May 17th marked the 70th anniversary since the landmark decision in Brown V. Board of Education ostensibly eradicated racial segregation in public schools. Yet, in 2024, many states’ education systems, including California’s, are still stuck in the past due to residential assignment. It’s time state policymakers eliminate residential assignment and address sharing for good by mandating statewide open enrollment so the Brown decision can finally live up to its full potential.
Residential assignment is the practice of using school boundary lines to determine where a child goes to school based on their home address. In theory, residential assignment makes sense. Each family sends their child to the school closest to home. Unfortunately, it’s a lot less intuitive in practice. In California’s K-12 system especially, residential assignment helps maintain discriminatory fault lines. A solution that should be considered is the permanent erasure of these dividing lines for good, allowing every student, especially in California, to access any public school that works best for them.
The residential assignment boundaries used by our public education system often replicate redlined maps from the 1930s. These redlined maps were divided into four different colors. The parts of the map shaded red were considered hazardous and unworthy of receiving housing loans. The populations that were disproportionately affected by the low access to housing loans included Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Jewish families. These maps created segregated living patterns that permeated public schools, creating de facto segregation based on the factors of race and wealth that exist to this day.
Multiple studies have analyzed the relationship between public school attendance zones and redlining, finding many of the maps are nearly identical. For instance, Oakland is one of the worst perpetrators, as its school attendance boundary has “strong spatial correlations with redlined neighborhoods in terms of both perimeter and area,” according to a study from the Urban Institute. The practical results are disastrous. Children who live in historically redlined areas are often denied a high-quality public school education, an outcome that can have consequences that extend far beyond their schooling years in the form of lower wages, poor health, and many other negative effects.
It’s no surprise that many families turn to address sharing to secure better education options for their kids. Address sharing is when parents use an address other than their own to enroll their child in a preferred public school, and it’s illegal in California. Many public school districts have hired private investigators to find evidence that can lead to parents being charged with a felony and a four-year prison sentence. For any families caught in the practice, their children will be expelled and relegated to the residentially assigned school they were trying to escape.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Families who want the best public education for their children shouldn’t risk going to jail if they can’t afford a home address in a higher-income school district. Instead, we should expand open enrollment, decoupling access to quality schools from the ability to afford high dollar residential neighborhoods.
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According to a new report from yes. every kid, California is one of many states that does not currently have mandatory statewide open enrollment. Policymakers can change this by making their present open enrollment program, which allows families the option to transfer to other schools in their assigned district, also include outside districts so all schools in the state are available for public access. The new program would likely benefit student outcomes, too, as studies looking at open enrollment policies have found that student achievement and college enrollment improved for students who took advantage of the program.
70 years ago, the Brown decision made racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Now it’s up to us to honor the legacy of Brown V. Board by making the opportunity to attend a great public school available to every student by creating a K-12 system with no more lines. Erasing the public school boundary lines steeped in a dark history of bigotry by expanding open enrollment can make access to high-quality public education a reality for every child, no matter their background. This is the public education system we should have had in 1954, and it is certainly the one we need in 2024.
Cooper Conway is a recent alumnus of Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy, a Policy Advisor at 50CAN, and a State Beat Fellow at Young Voices, where he focuses on education reform. Follow him on Twitter @CooperConway1.