There’s been a spate of interest recently among progressives in doing more to promote the availability of “interdistrict transfers” that would let students shift out of their current public school and into a different school in a different district. The idea would be to do something to undue the unfair consequences of our current arbitrary system of district boundaries. Education Sector decided to take a look at the potential for this idea and has now released a report on the subject that’s fairly skeptical. As Erin Dillon explains, “To our surprise, we found that interdistrict choice on a large scale is unlikely to benefit a large percent of students – only 10 to 20 percent are likely to find a better school option.”
Dianne Piche, executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, makes a number of points in response to argue that this is likely an underestimate. I would also only observe that “only” is doing a lot of work in the phrase “only 10 to 20 percent are likely to find a better school option.” A different phrase would be “as many as 10 to 20 percent would likely find a better school option.” If I were a member of one of the 10-20 percent of families who could be helped by these measures, I’m not sure I would find their inefficacy for the other 80 percent of the population to be a very compelling reason to poo-poo the possibilities here. The public school system, by its nature, is very fragmented so lots of positive steps don’t help most kids and so you just kind of need to spoon more and more stuff on the plate.
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