Good schools are good?

Parking is the third rail of urbanism discourse in America. Even in cities like New York and Chicago the conversation around limiting convenience and access for drivers can be heated and draw extreme reactions.

But there is another third rail, one that’s more nuanced, gets very little discourse, and oftentimes isn’t even considered within the discourse of urbanism dialogue: schools. And as I risk getting cancelled, shot, or my own personal nightmare of being run over by a truck for weighing in on this topic, I’ll start with the caveat that I don’t have kids so I am swerving out of my lane (car analogy womp womp), but I did go to school, so I’ve got that going for me!

I will also add the disclaimer that my personal belief, and I’m not sure if there’s a data-driven way to make this argument, is that poor performing schools are a symptom of, and not a cause of, the economic and social segregation we suffer from in America. We can pour money into fancy STEM centers, try to carve out new charter schools in poor performing areas, and built the most ridiculous sports complexes the world has ever known, but at the end of the day the best predictor of the outcome for a child is the socio-economic status of their parents.

And because of how we plan, zone, and manage our communities in America, those of lower socio-economic status end up concentrated in pockets…historically in the urban cores of our cities, hemmed in by governmental, and also school boundaries. And thus we weave the two topics together.

Segregation has always been at the core of American values. Hell we basically fought a war over it! And once that war was over and segregation by enslavement was ended, the next strategies were developed - Jim Crow laws: codified ways of maintaining separation by race and thus also by class. And as those began laws began to fall, and generations of African Americans began pulling themselves up into higher income brackets and daring to do such audacious things like buy homes next to white people, we invented another segregator - the red line.

But even redlining was no match for progress, and so the segregationists invented their most devious tool yet: Zoning. And even more specifically - single family zoning. Now, building a detached single family house is not in itself a racist act. But zoning your community so that it’s the only thing you can legally build - that is deeply rooted in racism.

Zoning is the most powerful tool in the modern racist’s tool kit, and one that can slice and dice all while no one utters a peep. Can’t use racial covenants to keep black people out of your neighborhood? Just invent a zoning code and minimum lot size requirements so that only upper middle class and wealthy whites can move in. Don’t want poor and minorities walking around your community? Litter your whole city with single family zoning and defund public transportation so that only those who can afford a car can access your neighborhood.

A house. A two car garage. A neighborhood full of white people. It’s the American dream.

Ok this is pretty wild rant for a post that was supposed to be about schools you’re saying?

Well really it’s a post about segregation, and how our zoning code and transportation policies, combined with that American desire to seek segregation for our families away from potential undesirable elements of our community, leads to our segregated communities, leads to our ever expanding sprawl, and a continuous search to escape those we’re leaving behind.

The suburban sprawl loop comes in waves of about 40-50 years of growth and expansion, and then a 40-50 year cycle of stagnation and disinvestment. At least that’s how I think it’s going to play out. We’re just beginning the first phase of the early decades of sprawl witnessing their entrance into the disinvestment phase.

The house, neighborhood, and school I went to provide a telling example. I grew up in a house built in 1959, a new suburban style development on the north end of Des Moines, totally inaccessible to most places unless you drove. There were new schools being constructed all over, and my high school (Hoover High go Huskies!) opened in 1967. (the fact that my high school was named for a President who is most known for leading us into the Great Depression probably should have been heralded as a pretty ominous sign)

When I attended from 1999-2003 it was a middle performing city school, losing students to the then expanding western suburban schools of Urbandale, Johnston and Valley (West Des Moines, Clive & Windsor Heights), just beyond the borders that were earlier in their investment cycle. I’m not sure the minority % or free and reduced lunch % at that time, but I would estimate it was approximately 40% minority and maybe 50-60% free and reduced? I’ll be using these numbers as proxies for “poor kids” through my narrative.

Growing up there were plenty of signs that we were in the back half of the growth cycle (I assure you I was paying absolutely no attention to that back then). Several feeder elementary to my high school had long since shuddered, and high school class size was trending down. This was due not only to the newer shinier schools attracting prospective parents in the metro, but also because the neighborhood had been planned and built for one massive generation of families to move in and raise kids. Most of those kids had since been raised and shuffled out the door, but many of the parents still continued to live in the neighborhood as empty nesters.

In 2023 my area of town is now well into its disinvestment phase, and my high school currently has 77% minority student population and 80% free and reduced lunch. For reference the statewide average in Iowa is 26% minority and 41% free and reduced lunch.

Now I don’t consider having minority and free and reduced lunch eligible students a bad thing, in fact we were always proud of the diversity of our school growing up, even when it was whiter than it is today.

