He's a conservative stick-in-the-mud. He fought to keep gay books out of public schools, he quotes former Republican President George Bush's education reports, and he wrote an essay that was published by the Washington Institute for Policy Studies, a right-wing group. But Nielsen, who's vice president of the school board, has crafted what is arguably this year's most left-wing proposal. He wants to use low income as a "tiebreaker" for the annual competition to get students into their choice of high schools. This economic-based plan would replace one of the current standards: race.
Nixing the racial standard, which has helped schools achieve racial balance, rubs liberals the wrong way. However, Nielsen's socio-economic plan may be the most groundbreaking way to create an equitable public education system. "Should an African American who makes a million dollars a year be considered a minority?" Nielsen asks.
At an important but low-key board meeting last Wednesday (which drew only about five parents), Nielsen, a pink-faced, fatherly man, made his pitch to ax race and replace it with income diversity as the deciding factor in school placement. Currently, students (or their parents) can pick any of Seattle's 10 public high schools. If too many students apply to a school, four tiebreakers are used to pick who gets in first: having a sibling at the school, neighborhood residence, race, and lottery. Nielsen wants to use economics instead of race to decide who makes it to the top of a school's list. Students who qualify for the school district's discounted lunch program would meet the income tiebreaker standard.
He gives two legitimate reasons for swapping race with class. First, he says poverty transcends race as a barrier to equity in our schools. While liberals argue that blacks are doing worse on standardized tests, Nielsen broadens the context of the debate. He argues that there's substantial crossover between minorities and poor people. The percentage of black students receiving discounted school lunches, for example, steadily climbed from 54 percent to 63 percent over the last eight years. By the same token, about half of the district's Latino and Asian students have also qualified for lunch assistance every year during that period. Meanwhile, consistently less than 20 percent of white students are poor enough to get cheap lunches.
Second, and most important for Nielsen, the federal courts are increasingly cracking down on race as a way for schools to pick students. Nielsen's being practical by acknowledging the national trend toward abolishing minority affirmative-action programs. For example, last year a federal judge ordered San Francisco's school district to lose its racial admission criteria. Locally, a group of middle-class white parents are now holding 1997's I-200 over the Seattle School District's head in federal court to get rid of the use of race in school assignments.
Ironically, Nielsen's real reason for proposing the change is that he wants to help the middle-class white parents who live in his Magnolia and Queen Anne district get their kids into the school they want. These parents were the loudest whiners this year after their kids were overwhelmingly locked out of the most popular school, Ballard High.
Nielsen's colleague Michael Preston, the board's only black member, spent last week's two-and-a-half-hour meeting trying to suppress his indignation over Nielsen's proposal. "The reason that you want the racial tiebreaker is for people who live in racial isolation," Preston said at the meeting. Preston says eliminating race as an edge in school choice will have only one effect: resegregation.
School Board President Barbara Schaad-Lamphere is cynical about Nielsen's proposal as well, but for different reasons. She says it's easy for the board to change the assignment plan, but it's hard to actually improve the schools. "You can't mandate quality," she says. Indeed, for the last four years, the board has gotten bogged down with changing the way it assigns students to schools rather than actually finding solutions to make all schools desirable.
School board members plan to hold community forums throughout October to get feedback on their proposals. They expect to vote on the final changes to the school's assignment plan in early November.
