Open Enrollment in St. Louis Schools: 55 Years in the Making

A version of this commentary appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

When the Spainhower Commission issued its final report in 1968, St. Louis County had 25 school districts (plus the Special School District). Those schools served 186,428 students. Asked to develop “a plan to provide equal access to educational opportunity for all children,” the commission recommended a consolidation of all St. Louis–area school districts into a single district. That call was taken up again in 2014 following the shooting of Michael Brown. Then, as in 1968, the solution proposed was to tear down those dividing district lines in the sake of unity. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board endorsed this plan in their piece, “One school district. One focus. One future: Unify St. Louis schools.”

Fifty-five years after the Spainhower report, the number of students enrolled in St. Louis County school districts has decreased by more than 53,000, but almost all district lines remain. Just three school districts have closed. At the time of their mergers, all three served mostly African American schoolchildren. In the 1970s, the Kinloch and Berkeley School Districts were forced by the courts to consolidate into the Ferguson-Florissant School District. In 2010, the Missouri State Board of Education consolidated the Wellston School District into the Normandy School District.

From then to now we have known that arbitrary boundaries drawn around school districts create haves and have-nots. We have known that assigning students to attend schools based on where they live has perpetuated inequities among students and limited access to quality educational options. And yet, the problem has been almost intractable. Why? According to James Spainhower, as reported by the Post-Dispatch’s Tony Messenger, “The only place where the report was weak, was in the thought that people could get over their biases.” I think this analysis is correct, but not in the way that Messenger implied.

According to Messenger, parents in predominantly white school districts did not want to merge with predominantly African American school districts. As we saw when students from the predominantly African American Normandy school district attempted to transfer to predominantly white school districts a few years ago, race can still be an issue. But race wasn’t the only obstacle for those Normandy students—remember, their own school district didn’t want them to leave, either—nor am I convinced that race is the primary motivating factor for those who oppose school district consolidation. People take pride in their local schools, and they do not want to see them changed. Moreover, people instinctively react when anyone attempts to force their school district to be consolidated. It is a loss of identity.

This is the problem. If we leave school districts to make this change themselves, nothing will get done. If we attempt to force consolidation on them, they will resist. This is why attempts at consolidation, except in those rare cases mentioned above, have failed in the St. Louis region. People are loathe to voluntarily consolidate their own school district unless they see a significant benefit, and they strongly resist top-down directives from the state to consolidate their schools.

It is time to change the strategy. Rather than rely on district leaders to take action or attempt to obliterate school district lines, we need to make those boundaries porous. We need to allow students to begin moving across those lines to attend schools in other school districts. We need school choice. We need open enrollment. The Post-Dispatch editorial board once championed this idea. In their call for unifying St. Louis schools they wrote, “The fastest way to move toward such unity would be for the school districts in the St. Louis region to adopt an open enrollment policy.”

Now there is an open enrollment proposal before the Missouri legislature. Yet, as Blythe Bernhard and Jack Suntrup have reported, “Missouri educators vow to fight as open enrollment plan gains steam.” This opposition was to be expected. What was not expected was the complete silence from those who previously advocated for unity among St. Louis schools.

If we continue to look for top-down solutions to this problem, in another 55 years we’ll likely be exactly where we are today—where a student’s educational opportunities are dictated by his or her zip code.