Here is a link to the report of the Annenberg institute of School Reform, which documents that the New York City Department of Education has systematically steered students with the highest needs to the lowest-performing schools.
This guarantees that the students will not get the services they need, and guarantees that the struggling school will fail and close.
It is shameful.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“This guarantees that the students will not get the services they need, and guarantees that the struggling school will fail and close.”
AND be turned into a charter AND fill private pockets with public funds– the whole point of implementing the “creative destruction” business model in education
Too true!
According to the corporate “reformers” and their minions, it is “all about the children”. They set up charters as improvements to Public schools and how many OTC students were sent to charters(they are Public schools, right)? This is just one of many examples where these minions have failed Public Education!
this comes as absolutely no surprise to me. it was so obvious from the first that this is what the DOE had in mind.
I hope that these students’ parents protest loudly! Shame on the NYC Department of
Education!
shameful is too mild a word. criminal is closer to the truth. I picture those in power sitting around a big table in a fancy board room making these decisions to destroy the lives of children.
And then they cut our budgets, slash our services and increase class size. Only one month into the school year, and local charter schools are already dumping! Can’t anyone help us and the kids? Please?
Budget is not the problem in N.Y. City Public Schools with over $22,000/student it is what Bloomburg and his minions do with it. This is a sick example of their sociopathy. If you cannot take care of the least of you you cannot take care of anyone stands.
Vote in Di Blasio and hold his feet to the fire. Stop the insane charter schools for free, Treat these students correctly. Stop blowing away your money for friends to get rich. Put the arts and physical exercise back into those schools. Make sure they are pollution free as many have PCB’s in the old lighting and caulking. Many are having fumes from the old pollution seep into the classrooms and cause problems. There you have the problem of the tides pumping the ground and making all those old chemical slowly come up.
The public owns the schools not the billionaires and they need to learn that lesson and if it has to be a hard lesson “So Be It.” Without that attitude I guarantee they will steamroller you right into the ground. Just as at Tiennamen Square they did not know what to do when the guy stood in front of the tank.
Could anyone think of a more de-personalized name for these high-risk students, too? “Over the counter” sounds like unregulated, use as you like –and they sure are being used…
This week’s TIME has Bloomberg on the cover and the article clearly owns the fact that corporate reform is real.
“Without billionaires like Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Eli Broad and Jim Walton, the revolution now taking place in K-12 education–charter schools, standardized tests, Common Core, merit pay, the end of tenure–would be years behind schedule.”
Interesting that it is called a revolution.
There is also an interview with Andre Agassi.
I haven’t thought about it enough to comment.
Andre Agassi raised $750 million in venture capital to open a chain of charter schools. He should open tennis camps.
I think it was a typo, instead of revolution he/she meant “devolution” in the biological sense of degeneration.
Well in the same issue Joe Klein’s “Apocalypse Now” piece is pretty interesting, pointing out the nihilism of the new Left and the politics of confrontation from both the new Left and the Tea Party.
Alas it looks to the millennials to be more collegial.
It is interesting.
But going back to the other article. Revolution? Really?
No thank you. This mother says no, not for my kid. I don’t buy it. Revolution does not come from the top. In fact, I would wager that the new efforts in corporate teform,while possibly motivated by some out of touch sleek and shiny syndrome desire to help, are more likely intended to beat those who might actually instigate a revolution from doing so and beating them to the punch??? Hence the urgency. ?
Then again, if the “failing schools” line had to be fabricated, then maybe we were beyond needing revolution (just maybe normal improvements) but now that corporate reform has taken us to a new place all together, they call it revolution. I think they need a new word. “Creative disruption/destruction” is now being called revolution? How about just call it destruction?
“Revolution does not come from the top.”
Exactly, those at the top have good historical reasons to fear true revolutions.
Billionaires don’t need to start a revolution from the bottom. That’s for commoners. The corporate elites paid handsomely to ALEC and politicians for the reigns over both political parties and they have effectively committed a coup d’etat from the top.
“Interesting that it is called a revolution.”
Ah, yes. The now familiar media demand that we be grateful for donations.
I didn’t ask Bill Gates to “reform” my local public school. I reject his “gift.” As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s a gift at all.
Chiara, remember the gift known as the Trojan horse.
Joanna, isn’t it good that TIME placed the blame where it belongs: on the billionaires.
TIME magazine is unaware that public education belongs to the public, not the billionaires.
Joanna,
Your post has me thinking of John Lennon lyrics…so I hope you forgive me as I use your old method (by the way I miss your posting of lyrics). I expect it will be the poets that get us out of this mess,
……………………………………………………………………………………………..
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re doing what we can
But when you want money
For people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right
All right, all right
This is a slight variation on one of the wrinkles of the Chicago plan. Here, “choice” has now helped create a three-tiered school system where for decades it had been a two-tiered system.
