School board agenda for April 11

Some of the items on the board’s agenda this week:

We’ll start the meeting by holding “public hearings” on the proposed certified budget for fiscal year 2018 and the Shimek playground renovation proposal. (At our last meeting, the board approved the purchase of the playground equipment; this hearing is about the renovation work itself.) Members of the public will have the opportunity to speak and to ask questions about those topics. I posted about the Shimek playground proposal here.

We’ll vote on adopting the certified budget, which we have to submit to the state by April 15. (More detailed information here.) At our last meeting, I pointed out that it didn’t make much sense to schedule the public hearing on the certified budget on the same night that we have to vote on it, since we’d have no time to incorporate any feedback we receive at the hearing. In other words, the board seems to treat these public hearings (and arguably the entire budget-setting process) as perfunctory. In the future, I’d like to see the board take a meaningful look at how it’s allocating the district’s resources and whether it reflects our real priorities; that should involve consideration of community input, too—all well in advance of the state deadline for budget certification.

We may vote on bond proposal language to appear on the ballot in September; it’s not clear whether the final proposal will be ready this week, or whether we’ll continue to discuss the proposal at our work session and then schedule a vote for the next board meeting.

We’ll hear updates on special education and on the legislative session.

We’ll review proposed amendments to our board ends policies (here and here), to some of our policies directed at students, and to the charter for our Education Committee board committees. (UPDATE: The item about the committee charters has been removed from the agenda and sent back to committee for further consideration.)

At our work session, we’ll discuss the facilities master plan, the bond proposal, and our future use of the ThoughtExchange platform. Previous post on ThoughtExchange here.

All that and more! The full agendas are here and here. Feel free to chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

School board agenda for Tuesday, January 10

This week, among other things, the board will hear an update on the district’s progress on the issue of seclusion enclosures (previous posts here and here), we’ll hear an update about state legislative issues that affect the schools, and we’ll consider whether to adopt the latest version of the draft policy articulating the district’s weighted resource allocation model—that is, its effort to funnel more resources toward higher-need schools.

At the work session, we’ll discuss how to go forward with the plans to ask the voters for bonding authority to fund projects in the district’s facilities master plan. (Info here.) The board chair, Chris Lynch, has proposed that we initially ask for authority only for projects in the first two or three years of the plan, which would mean asking the voters to authorize about $75-95 million in bonds. The remaining projects could be funded either by subsequent bond votes or via the SAVE tax if the legislature eventually extends that tax.

The board will also discuss whether there should be changes in the facilities plan as we consider what an initial bond proposal would include. A (presumably non-exhaustive) list of potential topics appears here.

The full meeting agendas are here and here; please chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

How should we determine the target enrollment for an elementary school?

I’ve been posting about how small schools tend to generate outlier class sizes. These posts naturally raise the question: What can we do to minimize the likelihood of outlier class sizes in small schools? But they also raise another question: How should we determine how many kids it makes sense to enroll in any particular elementary school building? In this post, I want to consider the latter question.

When the district draws attendance zones—or even if it abandons geographic attendance zones and tries something like a magnet school—it can’t avoid setting target enrollment numbers for the buildings. There is a wishful-thinking aspect to that task, since it’s hard to predict how many kids will show up from year to year. But it’s an unavoidable task. It affects not just how we draw attendance zones but also how we assess whether to build new elementary capacity.

In determining the target enrollment for a particular building, we need to assume that there will be a roughly equal number of kids in each grade level. We all know this assumption is false, and that there will sometimes be a lot of variation in the enrollment in different grades. But that variation is arbitrary and unpredictable, so you can’t plan around it. So I don’t see any alternative to assuming equal enrollment in each grade level (while recognizing that unpredictable departures from that assumption will be the norm).

Our district has assigned “capacity” numbers to its buildings. In the past, it did so by simply multiplying the number of classrooms by a typical class size (in those days, 23). More recently, it used consultants to assign capacity numbers based on square footage and other factors. But neither one of those methods gives us a good sense of what the target enrollment should be. It doesn’t always make sense to use every available room as a general education classroom, and any enrollment target has to be realistic about what class sizes the district can afford to staff.

An example: In my previous post, I argued that in a school with fourteen available classrooms, the highest number of students you could enroll, without exceeding the class size goals, is 364.  But what if there are sixteen available classrooms?  Shouldn’t that mean that you could enroll more kids?  But it doesn’t, because there’s no way to spread seven grades over sixteen rooms without creating very problematic class sizes.  In that situation, I believe the fourteen-classroom model is still your best option (subject to alternatives I’ll soon discuss).  So the presence of those extra two classrooms doesn’t necessarily increase the number of gen-ed kids you can reasonably aspire to enroll.  It may well make sense to put those two extra rooms to some other use, such as preschool classrooms or dedicated special ed rooms.

