Coralville Courier Editor's Note: This is nothing more than an attempt to social engineer. Such things don't work. All this will do is water down the top achievement level. The so-called research being relied upon for this *diversity* nonsense should be questioned very critically. I reject Richard kahlenberg's notion, that socioeconomically diverse classrooms lead to higher test scores. You can't tell me that putting some less fortunate kids in Lincoln Elementary makes the fifth grade class smarter. That's illogical. It may slightly bring up the testing average, but it waters down overall achievement excellence. What the school district is really proposing here, is parity.
On paper, it’s easy to fix. Redistrict some poor neighborhoods here and some rich neighborhoods there and get each school closer to the district’s average of 34 percent and, researchers say, test scores will rise.
But each of those percentages on paper represents dozens of kids in real life, and Iowa City Community School District leaders say they’re reluctant to force many of them to attend new schools.
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