Another parting shot from the lame-duck Bloomberg administration.
Students will no longer be guaranteed a seat in their zoned neighborhood high school.
Bloomberg has wanted an all-choice system for years, and this is his parting shot.
Students list their choices, but the high school or the computer makes the decision.
Most students now travel from 45 minutes to an hour to get to their assigned “choice” high school.
Parents are not happy.
They still like the idea of a neighborhood high school.
Meanwhile, my insider at the DOE tells me that the officials at the DOE are in a quandary.
Few of them are educators. All they have ever done is to close established schools and open new ones.
Then after five years, they close the “failed” new schools, and open another to replace it.
The one complicated thing they don’t know how to do: Help struggling schools get better.
Bill de Blasio has a monumental task confronting him assuming he is elected mayor.
He will be like the guy following Humpty Dumpty, trying to re-assemble a school system that has been broken into 1500 pieces, lacking any supervision, management, or vision.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How much will de Blasio (if he is elected) be able to reverse the changes that Bloomberg has made?
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There are times when I really understand the frustrations of the choicey set. Like how come we have this Zoned Election System that denies me the choice of voting in the NYC mayoral race where my vote might do the most good right now? Seems downright undemocratic that I can’t vote in any election of my choice any time I want. The People should rise up and cast off the bondage of geography and the chains of residency restrictions.
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🙂
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TE,
Interested in your thoughts on JA’s thought!
Duane
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If geographic quotas for voting are a concern, I would say the US Senate is more of an issue. The 38 million residents of California have two senators, the 580 thousand citizens of Wyoming have two senators. Not exactly a shining example of majority rule.
I am not sure what it has to do with allowing students to choose a school though.
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TE,
Thanks for the response. I read JA’s post as a commentary on your desiring more choices other than “zip code” based choice and your claims that geographical placement is not “fair nor just” (maybe not your exact words but similar. And that the mantra of choice, choice and more choice is the ultimate goal for the freedom and liberty of all.
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The issue of choosing goods or service providers depends a great deal on context. My choice of natural gas provider, for example, is completely determined by the physical location of my house for good reason as the delivery of natural gas has huge economies of scale. If I could only go out and eat at a single restaurant based on the location of my house, that would seem to me to be a foolish policy and result in very bland food that is not really to any ones taste. There are Italian, Indian, Mexican Chinese, and Japanese restaurants in my town because people can choose which one to attend.
If you think that different educational approaches have merit for particular students, you need to allow students to choose schools. There is no other way to allow the building level autonomy that posters like Robert Sheperd make so forcefully.
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I am not so sure that “there is no other way” as building level autonomy is not that tightly knit to allowing students to choose a school. Choice for choice sake is quite different from building level decision making although I can see how choice could make for interesting building level decisions when those decisions ultimately might cause the demise of that particular school. And I’m not sure that we necessarily want that for public community schools where a lot more is at stake for the community and not just a few share/stake holders who may stand to personally profit off a public good (which has a long history and a constitutional mandate to exist).
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Not choice for choices sake, but choice if your student would benefit more from a Waldorf education or a Montessori education. That is what the relatively wealthy of my town can choose for their children. Could a zoned district school be a Waldorf school?
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I’ll just ask it again: how does this reform improve existing public schools?
Be specific. No theory on market mechanisms. I’m well-versed in market theory. I’m starting to think liberal reformers may not be, however, although they swallowed conservative theory whole. This must be terribly upsetting to the well-intentioned reformers, realizing they got completely rolled and mistakenly became lock-step followers of Milton Friedman.
I think the only remaining question is whether they have the humility to admit that. I doubt it.
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What I find shocking in all this is that fear has taken over as the primary motivator behind people’s decision making. I am a former New Yorker. We were tough, independent minded people who did not tolerate bullies or put up with nonsense unilaterally. When we thought something was wrong or unfair, we fought against it. I have no understanding of where ALL the parents and stakeholders are in relationship to their children’s education. Why aren’t they in the streets, all of them, fighting against this? I think I know at least one possible response: those who have means, and there is no shortage of the wealthy in NY these days, ensure that their children, in-utero, are on the wait lists of strong, well funded private schools, and that those same children have choices above and beyond their actual school. They can afford them and they opt for them. Many others have bought into the idea of choice and really think that their charter school is “better” than their traditional public school, despite the fact that the evidence may state otherwise. But their fear motivates them because better to send your kid to the charter that tells you there is more control over the curriculum, more teacher autonomy, less bureaucracy, etc. is worth the 45 minutes their kids have to travel on a bus. I have been an educator in multiple capacities for 22 years. I started my “career” in a middle school in Brooklyn where I witnessed white flight first hand. I watched as kids came into the middle school unable to read with parents who could not either. And we ignored these problems or fled the system. I have watched a profession I am passionate about, and an institution (public education) that I value, be degraded, deprofessionalized, deskilled, and mutilated without much resistance from those it most profoundly affects: teachers, children and their parents. I am so tired, and quite honestly, despite the fact that I now teach teachers, I have no idea how much longer I can stay in a profession where I howl at the wind watching other like minded, good-natured, and extremely insightful people (Diane is one such example) be reduced to arguing what is so painfully ridiculous. And do not get me started on the soon to be takeover of education from online providers. Talk about pure, unadulterated corruption.