In other words, there’s a difference between how many kids will “fit” in a building and what the target enrollment should be. I don’t have a strong opinion about what the optimal numbers are; if you think there’s a better number to shoot for in a building with fourteen (or sixteen) available classrooms, I hope you’ll chime in with a comment. But many of our current “capacity” numbers are very unhelpful. Mann’s listed capacity is 242—but what is the model for dividing 242 up into classes in seven grade levels? Alexander’s listed capacity is 500—but we put temporaries there as soon as the enrollment approached 400, in part because it qualifies for smaller class sizes as a high-need school. “Old” Hoover’s capacity is listed as 304—but since it can easily use fourteen rooms as gen-ed classrooms, it would make sense to put at least 350 kids there. (Before the closure vote, it did enroll that many.) We have special-use classrooms at many schools, but we don’t adjust those schools’ capacity numbers to take into account the unavailability of those rooms. The list goes on.

Our entire facilities plan, involving multi-million dollar projects, is driven by the district’s capacity numbers, but many of them do not accurately reflect how we can and will use our buildings. The district needs to develop a target enrollment number for each building that depends not just on the size of the building or the number of classrooms, but on a plan for how the rooms will actually be used and how the grades will (ideally) be distributed among them—a plan that tries to minimize the chance of outlier class sizes.

A class size math problem, part 2

A few weeks ago, I posted a “class size math problem” to illustrate how small elementary schools tend to generate outlier class sizes. The post received a lot of good comments—but nobody did the math problem! Specifically, the question was how many students you’d want to assign to a school that had ten (or, alternatively, fourteen) general education classrooms, and what the class sizes would be in each grade. The one constraint was that you had to assume that there would be a roughly equal number of kids in each grade level.

One purpose of the experiment was to show that it’s hard, in small schools, to have class sizes that stay in the neighborhood of the district’s class size goals. The goals, for most schools, are not to exceed 26 kids in grades K-2 and 30 kids in grades 3-6. We don’t want class sizes to exceed those goals, but if class sizes are too far below them, they undermine the district’s attempt to reallocate resources to higher-need schools. (More complete explanation here.)

Without mixing grade levels, this was the closest I could come to the class size goals, without exceeding them, in the ten-classroom school:

As you can see, many of the classes are very small—way below the district goal for grades K-2. That puts upward pressure on class sizes elsewhere and makes it harder to redirect resources to higher-need schools.

In the fourteen-classroom school, this was the closest I could come to the goals without exceeding them:

This school is significantly fairer to the district’s other schools, since its average class size is closer to the district-wide medians. It does less to undermine the district’s efforts to reallocate resources to higher-need schools. It accommodates a lot more kids. You could make those early-grade class sizes smaller—I’m sure many people would balk at the idea of a 26-kid kindergarten class—but only if you’re willing to live with smaller class sizes in the higher grades, too. As the upper-grade class sizes fall farther below the goals, class sizes elsewhere in the district would have to rise.

These scenarios assume an equal number of kids in each grade level. In reality, there is often a lot of variation in enrollment in the different grades. That’s a big part of what makes class sizes hard to manage in small schools. It’s actually hard to get much closer to the district goals than the “ideal” fourteen-classroom school, but the great advantage of larger schools is in their ability to handle that anomalous year-to-year variation, since they can spread the effects out over a greater number of classrooms.

In my next few posts, I’ll consider alternatives (such as mixed grades, paired schools, and the use of half-time teachers) that can help alleviate the class size issue in small schools.

A class size math problem

In my last post, I discussed how smaller elementary schools tend to generate more outlier class sizes. Before I explore possible ways to mitigate that problem, here are a couple of hypothetical questions that help illustrate the issue:

1. Suppose you have a school that has fourteen rooms available as general education classrooms. What would be ideal total enrollment at that school? What would the individual class sizes be?

2. Suppose you have a school that has ten rooms available for general education classrooms. What would be ideal total enrollment at that school? What would the individual class sizes be?

I chose fourteen classrooms and ten classrooms because those numbers work especially well for class size. In a fourteen-room school, you can have two classrooms for each grade level from K through 6. In a ten-room school, you can have two classrooms in each grade from K through 2 (where we usually try to have smaller class sizes), and then one classroom in each grade from 3-6 (where we usually tolerate larger class sizes).

The only constraint: You have to assume there will be an equal number of students at each grade level. So if there are 30 total sixth graders, there are also 30 total kindergartners, though you’re free to split some grade levels into multiple classrooms while not splitting others. (The reason for this constraint is that there is no good way to draw attendance zones that would result in consistently different enrollment totals in the lower grades than in the higher grades.)

Assume that the school is not a high-need school that would qualify for lower-than-average class sizes under the district’s weighted resource allocation model. So the district’s goal would be to keep the class sizes below 26 in grades K-2 and below 30 in grades 3-6. You can exceed those caps if you think that’s the best solution. But you should recognize that anything falling significantly below those goals will put your school below the district averages and make it harder to allocate teachers to high-need schools.

What are the best answers?

Follow-up here.

Small schools and class size

As will come as news to no one, I put a high priority on keeping our existing schools open; among other things, I think it’s a key ingredient in maintaining community support for district initiatives and it plays an important role in maintaining livable, family-friendly neighborhoods in the central core of Iowa City. But I don’t deny that there are costs involved in keeping our smaller schools open, and I think it’s important to think about what those costs are and whether there are ways to mitigate them.