But you know who does consider it a bad thing? School rating websites.

Now they don’t come out an say it, it’s tracked by other metrics like math and reading test scores, graduation rates, lots of other “race blind” metrics. But the correlation is there. Hoover High my alma mater is a 2/10 on Publicschoolreivew.com. North High where my grandparents went to school? It’s a 1/10. It’s a bad school. At least in my interpretation of how a 1/10 should be viewed, but I only attended a 2/10 school (actually it was probably a 4 or 5 back then).

And you might ask, who is to say that Publicschoolreview.com is right? It doesn’t matter if they are right or wrong, what matters is that it’s what comes up near the top of google search when you look up high schools, and so it’s what parents see.

It took Hoover about 50 years to go from a 10/10 (presumably) to a 2/10 - in what we can easily call our city’s failed attempt at trying to be a sprawling suburb.

Bad schools are bad. But are good schools good?

On the outskirts of the metro we have our new super-suburbs just starting a new growth and investment cycle, most notably Waukee and Ankeny. With ever expanding populations and tons of easily permitted new single family homes they’re building schools at a rapid clip….the same way my neighborhood did 75 years ago. Aspirational families are moving there in droves “for the schools”, trying to escape the poverty of our older communities both literally and figuratively. And those schools? Both Ankeny schools are 10/10. Waukee High somehow is only a 9 (which frankly, I feel Wautuckians you guys should file a complaint!) and their sparkling new school Northwest doesn’t even have a rating yet. What parent wouldn’t want that experience for their children?

Now the reality is those schools can offer a lot of opportunities to children because in the end it all comes down to money….but so much of the outcomes of these students is already pre-determined by their parents being who they are. Yes wanting to provide the best possible educational experience for your children is a good thing, but the fact that you have the means and capacity to do that is more important than the actual educational experience itself.

And thus we have it: parents wanting to do the right thing by pursuing the best education for their kids, and moving to a new sprawling community building lots of schools and houses all at once, starting a new cycle of investment and growth.

For those who didn’t take stats that li’l R2 number means 95% of a schools rating can be explained by how many poor kids attend it. “Good Schools” simply mean ones that don’t have many poor kids.

But eventually the cycle turns, and when the growth train ends, it can flip quite rapidly. I look now at Urbandale, the old suburban rival to my school just to the west, a city and district that is desperately trying to keep the growth cycle going a little bit longer. Compared to the other newer shinier schools Urbandale has a growing minority population (good!) but a sinking rating (7/10 less good!), and a stagnating student population. Urbandale is where my neighborhood was maybe 5-10 years before I started at Hoover, and we only have to look at my neighborhood today to know where the current trajectory will send it.

I can’t blame parents for wanting the best for their children, and in the unfortunate chance that a child doesn’t turn out to have the life that the parents expected for them…at least if you send them to a 10/10 school then you can tell yourself you did everything possible. If they go to a 7/10 school, or a 2/10 school, maybe that was the cause of everything? Statistically the answer is no, but parental emotions absolutely do not care about that.

What this leaves us with is the American super cycle of investment and dis-investment in our communities. A community goes up for 40-50 years, then stagnates for 10 or so, then begins a cycle of disinvestment. The post war years have witnessed the decline of the core American city, but as they begin a new cycle of reinvestment, at least in the urban areas that offer some of the now en vogue amenities like transit, walkability and an interconnected urban fabric, the cycle is shifting again, and our inner ring suburbs begin their cycles of disinvestment.

This lovely Urbandale listing conveniently hit my inbox this week.

As we continue our path with no changes to how we plan and build our communities, the next 50 years will see the disinvestment cycle for inner ring suburbs like Urbandale, Clive and even West Des Moines. And then 50 years from now Waukee and Ankeny will begin their disinvestment cycles, as the money and development plows up farmland in new communities across central Iowa, always hunting for new good schools with no poor kids in them.

It’s this core American value of segregation that I want to break. I want to end these investment/disinvestment super cycles and instead just build communities that everyone can live in for generations, and continually invest in, and update, and modernize as we go. Part of that is changing how we plan and build our communities, and part of that is changing how we split our educational opportunities into the haves and have nots, the 1/10s and the 10/10s. I’m not sure how to do that from an educational side, but I sure know there’s better ways to do it from a planning, land use, and transportation side, which is my lane (car analogy again womp womp).

I know that the 10/10 good schools are good.

But to make 10/10 schools you have to make 1/10 schools too.

So maybe, if we stop fueling and enabling the relentless sprawl for good schools, and thereby stop also creating bad schools, our schools can go back to just being….schools.

And our communities can be places for everyone, and we know there’s benefit to that.