When Imanee McCoy-Meadows was growing up in Augusta, Georgia, her mom chose to lie about her address to get her child into the best public school in town.
And it paid off. McCoy-Meadows excelled in school, went on to study industrial engineering at Morgan State University, and currently works for Procter & Gamble.
Thirty years later, McCoy-Meadows is raising four kids in Greensboro, North Carolina. And once again she finds herself on the wrong side of the lines that determine who can — and can’t — attend the best public schools.
Like many African American families did after the pandemic, she and her husband decided to homeschool their kids.
She noticed that the families in her circle chose to abandon the public schools because of “the lines,”
“Because they don’t like the schools they’re being assigned to, they opt to try something different.”
Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) confessed that, when she was a child, her family moved out of the Bronx to the suburbs of Westchester County for access to better schools.
“That’s when I got my first taste of a country,” she said, “[that] allows their kids’ destiny to be determined by the zip code that they are born in.”
The enrollment crisis in our public schools is severe, especially in major urban districts, and one key cause is that families like McCoy-Meadows’s (and Ocasio-Cortez’s) have decided that their assigned public schools are not a good fit.
In Chicago, there are 47 elementary schools operating at less than one-third capacity, according to ProPublica and Chalkbeat. Almost half of Los Angeles elementary schools — 225 in total — have seen enrollment declines greater than 50 percent.
Districts across the country — from New York to Denver to Seattle — are looking at closing public schools as their best option to respond to the crisis.
If we want to spare our children the pain of closing schools, there is another option: severing the link between your address and the public school that your children are assigned to.
Just look at the schools in New Orleans. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the city’s schools did away with “attendance zones,” the insidious lines that typically ensure that the best public schools are only available to wealthier folks who can afford homes in the priciest parts of town.
Today, test scores are up, as are high school graduation rates and college enrollment. Despite a recent downtick, New Orleans’s total enrollment is holding steady at levels of 12-13 years ago, much better than most other urban districts.
Another encouraging example: California’s community colleges.
In the 1970s and early 80s, California saw enrollment in its community colleges start to drop, especially for students on track for a four-year degree. Similar to what we’re seeing in K-12 schools now, it was a result of both declining birth rates and students making other choices.
Back then, students couldn’t just apply to any community college in the state. Instead, there was a strict geographic system: You were assigned to a community college based on where you lived.
In order to revitalize the system and make the community colleges more appealing to California students, the legislature passed a simple reform that severed the link between your address and your college assignment.
The resulting law provided for “the unrestricted enrollment and attendance of students at community colleges” and guaranteed California students “an equal opportunity to attend the community college of his or her choice.”
In the years that followed, enrollment in those schools rebounded, and the community college system is now regarded — by Californians across the political spectrum — as a jewel of the state.
It’s time to consider a similar change for our nation’s public elementary schools. In almost all cities and states, children are still assigned to public elementary schools based on where they live.
As a result, many middle-income and lower-income families find themselves boxed out of the most coveted public schools in their neighborhood: As any good real estate agent will tell you, a home in one of these coveted zones can cost up to $300,000 more than a similar home on the wrong side of the line.
Research by my organization, Available to All, has shown that many of these coveted school zones mirror the patterns of the racist redlining maps of the 1930s, meaning, those public schools are often still reserved — with the help of government policy — for a population that is predominantly wealthy and white.
What’s more, the rigid geographic system leads to perverse decisions about school closures and school boundary changes. In Tampa, a failing school in an African American neighborhood, Just Elementary, was closed, primarily because almost half of the assigned families had opted out.
After the school closed, the nearest elementary school was Gorrie Elementary, an A-rated school just a couple miles to the south.
But not a single student from Just Elementary was admitted to Gorrie, because Gorrie was already officially filled of students from wealthy families who had paid to live in the exclusive zone. Instead, the Just students were bussed to other struggling schools with lots of open seats.
In order to revitalize public schools — and to lure back families like McCoy-Meadows’s —we need to break the rigid connection between your address and your public school assignment.
If we can give middle-income and lower-income families a fair shot at enrolling in the best public schools, then it’s likely that more and more of them will consider returning to the public system.
Instead of closing our public schools, let’s open them up.
Tim DeRoche is the founder and president of Available to All, a nonpartisan watchdog that defends equal access to public schools.