In this post, I want to consider the effect of small schools on class size. When the district sets class size goals, it can give the impression that class sizes can be fine-tuned. For example, the most recent draft of those goals suggests that most elementary schools should have class sizes of no more than 26 from kindergarten through second grade, and no more than 30 in grades three through six. (The class size goals are lower than that in schools with higher levels of academic need, but most schools will not fall into that category.)

But conforming to those goals is easier said than done, especially in our smaller schools. A school with an enrollment of 240 is likely to have about 34 kids per grade. What do you do with that number? A 34-kid kindergarten classroom is much larger than ideal, so the district would almost certainly choose to break it into two 17-kid classes—a lot nicer, but way below what we could afford to staff district-wide. What if 40 sixth-graders show up? Again, 20 is a wonderful class size, but it’s way below the district median for sixth-graders.

In other words, smaller schools tend to produce more outlier class sizes, forcing the district to choose between class sizes that are significantly above the goals or significantly below them. This effect lessens somewhat as you get into enrollments of over three hundred. A 300-kid school will tend to produce class sizes in the twenties, which is at least better than having to choose between 17 or 34. But it would still be subject to year-to-year fluctuations that could generate uncomfortable choices, and class sizes in the low twenties are still below the district median.

By contrast, large schools give the district enough flexibility that they seldom result in outlier class sizes. In a 600-kid school (assuming the kids are spread out evenly over the seven grades), you can have class sizes of about 21 in the lower grades and 29 in the higher grades. Even if a bigger-than-usual group shows up in one grade, it gets spread out over three or four classrooms, so it’s not liable to generate class sizes as high as 34. As a result, the large school may be less likely to get an additional teacher than the small school with the 34-kid cohort.

In particular, smaller schools pose a challenge for the district’s weighted resource allocation model—that is, the effort to allocate smaller class sizes to school with higher academic need. To create smaller class sizes in high-need schools, we need to tolerate larger class sizes in the remaining schools. If that effect is spread out over many schools, the effect on any one school will be smaller and thus the model will be more politically sustainable. But it’s not so easy for smaller schools to take a “fair share” of that effect—again, because the choice will often be between a class size that greatly exceeds the goals and one that is much smaller than average. If the smaller schools get lower-than-average class sizes, even when they are not high-need schools, the burden of the resource reallocation will fall disproportionately on larger schools. If the smaller schools are expected to tolerate class sizes far above the goals, the burden will fall disproportionately on them. Either way, it becomes harder to sustain the reallocation effort.

Again, I’m certainly not trying to make the case for closing smaller schools. But if we’re going to resist the ongoing pressure to consider closing some of them (and not just Hoover), it makes sense to do some problem-solving around the issue of outlier class sizes. I’ll explore some possibilities in an upcoming post.

School board agenda for Tuesday, October 11

Some of the items on this week’s agenda:

We’ll vote on approval of the weighted resource allocation model, which is designed to provide smaller class sizes in schools that have higher rates of students from low-income households, English-language learners, and students receiving special education services. The district has already been phasing in the model; this vote will incorporate it into the superintendent directions. More info here; testimonials here.

We’ll discuss the district’s Certified Annual Financial Report and its Annual Financial Health Report.

At our work session, we’ll discuss a report on the general obligation bond funding that will be necessary to finance the projects in the district’s facilities plan. We’ll also begin to talk about the possibility of suggesting revisions to the facilities plan.

We’ll review the district’s updated elementary and secondary boundary maps.

We’ll discuss updating the district’s letter to municipalities and to the county supporting diverse neighborhoods and affordable housing.

All that and more! The full agendas are here and here. Feel free to chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

Secondary boundaries

One of the issues that the school board is discussing at its meetings is whether to stick with the secondary feeder plan that the previous board approved last May. It’s a big topic that’s hard to cover comprehensively in one blog post, but I wanted to post some of my thoughts about it here so people would have some idea of where I’m coming from on it.

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The district is opening a new high school, Liberty High, in 2017, so the board has to establish that school’s attendance area, which will have to be drawn from the attendance areas of City High and/or West High. Rather than draw actual secondary boundaries, the previous board settled on a “feeder plan,” identifying which elementary schools would go to which secondary schools. The idea was that the next board would then finalize the elementary boundaries, but the feeder plan itself would remain unchanged.

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The feeder plan that the previous board adopted put a high value on “balance,” which is shorthand for minimizing disparities in the precentage of kids at each school who are from low-income households, are receiving special education services, or are in the English-language-learner program. To pursue that goal, the plan has to bus kids from some elementary schools to junior highs and high schools that are relatively far from their homes, when closer alternatives exist. Specifically:

• Kids in the Alexander area in the southeasternmost part of Iowa City would be bused to Northwest Junior High in Coralville, which is as much as seven miles away for some of them, instead of going to Southeast Junior High, which is well under two miles away for many of them. They would also go to West High instead of City High, even though City is significantly closer for most of them.

