School Choice and a Mayor's Conundrum

This letter appeared in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the Bay State Banner, December 19, 2013.

Under the previous mayor’s student assignment plan, the intention was to provide Boston students with options of attending quality schools close to home.  Problem is, we should consider diversity an essential feature of any school deemed quality.  So how can city and school officials promise quality “close to home” when the city’s very neighborhoods (i.e. “homes”) are not diverse?

The flawed logic suggested by the very utterance, “separate but equal,” has been long proven. Racial isolation has deleterious effects on student achievement.

Let us hope that city leaders will resist the easy temptation of believing that “neighborhood schools”—as our neighborhoods are currently constituted—could ever make separate equal.