Tim DeRoche Quotes

Here is the truth: 78% of public school children attend their assigned public school. If American public schools are divided along economic and racial lines (and it’s indisputable that they are), then it is primarily because of school assignment policies, not because a minority of parents look for better public school options for their children.

The harder you look at attendance zones, the more they appear to violate fundamental principles. Isn’t public education supposed to be "the Great Equalizer" providing equal opportunity for all children, regardless of race or income level? Aren’t we all supposed to be treated equally under the law?

What is this peculiar, misshapen thing that we call an attendance zone? It’s an administrative service area. Government bureaucrats carve up the map and determine who gets preferred enrollment at what school. There are no elected officials at the attendance-zone level—and no political representation. The residents of a school zone are not subject to special taxes that go to the local school. An attendance zone is also a license to discriminate. If the school is full (most of the best schools are), then the attendance zone provides the school with the ability to exclude families who live within the district’s jurisdictional boundaries but outside of the arbitrary zone for that school as drawn by district staff.

Almost 80 percent of public school children attend their assigned public school. If American public schools are divided along economic and racial lines (and it’s indisputable that they are), then it is primarily because of geographic school assignment, not because a minority of parents look to escape the failing schools they’ve been assigned to.

We already have a name for this practice of using your address to determine whether or not you are eligible for valuable government services. We call it redlining. Educational redlining is analogous to redlining in the housing market. In each case, valuable government services are reserved for more privileged communities, using geographic preferences as a way to limit who is eligible to receive them.

By carving up our cities into attendance zones, we are perpetuating the economic and racial divisions that marked one of the darkest eras of our nation’s past.

I want to draw a direct line from the racially discriminatory housing practices of the middle decades of the twentieth century and the laws and policies that create attendance zones for public schools today.

I started thinking of Huck Finn as a protoypical American myth.

Huck undergoes a change in Twain’s original in terms of how he sees the slave Jim, and Huck undergoes a similar change in this book.

The original Huck Finn is not about slavery; it’s not about race. This is a story about an abused kid looking for a safe haven.

My wife and I were out doing a kayak trip on the [Los Angeles River] ... It’s a wilder place than you would think from just driving over it on the freeway. I started to think about the idea of the River as this place where you could have an adventure. I started to imagine, ok, what would it be like if Huck Finn were alive today and he were traveling down the River.

It was an incredibly fun experience to try an inhabit that voice and try to get into Huck’s head and see Los Angeles from the point-of-view of this naive kid from backwoods Missouri.