• Kids in the Kirkwood area in Coralville would be assigned to Liberty High (about five miles away) instead of West High (about three-and-a-half miles away and accessible via public transportation). They would also be assigned to North Central Junior High (about three miles away) instead of North West Junior High, which is literally right next door to Kirkwood Elementary. Kirkwood-area students would be given the option of attending North West for junior high, but they would be the only students there who would then go on to Liberty High rather than West.

• Wickham-area students would attend North West Junior High and West High, rather than North Central Junior High and Liberty High, even though the latter are closer than the former, in some cases significantly so.

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When the board voted to adopt the current feeder plan, the administration’s estimates showed a very close FRL percentage at each of the three high schools—31%, 28%, and 29% at City, West, and Liberty, respectively—but those estimates gave a misimpression of what the actual rates would be, because part of the board’s plan was to carve out an area from City and West’s territory that would go to the planned Grant Elementary in the North Corridor, and thus would eventually go on to Liberty High. The site for Grant is in the current Wickham attendance area, which means some portion of Wickham (which the estimates showed going to West High) would naturally become part of Grant and go to Liberty. It also seems very likely that all or part of the “North Lincoln” area (which the estimates showed going to City) will be assigned to Liberty, either because it will become part of Grant, or because it will stay at Lincoln but be assigned to Liberty anyway.

Wickham and Lincoln are both very low-FRL areas, so sending portions of them to Liberty changes the FRL distribution under the current feeder plan considerably. Assuming that about a quarter of Wickham and about half of Lincoln end up at Liberty, my best estimate of the FRL rates in each high school’s zone, if we measured them using this year’s numbers, would be:

City High: 34%

West High: 33%

Liberty High: 20%

As we have discussed the issue this year, an alternative proposal has developed that would keep the Kirkwood area at West High and the Alexander area at City High, but would move other parts of City High’s zone into West and Liberty. (See below.) My best estimate of the resulting FRL rates, if we measured them using this year’s numbers, would be:

City High: 36%

West High: 33%

Liberty High: 15%

(Again, those are ballpark estimates; see below for how I made them. [Update: On May 10, the board adopted new elementary boundaries and began to make changes in the secondary feeder plan. See this post. The resulting FRL rates, under this year's numbers, are 36% at City, 34% at West, and 20% at Liberty. See this post for a follow-up.]

As we debate whether to change our secondary feeder plan, we are choosing between something like the first plan and something like the second one. Although the current feeder plan will not result in as close a socioeconomic balance between the three high schools as it initially seemed, it still provides somewhat more balance than the alternative.

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At least four rationales have been offered for choosing the plan with more socioeconomic balance. The first is that students from lower-income households will perform better academically if they go to schools that do not have high poverty rates. There has been a lot of empirical research on this topic, and I’m pretty easily convinced that, all other things equal, it’s true that low-income kids benefit academically from not being in high-poverty schools.

It doesn’t automatically follow, though, that the current feeder plan is better than the alternative. The FRL differences between the two are not particularly large, and the resulting FRL rates do not appear to be so high as to raise academic red flags. (In fact, according to the state Department of Education, the proficiency rate of City High’s low-SES students is higher than that of West High’s low-SES students, even though West High’s FRL rate is lower.) More importantly, the plan puts concrete transportation burdens on many kids from high-poverty areas, so those burdens have to be weighed against any potential benefit of being in a lower-FRL school.

Every indication is that the great majority of families at Kirkwood and Alexander—which are two of our highest poverty schools—do not think that the plan is what’s best for their kids. For example, our district recently surveyed the parents of Alexander sixth-graders about which junior high they’d rather go to if they know that they’ll end up at West for high school. Twenty out of thirty-three said they wanted their kids to attend Southeast. If they had been given the Southeast-City option, that number probably would have been even higher. That same preference has been reflected in the great majority of comments made by Kirkwood and Alexander parents at board meetings, in emails, and at PTO meetings.

These parents aren’t just expressing an attachment to their current schools out of history or loyalty or familiarity. Those can be real concerns for people, but we can’t possibly draw new districts without asking some families to leave schools they’re fond of. The Kirkwood and Alexander parents, by contrast, are identifying concrete hardships that going to a more distant school imposes on them. Kirkwood parents point out, for example, that there is no public transportation between the Kirkwood area and North Liberty, which will make it hard for kids to get to and from school at times not served by a school bus, especially if they come from one- or no-car households. Alexander families make a similar point, and also point to the sheer quantity of time their kids will have to spend on a bus. “I don’t own a car,” one Kirkwood parent said to me. “If my child is at Liberty and gets sick during the day, how will I get him home?”

I’m certainly not arguing that we should let every neighborhood choose which attendance area they’re in. Of course that’s impossible. I’m also not arguing that no one should ever be asked to make a sacrifice for the greater good; I’m fine with that in many contexts. I’m arguing that we should not make kids in high-poverty areas worse off for the sake of achieving balance, especially since one of the whole reasons we’re pursuing balance in the first place is to benefit those very kids. So it’s important to assess whether the feeder plan makes them worse off or better off. In doing that, my inclination is to give a lot weight to what those families think.

