vouchers, would not be to increase stratification; it would be to replace the current stratification by income and race by a stratification based on students' performance and behavior. To be sure, students' performance and behavior are correlated with income and race, but they are a different basis for stratification that both changes the grounds on which the competition for schools and students takes place and reduces the stratification by income and race. To use an example introduced by Astin, the top students at the selective Bronx High School of Science in New York City (as well as the student body as a whole) are far more diverse in income and race than are the top students (or all students) at New Trier High School or any other suburban school in North Shore Chicago. (I use Chicago-area schools as an example because I am familiar with them, but nearly comparable stratification can be found in almost any large metropolitan area in the United States.) It is perhaps time to be straightforward about stratification among schools more generally. Numerous scholars inveigh against choice on grounds of inequality or stratification, as does Astin.

Economic issues involving property rights to school attendance

A system of separable and transferable property rights to attend a particular public school would allow families to buy into a better public school without having to buy a house in the local attendance zone for a particular school. Transferable property rights to education should lead to increased competition among schools for students, and increase the accountability of schools to their customer base. Under such a system, some schools may focus on a college preparatory approach. Other schools may focus on a job skill approach to encourage students to remain in school. In either case, the quality of the particular type of education offered should improve.

Demographic change, attendance area adjustment and school system impacts

In the extensive litigation over school board liability for segregated schools, a great deal of attention has been focused on changes in school attendance areas. Evidence presented in several trials suggested that school boards have gerrymandered boundaries to keep some schools “black” and others “white.” Even though both district and appeal courts have found violations in attendance zone changes, there has been little other than anecodotal evidence to support these findings. In many cases the areas with the most changes in attendance boundaries are also the areas of rapid racial transition, but correlation does not necessarily mean causation. This case study examines boundary changes in Topeka and suggests that racial change in schools is more directly attributable to demographic shifts than to attendance boundary changes.

Dilatant Center‐Crack Tip Interaction Effects

In this paper we consider the toughening effects of a collection of discrete particles, acting as dilatant centers, in the vicinity of a crack tip. The results are compared with those of continuum treatments in which the material is treated as a homogeneous continuum with a constitutive relation that mimics the macroscopic constitutive behavior of the material containing discrete, transformable particles. In terms of the force on the crack tip, J, there is no difference between the predictions of the two approaches but, in terms of R, the energy dissipation rate, additional terms emerge in the discretized picture. The additional terms are associated with the supply of interaction energy between the crack tip and transformed particle as the crack tip and its attendant zone of transformed particles advance and due to far‐field contributions.

The kinetic energy budget over the West Pacific during dominant trade wind and active monsoon regimes

From upper-air network data and NMC tropical wind analyses over the West Pacific . during July 1972 and July 1975, the kinetic energy balance in large-scale disturbances and in the general flow of the tropical circulation was calculated. During July 1972, when an active monsoon and its attendant intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) dominated much of the tropical West Pacific and five typhoons and a depression formed in the area under study, cross-isobaric generation of the eddy kinetic energy took place in the upper (300 to 100 mb) and lower troposphere (1000 to 700 mb), with weak dissipation at middle levels. The total amount of eddy kinetic energy produced in the area during July 1972 was five times greater than during July 1975, when strong southeast trade winds prevailed over most of the West Pacific and no typhoons formed in that area. In the 1972 case, a significant portion of the generated eddy kinetic energy was exported out of the region, whereas in the 1975 case the area imported a considerable amount of eddy kinetic energy to compensate for dissipation mainly in the upper troposphere. For the month with an active monsoon regime the eddy conversion from available potential to kinetic energy, -[ω*α*], was large, with a maximum in the layer 500 to 200 mb, due to the strong convective warming, whereas for the month with a prevailing trade-wind regime only weak positive eddy conversion (increase of eddy kinetic energy) took place in the lower troposphere, with a considerable portion of the troposphere being dominated by negative eddy conversion.

