NicholasTampio, a political science professor at Fordham University, asks:
“How did parents lose the right to educate our own children or, at least, have a meaningful role to play in our school districts? How can we reclaim this right?
“Enter Diane Ravitch, America’s foremost historian and theorist of education policy. In her new book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (2013), Ravitch explains how foundations, venture capitalists, and politicians have seized control of America’s schools. She also highlights how parents and citizens may fight back against the corporate reform movement.
“Advocates of the Common Core sometimes say that they belong to the new civil rights movement. Ravitch replies: “It defies reason to believe that Martin Luther King Jr. would march arm in arm with Wall Street hedge fund managers.”
“Follow the money, Ravitch counsels. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent over a hundred million dollars to create and promote the Common Core. Joanne Weiss, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s chief of staff, says that the initiative “means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets.” America spends over 500 billion dollars a year educating children between the ages of 5 and 18. The Common Core, like charter schools or vouchers, helps privatize America’s public schools, in this case, by empowering educational vendors such as Pearson to “enjoy national markets.”
“Schools, Ravitch argues, follow a different logic than businesses. Businesses control their inputs and discard elements that don’t produce. Public schools, to the contrary, must accept and educate all children. New York State Education Commissioner John King applauds the fact that most students failed the new Common Core exams. According to Ravitch, America’s schools should be nurturing its future citizens, not branding them failures at an early age.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just to clarify – public schools do NOT have to accept all students. Indeed some school districts have offered bounties and/or hired detectives to insure that some people who want to attend a public school are not allowed to do so.
http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2009/10/bayonne_boe_offers_bounty_for.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/25/schools-boost-efforts-to-_n_828275.html
“Copley-Fairlawn Superintendent Brian Poe said his district “has taken a certain amount of heat,” with critics saying it should educate all children. “That’s not the law in the state of Ohio, and that’s not our board policy.”
School districts do NOT have to educate all students. Though this is frequently asserted, it is not true. School districts take all students who live in their district – quite a different thing.
Public schools are expected to work with students who live in their district. However, school districts all over country also have established magnet schools that use admissions tests to restrict who can attend.
Joe,
“School districts do NOT have to educate all students. Though this is frequently asserted, it is not true. School districts take all students who live in their district – quite a different thing.”
It’s also true that the district doesn’t have to educate all students because some students may be over the proscribed age.
That’s a bit of sophistry (a suppressed correlative fallacy it seems to me, but I’m only starting to get into the whole logical thing) there with that supposed distinction. Yes, by law they do have to educate all students within the district’s boundaries until a student has shown to have abused the right and privilege of attending through nefarious actions that take away other students ability to learn.
You can do better than that argument.
And they take no students who live outside the district. All schools have admission criteria.
Man o man TE, that one’s about sophistrical as Joe’s.
Ay, Ay, Ay!!!
Duane, it doesn’t feel like sophistry if your a low income parent trying to do the best for your youngster, and you’re in a district with no options – near a district that’s doing a lot better.
As noted, some of those parents end up getting prosecuted for trying to get their youngsters into what they view as a better school.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/25/schools-boost-efforts-to-_n_828275.html
I understand your concern with non-residents plight. I also was not talking about their plight. So, to me, the goal should be to provide those poorer districts to have the necessary resources that allow the richer districts to offer a “better” program. It’s not happening now even though it is the state’s responsibility. The questions are many, though, about what consititutes an “effective” or “better” program and what are “adequate” resources. Not to mention the myriad out of school factors associated with a student’s ability to learn in a school environment. And by now we know that the edudeformers methods don’t work.
Agreed that it is wrong for some schools to have thousands of dollars more per pupil than other schools.
But some youngsters thrive in a more traditional school, others do better in a different kind of school. For some of us, that’s “corporate reform.” For others it’s expanding opportunity. Here are a few examples. As one parent wrote to me “Now he has hope and we have hope.”
http://hometownsource.com/2013/04/03/now-he-has-hope-and-we-have-hope/
Joe Nathan’s comment is inane: Of COURSE school districts need only serve all the kids living within their boundaries. Duh! Nathan has been an ardent proponent of charter schools. Might his response have something to do with that?
I for one could not be more grateful for Ravitch’s work on behalf of students and educators. The damage done by Bush, Spellings, Obama, Duncan, and their corporate cronies has been as extensive as it is unrecognized, and continues unabated. Ravitch shines a withering light on them and their policies, and on the verbal fog they spew to justify their machinations.
The next question to ask is why geographic location is the correct admission criteria to use.
Long before charters, I was and am a strong advocate for public school choice. And unlike a variety of people who post here, our children attended urban public schools that did not use standardized tests or any other measures for admission.
Seriously Joe? We have NEVER turned down a student, regardless of circumstance. And we have them all: foster kids, homeless kids, sick and disabled kids, you name it.
And actually, by federal law, schools must take kids who qualify as homeless if it was their original school. At least where I’m at, homeless is defined as more than two families living in the same dwelling, so the kids don’t even have to be in a shelter or living on the streets to qualify for this. I used to teach in the alternative junior high in my district, and we had kids like that all the time.
But always “in district” kids, right? If one lives in a rich suburb, the number of tough kids to educate will be limited just by house prices. All public schools can handle some of those kids, but few can handle lots of those kids.
Not sure where you teach. Minnesota and a few other states say families can move across district lines without paying tuition if public schools have room. But in most places, district lines determine who can attend a public school without paying tuition.
This means wealthy families have the ability to choose where to live, which public schools to attend…and then have that choice subsidized by the public. How? #1 They can deduct high real estate taxes from their taxable income. #2 They can deduct interest from expense house payments on their taxable income.
Part of the reason for public school choice for low and moderate income is to move toward giving those families at least some of the options that wealthy people have.