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The second rationale that has been offered for the current feeder plan’s pursuit of (relative) balance is that schools with high FRL rates face a lot of challenges (both academically and behavorially) that make it harder for teachers and staff to give all the kids the attention that they need.

I’m sure there is truth to that. But if that’s the concern, it’s not clear why we should devote our resources to pursuing balance at the secondary level, where the FRLs are relatively low compared to those at our elementary schools. Our district has five elementary schools with FRL rates of over 70%. If there are challenges associated with high-poverty schools, those are the schools most facing the challenges.

Proponents of the secondary feeder plan would probably argue that they would like to see balance at the elementary level too, but that it is not currently politically achievable or sustainable. I think that’s probably true; there would have to be much more broad-based support to bring about the kind of redistricting that would result in balanced FRLs at the all the elementary schools. But what makes the secondary plan any more politically achievable, other than the fact that the burden of it falls mostly on high-poverty areas whose residents are less likely to organize in opposition to it? Again, if Kirkwood and Alexander families were supportive of the feeder plan and thought it would benefit their children, the issue would be much easier to decide.

One way to address some of the challenges teachers and staff face at higher-poverty schools is to devote more resources to those buildings. The current feeder plan, because it spend additional money on school buses, is in tension with that goal. (On that, more below.)

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The third rationale that has been offered for the current feeder plan is that any substantial disparity between the FRL rates at the high schools will lead, over time, to a gradual migration of middle-class and wealthy families toward to the area around Liberty High, at the expense of Iowa City, and particularly the east side. City’s FRL rate may not look so high now, the argument goes, but over time it will climb higher and higher, and all the kids there will be worse off for being in a high-poverty school.

This is an argument I feel a good deal of resistance to, for a number of reasons. First, it invests an awful lot of explanatory power in our boundary decisions; if such a migration does actually occur, it will probably happen for many reasons in addition to the secondary school FRL rate differential. Second, it is essentially unfalsifiable; even though there is no current indication that the FRL rates at City or West will be considerably higher (see note below), this argument just asserts that they will inevitably spiral upward.

Third, though I believe this argument is made with good intentions, it has a tendency to shade into a kind of alarmism about the presence of poor people in Iowa City that is hurtful to those in low-income neighborhoods and ultimately does not help City High. We have been hearing for years now that the east side is on the verge of a “tipping point” because the number of poor families (and therefore the high school FRL rate) has risen. Yet the east side has continued to grow, people continue to choose to live here, new homes (including high-end developments) continue to be built, and City High remains one of the best high schools in the state. There are a lot of reasons to see Iowa City and City High as at least partly success stories, rather than as being on the precipice of a downward spiral.

Fourth, this argument has an all-or-nothing quality to it. Under its logic, any noticeable difference in FRL rates between the high schools will lead to the inevitable decline of one into a high-poverty school. But even the current feeder plan is likely to have about a 14-point FRL difference between high schools, and so could be objected to on the same grounds. To bring all three high schools to a roughly equal FRL rate would take even more extensive redistricting, would require more money spent on buses, and would create even more transportation burdens for kids from low-income families.

Fifth, no matter how carefully it is made, this argument is bound to be experienced as unwelcoming by families in high-FRL areas. I can only imagine what it is like to be a student from the Alexander neighborhood and to hear that if there are too many kids like you at City High, people will no longer choose to move here. Or to be a Kirkwood student and hear that the kids in your area have to attend Liberty High to keep it from becoming too appealing to people.

Finally, there are countervailing concerns about what will happen to the areas around Kirkwood and Alexander under the current plan. More than one Kirkwood parent has told me that if the district goes ahead with the current plan, “Kirkwood’s FRL will be 90%”—because anyone who can afford to move will move. The ongoing development of single-family housing around Alexander has the potential to help bring down Alexander’s FRL rate, but a feeder plan that would send kids to junior high seven miles away is not exactly a selling point. The claims about what will happen to the neighborhoods around those schools are as hard to evaluate as the claims about what will happen on the east side, but they seem at least as worthy of being taken seriously.

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It’s also true that the current feeder plan costs money, and that expense is in competition with funding that could put more resources into our higher-poverty elementary schools. The board was initially told that the feeder plan would require spending about $250,000 annually above what we would spend under a plan that put a higher value on proximity to school. (Kirkwood-area kids, for example, would not need busing to go to North West Junior High, and much of the Alexander area would not need busing to go to City High.) Under the current plan, the board might also choose to run after-school activities buses to areas such as Kirkwood and Alexander, which would make the cost even higher.

It is hard to justify spending money to pursue balance at the secondary level when we have elementary schools with much higher FRL rates that could benefit from those same resources. There is also a good argument that it makes more sense to invest that money in the early grades and in early childhood education, in hopes of putting kids on the best footing at the beginning of their school years. When I recently met with a group of Kirkwood families, none of them thought the current feeder plan was anything other than a burden to them. They were very enthusiastic, though, about the prospect of having more resources (for example, smaller class sizes) at their elementary school.

