What if kids went to their neighborhood school? That's the big question in Charlotte. After the landmark 1971 Supreme Court decision upholding court-ordered busing here, the city was touted as the place where busing worked. But support has eroded over the past decade. Now a court challenge to race-based assignment policies threatens to dismantle Charlotte's system of busing for racial integration. To explore the issues and challenges that would accompany a move to neighborhood schools, The Charlotte Observer designed a mock school system.
In our system, all kids went to the school closest to where they lived. Our model system is simplistic and probably impractical, but it gave us a way to spotlight potential changes and trends. We believed that if we fully explained our methods and assumptions, our model could contribute to our community's debate over neighborhood schools. The stories ran in January 1999 as the first five parts of 'Deciding Desegregation,' a continuing series.
Reporter Debbie Cenziper and I described the forces of change acting on the schools. We compared schools in our system to existing schools, tracking ethnic diversity, concentrations of poverty, home-to-school distances, and campus crowding. The key ingredient of the Deciding Desegregation series was geographic data on each of about 94,000 students. We regularly use student data at The Observer because of the range of possibilities it offers for analysis.
Most often, we deal with results of tests such as the SAT and North Carolina's end-of-grade and end-of-course exams. The data has an entry for each student with key facts, including information we used for the Deciding Desegregation series, such as a student's race, gender, grade in school, and school attended. But we still needed to find out where students lived. Geographic data is a set of coordinates, like latitude and longitude.
These sorts of data would allow us to find a spot on earth near each student's home and display it as a dot in a computer mapping program. School officials have on hand geographic data for each student, drawn from their home addresses, in order to analyze attendance zones.