Gisela Garduno

The author is Mary Ann zehr and the name of the article is more

districts factoring poverty into student assignment plans. This was

published in Education week in May of 2010. The subject of the article

are school districts, academic achievement, school boards, low income

groups, race, elementary schools, learning, community relations,

magnet schools, poverty, and school superintendents. Advocates hope

to clear the path to racial diversity in schools, through the use of

poverty measures.

The point of this article is to expose the fact that there are still

some schools that are replacing race with socioeconomic as a

determining indicator after us supreme court ruled in 2007 that using

race as the primary factor in assigning students to schools violates the

constitution. Other districts that take family income into account never

included race as a factor. Many experts believe that composition of a

schools student body affect achievement. If black and Hispanic

students, who are more likely to be poor, go to the same schools as

their better white off peers, the thinking goes; they'll all do better and

aspire to higher education. But since the Supreme Court essentially

blocked a race-conscious path to racial diversity, some integration

advocates are looking to socioeconomic status to reach the same goal.

 Mary Ann zehr states that Richard D. Kahlenberg, a Washington-

based research and public policy organization, argues that educating

students of different social and economic levels in the same

classrooms is a powerful tool for increasing achievement. In 1966, the

so called Coleman report, written by sociologist James s. Coleman,

found that the most important predictor of academic achievement was

a child’s socioeconomic status; the second most was the

socioeconomic status of the student enrollment in the school he or she

attended. In 2005, Russell Rumberger, an education professor at the

university of California, Santa Barbara and his colleague Gregory J.

Palardy found that a schools socioeconomic status had as much to do

with the achievement outcomes of high school students in core

subjects, such as reading, mathematics, and science, as did individual

students socioeconomic status.

The thing that surprised me the most is that I didn’t know that

race was being used as a factor up until 2007. So now they are using

socioeconomic status is replacing the race card. This relates to my

topic because I want to see if there is a connection between a child’s

education and their socioeconomic status. So even if the child comes

from poverty they don’t always have the chance to get into a good

school even if they wanted to.