Will the money “saved” actually be redirected to the schools that most need it? And will it add up to enough to make much difference? Those are fair questions. But the first step toward redirecting resources has to be identifying resources that could be redirected. In my view, there are uses for the money that will be spent on busing that are likely to be more beneficial to kids in higher-need schools. (It is also true that we need to find a way to tilt resource allocation to higher-need schools no matter what we do with secondary boundaries. That issue is on our agenda for tonight’s meeting.)

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A fourth rationale for the current feeder plan is that if the FRL rate is higher at one high school than at another, the curricular offerings will not be the same. There is probably some truth to this, since curricular offerings are at least to some extent driven by demand. However, we’re talking about high schools that will have over a thousand students each. There will still be lots of demand for college prep and Advanced Placement courses, for example, and the high schools will still accommodate that demand.

We have also heard arguments that balance is necessary because lower-FRL schools win more athletic championships and have more successful extracurricular activities, and that the whole school benefits from those successes. I find it hard to give much weight to those arguments. Again, the high schools will still have large and diverse enough student populations to offer lots of athletic and extracurricular opportunities. Athletic championships are nice, but raising the odds of winning titles doesn’t justify the burdens we’d be putting on kids from low-income families under the current feeder plan.

I don’t blame anyone for wishing that our high schools all had similar demographic profiles. But I’m not willing to pursue that outcome no matter what the cost. I guess it is also true that I am just not that alarmed by the prospect that the high school on the east side might look like the east side’s population and seek to serve that population.

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As you can tell, I come to this issue from the perspective of someone living on the east side in a City High household. All of my kids will attend City High; one is already there. I live next door to the school. If I were to argue for the current feeder plan, I would in effect be arguing that we need to have fewer poor (and black) students at my kids’ high school. To make that kind of argument, I’d have to feel very confident that I was doing what’s best for those kids. I just don’t have that confidence.

I realize that my personal perspective should not affect my conclusion about the issue—if I lived in North Liberty, the potential moral hazard would be reversed—but I can’t deny that that perspective informs my thinking about the issue.

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I do think that it’s important to acknowledge that when we talk about FRL rates, we are talking not just about poverty but also about race. Though of course not all black people are poor and vice versa, students receiving free or reduced-price lunch are disproportionately black. There is a strong argument that anything we do with redistricting or with resource allocation has to be accompanied by a sea change in the way that the district engages with black students. Our district has taken steps in a good direction—for example, by developing a comprehensive equity plan—but still has a ways to go.

Not everyone in the affected communities believes that spreading the poor and black population out evenly across our schools is an unmitigated good. There are multiple perspectives on what the district’s approach to engaging with poor and minority students should be. I certainly don’t know all the answers, but I do know that what I hear from the families affected by our decisions does not always match my preconceptions. In general, I think the district needs to be more open to perspectives beyond those coming from within the institution.

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There are also capacity issues underlying the entire secondary boundary discussion. It is unavoidably true that once Liberty is open, some areas currently assigned to City High will have to end up elsewhere. City cannot continue to enroll 44% of our high school students when we have three high school attendance areas. So the hard thing is determining which areas it makes the most sense to re-assign. There, the balance and proximity issues are in direct conflict. The kids who are closest to the other secondaries are in many cases the ones from the most affluent areas, while the higher-poverty areas are often very convenient to Southeast and City.

At the same time, there are issues about how many students we can put at Liberty High, which will have a capacity of only 1000 students until its sixth year of operation, when it will get a 500-seat addition. As I wrote about here, assigning Kirkwood students to Liberty High will put that building significantly over capacity by its third year of operation. Given that there is room for Kirkwood at West High, it is very hard to justify sending them to Liberty. If Kirkwood is kept at West, though, it becomes even harder to justify sending Alexander there.

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What, then, is the alternative to the current feeder plan? This board is not discussing what the previous board identified as Plan 5C, which tried to assign areas purely on the basis of proximity and available capacity. That’s partly because Plan 5C assumed that we would keep a “clean” feeder system, with elementary populations staying together all the way through high school. All things being equal, I think most people would prefer a clean feeder plan, but because of the locations of our schools (and especially our junior highs), having clean feeders greatly complicates the districting process, and is in direct tension with concerns about proximity and capacity. As a result, I do think it makes sense to consider departing from a clean feeder system.

Even the current plan, which took clean feeders as a given, departs from the principle in practice, since Kirkwood students have the option of attending North West Junior High before going on to Liberty (and it is likely that many would choose that option). In theory, we could offer a similar option to Alexander students (though the current plan does not). But most of the feedback I have heard from families in those areas is that they are not happy being put to that kind of choice, because if they choose the more convenient junior high, their kids will be the only kids at the junior high who will end up at a different high school than all of their classmates. If there were a way to send roughly half of a junior high to one high school and the other half to another, splitting the feeder after eighth grades might be more palatable, but there is no scenario I can imagine that would have that result.