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I used to have a teacher who would jokingly tell us, “When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.” This sounds like a serious version of the same thing – when we want your choice, we’ll make it for you.
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Arne Duncan @arneduncan 1h
We can all learn something from a student who is willing to bike 30 miles to school after missing the bus. http://bit.ly/18DQzg5
Arne Duncan celebrates this, incidentally.
Here, in his example of reform success, reformers abandoned a public school system and a “choice” student had to ride a bike 30 miles to his new school. This is a HUGE success for them. No word on the other 99% of students in the public school state and federal officials abandoned, nor the community they left high and dry, but this one student is showing a lot of “grit” so I suppose they’ll expand this nation-wide.
I think the school reformers abandoned is still open. How great is it that the US Secretary of Education is tweeting excitedly that their school “failed”?
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Again, pressure needs to be put on De Blasio to commit now to revisit this issue with a newly constituted PEP board if he’s elected.
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Yet another developmentally inappropriate “reform”. Arne Duncan recently stated he was in support of later start times for high school. Realistically, 8:30 is probably the latest a high school would ever start if they decided to take this path. However, the benefits of a later start are completely wiped away when urban kids have to spend 45 minutes to an hour traveling to a school far away from their homes. This is not a choice any informed parent would choose for their child. Lack of sleep increases stress, can contribute to obesity, and certainly does not support the overall healthy growth of an adolescent.
Just say no, parents!
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Why can’t they just make the right decisions for student success? They don’t realize how these decisions are hurting instruction and learning in the classrooms. Makes me crazy…But they don’t want my opinion. I am an educated,knowledgeable experienced teacher. What do I know??
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Well, Duh …
It’s not about Reforming Education.
It’s about Real Estate.
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In Delaware, where “choice” is also the mantra of many GOP & Dem. officials, I’ve been trying to get fellow opponents of these measures to adopt the alternate phrase “school chance.” Choice sounds empowering, but for most families it amounts to a crap shoot–you enter a lot of school lotteries, you watch funds siphoned away from the traditional public schools in your community, you hope for a reasonable outcome for your child (and other children). But it’s a matter of CHANCE, not choice. Few families get the “choice” they most desire: the perceived hierarchy of school desirability is pretty consistent and aligns closely with the various schools’ demographic profiles. Public schools serving fewer poor children, many of them charters, are more desired by most families, leaving the neighborhood public schools that serve a wider socio-economic range of children lower on the “choice” totem poll. And the ability to exercise choice is heavily constrained, by design–e.g. some of the most highly desired “choices” do not come with meal benefits for low-income kids, or with publicly funded transportation–so they really aren’t available to the neediest students. Other coveted “choices” involve entrance exams to demonstrate “interest” in STEM subjects, etc.–virtually no low-income students have access to these publicly funded schools.
It’s School Chance. It’s a system based on gambling and stacked against the neediest kids.
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School Chance is a great renaming based on reality. Consider that stolen and spread around. In return I offer you the idea that charter schools should really be called corporate franchise or just franchise schools as that is the business model they most resemble.
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CA, thanks for the “franchise schools” concept–that’s a fair trade! I do think that there’s a battle to be fought (esp. in terms of press coverage) over language. Rephrasing the “reformers'” mantras to better describe what they are actually encouraging is an important part of keeping the public focused on the core issues & realities.
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Bloombergs lame duck actions are really quite simple. We have seen both the myth of failing schools and the assault on them to make the myth a reality by further burdening rather than helping them .This is the reformy SOP. Bloomberg is just salting the earth for deBlasio and thumbing his nose at the parents of NYC by causing as much damage as he can before he’s gone. He’s not taking his ball and going home, he’s taking NYC’s ball and throwing it in the river. This is how oligarchs throw a hissy fit.
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