3
The evidence for the analysis is drawn from a variety of sources, including local
media, government and non-governmental publications and the like, but is primarily
drawn from more than 100 interviews with actors in the public and private sector
conducted in the Washington D.C. area in 2003-2004.
5
Twenty-seven of these
interviews were with school administrators, school board officials, PTA leaders and other
actors in the education field. This paper draws on these interviews, though, again, for
the sake of clarity of presentation, it draws most directly on interviews with the
superintendents of public schools in Fairfax and Montgomery Counties.
The puzzle that emerges from both the question and the evidence is that the usual
language of interests doesn’t easily explain the policies schools in the DC metropolitan
area choose to pursue. In an era of zero-sum budgets, schools choose to redistribute
funding in order to accommodate the needs of newly-arriving racially and ethnically
diverse students, potentially alienating their politically engaged white middle-class
constituencies. Why school administrators chose this politically perilous path, rather than
simply follow the status quo, is the heart of the paper.
Immigration to Metropolitan Areas in the US
Metropolitan areas are not all alike. For instance, the102 metropolitan areas in
the United States with more than 500,000 residents in 2000 (which account for 62.4
percent of the US population) have quite distinct demographic patterns, falling into three
distinct groups:
6
•
Fifty of these 102 metropolitan areas are ‘white-dominant’ metros, in which white
Americans make up a large majority of the area’s population. These 50 white-
dominant metros have 51 million people, or 18 percent of the US population.
5
The author conducted these interviews, together with Lorrie Frasure of the University of Maryland and
Junsik Yoon of George Washington University.
Convention