Instead, it is possible to consider splitting some feeders after sixth grade. For example, the North Lincoln area could remain at Lincoln Elementary, but after sixth grade, all or part of that area could attend North Central and Liberty. The “North Mann island”—i.e., the Peninsula neighborhood and its surrounding area—could remain at Horace Mann, but then attend North Central and Liberty. The “Twain west side island” could stay at Twain, but then attend North West and West High. In each case, splitting the feeder would take a relatively large group of kids—roughly half of Mann and Lincoln, about a third of Twain—and move them together to a different secondary path. It would also be a way of reducing the City High population without re-assigning kids who are very close to Southeast and City. All of those areas are currently bused to their elementary, junior high, and high schools, so redirecting them would not add busing costs (and might well reduce them, since much of North Lincoln is not within busing distance from Liberty). And it would also make the best use of our existing elementary capacity; we have more elementary capacity on the east side than in the North Corridor or on the west side, so keeping those areas at east side elementary schools makes sense.

Splitting feeders is never an ideal choice, but given the other feasible options—which involve putting real transportation burdens on families in low-income areas—these ideas seem like the least bad option.

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There are more aspects of this issue that I could discuss, but I should bring this particular post to a close. My main goal was to provide an explanation of my thinking on this issue to the many people who have contacted me about it. As with all blogging, though, I am also using this space to think out loud to some extent. I am not sure any of us will ever succeed in mastering all the aspects of this issue, and I’m sure I still need to be educated about additional perspectives on it. Please chime in with comments.

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Note on calculations: To estimate the FRL rates under the different possible secondary boundary plans, I took the current number of students receiving free- or reduced-price lunch at City or West this year (1086) and reallocated that number among the three secondary zones in the current feeder plan and in the alternative plan. To do that, I assumed that the secondary enrollment from each elementary attendance area would be proportional to each area’s share of the total elementary enrollment. I ended up with the following FRL rates under the current plan: Liberty: 222 FRL out of 1100 students (20%); West: 435 FRL out of 1319 students (33%); City: 429 FRL out of 1277 students (34%). Under the alternative plan: Liberty: 153 FRL out of 1000 students (15%); West: 449 FRL out of 1342 students (33%), City: 483 FRL out of 1355 students (36%). I assumed that the FRL rate of Tate High, the district’s alternative high school that does not have an attendance zone, would remain at roughly 64% under either feeder plan.

It’s not a perfect way to estimate, but it’s the best I could come up with, and I think it yields pretty good ballpark figures. Again, it is based on what the numbers would look like this year under the different scenarios. Will the numbers change in the future? Almost certainly they will, but is very hard to project FRL rates into the future, since they hinge to some extent on changes in the economy, on changes in the location and availability of affordable housing, and on the degree to which eligible families actually enroll in the free- and reduced-price lunch program. (The company that makes our enrollment projections does not attempt to project FRL rates.)

Some have argued that FRL rates at the secondary level will continue to rise, and have cited the higher rates at the elementary and junior high level. There is probably some element of truth to that, but it’s hard to quantify, because historically FRL rates have consistently been higher in the early grades and lower in the later grades. On average over the past ten years, the high school FRL rate has been about four percentage points lower than the junior high rate, and that difference has been even larger (eight points) at Southeast and City. So even though Southeast’s current FRL rate is higher than City’s, it’s not safe to assume that City’s will rise to that same level.

What would stronger weighted resource reallocation look like?

There has been ongoing discussion in our district about the fact that some schools have a much higher percentage of “high need” kids than other schools do. People have advocated for various ways to help the higher-need kids: some say we should redistrict to avoid high concentrations of high-need kids in any one school; some want to use magnet schools or paired schools to achieve the same end; some want to direct disproportionate resources toward schools with disproportionate need. These are not mutually exclusive ideas; the district could use redistricting, magnets, or paired schools to some extent and then try to address remaining disparities with resource allocation.

Our district has already begun a “weighted resource allocation” plan. So far, the plan has involved allocating certain types of staff support (such as School Administration Managers) toward schools with more high-need kids. As I understand it, the plan has not (yet?) progressed to reallocating classroom teachers (though some ad hoc recognition of high-need schools may have occurred to a limited extent). Since the bulk of our operating budget is spent on classroom teachers, applying the plan to classroom teachers would greatly increase how much resource reallocation we could do.

That said, it’s easy to say that we should reallocate resources, and harder to know what that would actually entail. The goal of this post is to imagine what it might look like if we deliberately tilted the allocation of classroom teachers toward schools with more high-need kids. So I did an elaborate mathematical experiment. To begin, I defined “high need” simply by using the percentage of kids who receive free or reduced-price lunch at each school. This is not a perfect proxy for “high need,” but it’s a pretty good one; we’ve seen big disparities between FRL and non-FRL kids on statewide assessments of reading and math proficiency. (Our district has begun to use a more complex indicator that also takes into account the number of kids in special education and in the English-language learning program. I hope to write more on the measurement of “high need” in a future post.)