Changes in City and Suburban House Prices during a Period of Expected School Desegregation

During the last decade the courts have given attention to public school segregation which results from residential segregation. The precedent was established that when the past actions of school authorities in drawing attendance zones served to create or maintain school segregation, desegregation plans using busing could be imposed as a remedy.' At the same time, neighboring suburbs with their own school systems have not been included in the desegregation plans of affected cities, thus creating the option of moving to the suburbs in order to avoid busing.2 This paper reports on a study of house prices in Columbus, Ohio and neighboring suburbs during a period of increasingly imminent school desegregation. Most research on desegregation has examined changes in enrollment patterns; such a focus yields only an indication of relative shifts in demand for housing. This study directly observed changes in house prices. The study used Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data on 5888 sales between May and August for the years 1975 through 1979. Year to year comparisons were made which matched six suburbs to contiguous city neighborhoods which have similar types of housing. The purpose of the study was to determine the size of any change in the ratio of city to suburban house price differentials and the timing of those changes with respect to major events in the desegregation process. Year to year changes in the ratio of suburban to city house prices can be expected given a relative increase in demand for suburban houses and a housing supply which is inelastic in the short run. Following a typical capitalization argument, suburban and city house prices should in equilibrium adjust to expected school desegregation such that at the margin households are once again indifferent between a suburban or city location. It was hypothesized that the greatest capitalization impact of expected desegregation would be concentrated upon large houses (defined to be houses with four or more bed* I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Ohio Board of Realtors. The research has benefited

Housing, Schools, and Incremental Segregative Effects

Racial segregation in housing contributes to racial segregation in schools, and racially identifiable schools contribute to the development and maintenance of segregated neighborhoods. Examination of the reciprocal interplay between housing and school segregation has been spurred by the Supreme Court's decision in the Dayton school case, which calls for determination of how much incremental segregative effect the discriminatory actions of a school board had on the racial distribution of pupils compared to what the distribution would have been if the board had never practised discrimination. In recent hearings in the Milwaukee school case, plaintiffs sought to address this specific question through the testimony of a social scientist. Discriminatory actions with respect to teacher assignment, "intact busing," student transfers, school plant utilization, and attendance zone boundary changes were identified as having pervasive and enduring effects on racial residential segregation in Milwaukee. This case study illustrates that the Supreme Court's effort to construe school cases narrowly should fail, and that policymakers, whether they are concerned with housing, schools, or other domains, should cultivate a broad perspective on the unity of the nation's racial problems.

On the dynamics and climatology of surface flow over the Equatorial oceans

The surface circulation over the Equatorial Atlantic and Eastern Pacific is investigated using 60-year average ship data with a one-degree square resolution. At the height of the Northern summer, a zonally oriented speed maximum extends across the Eastern part of the oceans at about 4–5 N, near where the cross-equatorial flow recurves from Southeast to Southwest. This separates a band of strong divergence immediately to the North of the Equator from the convergence belt further poleward. Strongest convergence occurs about 350 km South of the confluence between Northern and Southern Hemisphere trades, and within a region of high directional steadiness of wind. A negative wind stress curl induces upwelling and low sea surface temperature immediately South of the Equator, and downwelling to the North. In most of the Northeast trades and the Southeast trades of the Southern Hemisphere during July–August, frictional energy dissipation not offset by cross-isobaric flow produces a gradual slowing of the current and downstream convergence. As the Southern Hemisphere trades flow North from the Equator over the Eastern part of the oceans, the Coriolis acceleration increases acting to the right, enhancing the cross-isobaric angle and resulting in net kinetic energy generation, the aforementioned speed maximum and attendant zone of strong divergence. Continuation of this Coriolis effect recurves the flow from Southeast to Southwest, which further downstream diminishes the cross-isobaric angle, thus impairing kinetic energy generation and resulting in a band of maximum convergence. A positive relation is found between the latitude of the discontinuity separating Northern and Southern Hemisphere trades and the latitude and intensity of the zonally oriented convergence/divergence bands, both seasonally and on a year-to-year basis. DOI: 10.1111/j.2153-3490.1978.tb00859.x

Democracy, courts, and the schools

James P. Shaver Professor and Associate Dean for Research College of Education Utah State University Logan, Utah The role of the courts in our democratic society is a topic that should be of interest to every teacher and administrator. Perhaps the most obvious reason for concern is the substantial potential of the courts for influencing school policy and practices. The exertion of judicial power became particularly salient for many professional educators, as well as the lay public, with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the now famous Brown case' that racial segregation in public schools denies the equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and is, therefore, unconstitutional. The Court's follow-up decision2 on the implementation of Brown gave the U.S. District Courts broad discretion in evaluating and approving remedies for the school segregation complaints brought before them. And an extensive series of cases dealing with desegregation plans has followed, involving remedies such as modifying attendance zones, busing students, and merging school districts, all considered with an eye to the educational risks or benefits for children.3 Litigation about other educational matters for example, school finance,4 the need for bilingual instruction,5 and the obligation of school districts to provide education for handicapped children6 has also had widespread implications for schooling. Nevertheless, there is some evidence (e.g., Zirkel, 1978) that school leaders often lack knowledge of school-relevant court decisions. It might appear from the selected cases mentioned above that matters involving school policy have been before the courts only in recent years. But the adjudication of school-related policy issues is not a recent phenomenon. The Massachusetts courts decided in 18507 that it was not, on the face of it, unreasonable for the Boston School Committee to segregate schools by the race. The famous Tennessee Monkey (Scopes) Trial was held in 1925. The concern of the U.S. Supreme Court with the denial of students' civil rights was evidenced some 35 years ago in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. 8 In that decision, the Court held that an attempt to force a student to participate in saluting the American flag was a denial of First Amendment

