As NYC is trying to come up with a city integration plan, California has developed a segregation app! Way to go, left coast!
Now, as you’re looking to enroll your kids in school in CA, you can use this handy phone/tablet app cleverly named CA Schools to do your “due diligence.” I spent about 20 minutes with it and found it incredibly unwieldy. But worse than that, while ethnicity data is available on a given school, you’ll find no information on how demographics of “socioeconomically disadvantaged” students compares with the district or state — even in the “equity report”!
Imagine IF (cue twinkly music) the CA Dept of Ed had developed a kind of School Diversity Score… Imagine if, as you’re trying to make sense of test score data (which you know reflects more about parent-socioeconomics than teaching integrity), a segregation/integration meter stared you in the face.
Imagine, too, if the Diversity Score also included some information on classroom equity — are kids of color enrolled in gifted programs on campus at the same rate as white/privileged kids? What about disciplinary actions or AP course enrollment?
Would such an index move you? Would you better contextualize those test scores or think differently about them?
I think so. Maybe not every parent would — but YOU would. And, at the very least, parents wouldn’t be able to pretend that it didn’t exist. There’d be so MUCH that we couldn’t so easily ignore!
Anyone have any experience with the Diversity index in Boston?
Wow. This is pretty amazing. Never even considered this sort of integration (!) with technology, but OF COURSE! Having these demographics available when making decisions between schools could be a game-changer. What a straight-forward way this could be to offer underprivileged (yet determined) schools a spotlight. Well thought out and working properly, this app could really be effective. Nice work, CA…