Then, I decided to assign a greater “weight” to high-need students, on the theory that the kids with more need should get more teachers. To keep it straightforward, I decided to give each high-need kid the weight of two students and then reallocate teachers accordingly. That means that class sizes in a 100% high-need school would, on average, be half the size of those in a 0% high-need school. And since we don’t have any schools that are 100% or 0% high need, the actual class size differences would not be that large on average.

How would that system change the allocation of teachers in our elementary schools? Here’s what happened when I ran the numbers:

What would the resulting class sizes look like? First, let’s see what they look like now. Here is a chart showing the class sizes in our elementary schools as of October 2015. Green squares indicate class sizes that are below-median for that grade; red squares are above median. I’ve listed the schools in decreasing order of FRL percentage, so the higher-need schools are at the top. (Click to enlarge.)

As you can see, there is a little more green toward the top of the chart than at the bottom, but the pattern is inconsistent and not very strong. (Caveat: I used the class size numbers from the district’s October 2015 report; there have almost certainly been changes since that time, both in the number of students and possibly in assignment of teachers.) Now here’s what it would look like if we reallocated that same number of teachers based strictly on giving high-need students the weight of two students (click to enlarge):

On the one hand, you can see that the pattern is much stronger and more consistent: schools with more high-need kids would get consistently smaller class sizes. On the other hand, you can see just how much it would come at the expense of the schools with the fewest high-need kids. Class sizes would be significantly larger there. In fact, toward the bottom of the chart, I had to start combining grades (that is, having mixed classes of first- and second-graders, or third- and fourth-graders, or fifth- and sixth-graders), in order to avoid class sizes in the forties or worse. Even then some of the class sizes were pretty steep.

There are many, many possible critiques of the method I used here to determine reallocation. FRL is not a perfect proxy for need, for example. Two is not necessarily the right multiplier. “Need” is not a binary concept, but varies on a spectrum. Academic need is not the only kind of need. Maybe what high-FRL schools need is not more classroom teachers but more reading specialists. And so on. There are certainly other ways to conceive of how resources might best be directed toward needs. But any attempt to reallocate resources, no matter what the details, will have to recognize that there are consequences, and that the greater the benefit to high-need kids, the more uncomfortable some of those consequences are at the other end.

Seeing a concrete illustration of resource reallocation raises lot of questions. What is the “ceiling” on how high a class size we can tolerate, even at a low-FRL school? Could any plan like this one ever get the buy-in it would need to become a reality—from the public, the board, and the teachers and administrators? Would this approach to addressing disparities be more or less politically sustainable than a purely redistricting-based approach (keeping in mind that a redistricting approach would entail some additional busing expenses that would also affect class size)? Would it be more or less effective at reducing the proficiency gaps? How big would the benefit actually be?

Is it possible that some families would transfer their kids from schools with the higher class sizes to schools with the lower class sizes, taking some of the edge off of the disparities in both class size and FRL? In other words, could it work as a kind of Small Class Size Magnet School plan? On the other hand, to what extent would better-off families simply opt out of the public schools altogether (which costs the district money in per-pupil state aid) if they felt like class sizes at their elementary school were too high?

How would resource reallocation work in the junior highs and high schools? I assume it would have to operate at the classroom level—that is, courses that enroll lots of high-need students would have smaller class sizes, while class sizes would increase in courses that enroll fewer high-need students. (I’m looking at you, AP courses.) Notice that there is an argument for doing this even if our boundary plan equalizes the FRL percentages at each school, since the FRL percentages might still vary widely from classroom to classroom.

Again, this particular approach to resource reallocation is just one of many that are imaginable. But it’s useful because it provides a concrete sense of how resource reallocation could really hash out in practice. One thing you notice right away is how class sizes change not gradually but in quantum leaps: often adding just one teacher to a particular grade in one school changes that grade’s squares from very red to very green. Since you can’t just add a fraction of a classroom teacher to a school, class sizes are not easily fine-tuned or smoothed out.

I know there are limits to what the school district can do to bring up test scores. It is not within our power to erase all the effects of poverty (and other challenges) on our students’ lives. Though I’ll never agree that “educational achievement” can be reduced to a score on a standardized test, the proficiency gaps we’re seeing are clearly telling us something real about how well we’re serving our high-need kids. In my view, some form of resource reallocation toward schools with more high-need kids (not necessarily this particular variation!) ought to be a part of the discussion of how to address those gaps. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not an easy fix and that it might be hard to achieve significant benefits without tolerating some significant costs.

Finally, I’ll be a broken record: The painful trade-offs that you see when you think about class size would be reduced and even eliminated if our governor and state legislature would provide better school funding. I’m not meaning to excuse the school board from using its funding as wisely as possible, but state funding is the primary factor driving class size. Even just bringing Iowa back up to the national median for per-pupil funding would provide our district with millions of dollars of additional operating funds—enough to turn many red squares green and still have something left over to address other needs. Neither political party is perfect on this score, but in practice, increasing school funding requires electing a Democratic legislature this year and a Democratic governor in 2018.

I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts in the comments. How do you think resource reallocation compares to other possible ways to address the proficiency gaps we’re seeing among our high-need kids?