On the dynamics and climatology of surface flow over the Equatorial Oceans

The surface circulation over the Equatorial Atlantic and Eastern Pacific is investigated using 60-year average ship data with a one-degree square resolution. At the height of the Northern summer, a zonally oriented speed maximum extends across the Eastern part of the oceans at about 4–5 N, near where the cross-equatorial flow recurves from Southeast to Southwest. This separates a band of strong divergence immediately to the North of the Equator from the convergence belt further poleward. Strongest convergence occurs about 350 km South of the confluence between Northern and Southern Hemisphere trades, and within a region of high directional steadiness of wind. A negative wind stress curl induces upwelling and low sea surface temperature immediately South of the Equator, and downwelling to the North. In most of the Northeast trades and the Southeast trades of the Southern Hemisphere during July–August, frictional energy dissipation not offset by cross-isobaric flow produces a gradual slowing of the current and downstream convergence. As the Southern Hemisphere trades flow North from the Equator over the Eastern part of the oceans, the Coriolis acceleration increases acting to the right, enhancing the cross-isobaric angle and resulting in net kinetic energy generation, the aforementioned speed maximum and attendant zone of strong divergence. Continuation of this Coriolis effect recurves the flow from Southeast to Southwest, which further downstream diminishes the cross-isobaric angle, thus impairing kinetic energy generation and resulting in a band of maximum convergence. A positive relation is found between the latitude of the discontinuity separating Northern and Southern Hemisphere trades and the latitude and intensity of the zonally oriented convergence/divergence bands, both seasonally and on a year-to-year basis. DOI: 10.1111/j.2153-3490.1978.tb00859.x

Isolation of Negro Students in Integrated Public Schools

In a recent report the United States Commission on Civil Rights clearly documented the persistent problem of racial isolation in the public schools.1 Isolation, as presented in the Commission Report, is merely another way of saying that the public schools, some thirteen years after the Brown decision, are in many instances still segregated by race. Some of the more fundamental causes of racial isolation, as stated by the Commission, are: disparity in income between the white and Negro races, discriminatory practices in housing leading to residential segregation, the flight of white citizens to the suburbs, the traditional practice of basing school enrollment on residence in attendance zones and the unwillingness of some school officials to take effective steps to relieve the problem.2

The Supreme Court and Racially Imbalanced Public Schools in 1967

It is a central fact of recent history that in 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States declared legally required (de jure) public school racial segregation contrary to the Constitution.1 But the Court also said in the same opinion that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.2 Was the Court saying that persons attending schools which were all-Negro or predominantly Negro as a result of housing patterns and attendance zones (racially imbalanced or de facto segregated) in the non-South had a constitutional right to attend school with whites? Since 1954 the Court has written a number of opinions clarifying its views on the composition of pupil populations in Southern schools,3 but it has failed to enlighten us as to its position on racial imbalance. It is proper to call this a failure, because the Court has had ample opportunity. Beginning in 1956 the Court has refused to review a number of lower court decisions dealing with racially imbalanced schools in non-Soutlern states.4 Such a refusal theoretically

Constitutional Law. Equal Protection of the Laws. Statute Requiring Redrawing of School Attendance Zones to Achieve Racial Balance Violates Equal Protection Clause of Fourteenth Amendment. Tometz v. Board of Educ., No. 40292 (Ill. Sup. Ct. June 22, 1967), Summarized in 36 U. S. L. W. 2011 (July 4, 1967)

Constitutional Law. Equal Protection of the Laws. Statute Requiring Redrawing of School Attendance Zones to Achieve Racial Balance Violates Equal Protection Clause of Fourteenth Amendment. Tometz v. Board of Educ., No. 40292 (Ill. Sup. Ct. June 22, 1967), Summarized in 36 U. S. L. W. 2011 (July 4, 1967)