This is a lengthy historical sharing, prompted by Diane’s notes above and by questions that have been raised in Chicago about the so-called “decline” of the city’s neighborhood high schools. Actually, as I recently outlined on a TV show, what we are viewing is the sabotage of the schools in the communities over a long period of time, a sabotage that was perfected as policy by the “Chicago Boys” long before they got to export it across the USA behind Arne Duncan and Barack Obama’s “Race To The Top.”
For decades, Chicago had a couple of selective enrollment high schools — and then all the others. On the city’s North Side, where my family and I live, the selective high school for years was Lane Technical High School (where Karen Lewis taught chemistry for years and years before going to King High School, then to the presidency of the Chicago Teachers Union). Lane Tech selected its 9th graders by what one principal joked to me was the “scissors” method.
“You take scissors to the printout and cut off everyone below a certain reading score,” he said. The printout was the printout of all the students’ seventh grade reading scores. In those days, Chicago used the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. The kids who didn’t make the (literal) “cut” were sent to the general high schools on the North Side.
By the 1970s, desegregation (both of races and sexes; Lane Tech was “all boys” for generations) forced Chicago’s public schools to sort of “desegregation.” As a result, CPS added some magnet schools to both the elementary and high school levels. The requirement was that the magnet schools be desegregated, and as a result, Chicago developed some of the “best” schools in Illinois — by allowing them to select students based on race AND test scores. As a result of that, my eldest son and the First Lady of the USA (then, Michelle Robinson, today, Michelle Obama) got one of the best possible educations at Whitney Young Magnet High School.
But there was always the “cut” — and those children left behind.
By the time Chicago got mayoral control in 1995, there was a growing demonization of the non-selective public schools — especially at the high school level.
So Mayor Daley and his school board, and Chicago’s first “Chief Executive Officer” Paul G. Vallas, proclaimed (that’s what CEOs do; Daley was CEO of Chicago, Vallas Daley’s schools CEO) that Chicago would have six “new” “College Prep Academic Magnet” high schools, one for each of the six “regions” they had also proclaimed then (a region was basically a sub-district).
They actually built two new “academic magnet college prep” high schools on the North Side (where most of the white folks in town live). By 1998, Chicago had Northside College Prep and Walter Payton College Prep high schools. Both were brand new schools, new buildings (some quirky stuff, but that’s outside the scope of this report) and new faculties. I covered the openings, and in both cases the schools were bragging about how many Ivy League teachers were on their brand new staffs. (No mention of whether those FNGs could teach, or how long they’d be in Chicago). Northside served mostly the wealthier and middle class people of the North Side. Payton was built for the city’s Gold Coast (the area that many tourists see in Chicago, along the lake adjacent to the “Magnificent Mile” and by Oak Street Beach). Payton actually had a Pritzker for four years (although she used her Dad’s name for security reasons, understandable actually). The privileges grew.
Farther south (where the Black people live), the “academic magnet thing was a bit different. Instead of building new schools, Daley and Vallas destroyed one very good existing school (Jones “commercial”) and created an expensive “college prep” high school in a building serving the “community” where Daley had moved (the so-called “Museum Campus”). By converting Jones to “Jones College Prep,” the Chicago Board of Education created what would become the most expensive high school in Illinois. Jones had been built to train office workers, 11th and 12th graders who went there to get Loop office jobs. It was famous for that. By 1999, Daley and Vallas had destroyed it, and Chicago had begun an expensive process of buying land to create a four-year high school where a two-year specialized school had been. (That’s another story for another time).
Farther south, there were three “new” “College Prep Academic Magnet High Schools” — but none was really new. Instead of building new schools (or spending hundreds of millions like on the crazy Jones project), south of Roosevelt Road (as good a border as any for those wanting to know where “Black Chicago” begins) the Board didn’t bother to build buildings, they just did conversions.
— Lindblom Technical High School was renamed “Lindblom College Prep” academic magnet high school.
— King High School (four blocks from the home of Barack Obama and family) went form being a general high school to being “King College Prep High School.”
— and the Board of Education bought a high school from a Catholic order and converted it, with a new paint job, into “Brooks College Prep High School.”
At every point in this development, the supposed policy reason for the “college prep” magnet stuff was that the schools would desegregate.
But five years ago, the federal judge in Chicago who was monitoring Chicago’s limp “desegregation” plan said Chicago didn’t need federal oversight any longer.
It became a racist free for all. The selective enrollment high schools on the North Side (where the white people are most densely concentrated) became less and less Black. Meanwhile, the “college prep high schools” south of Roosevelt Road became more and more Black.
You might say that “nature” — Chicago style — was taking its course. America’s most segregated city was intensifying segregation (again).
But during the last ten years, another example was added:
The charter schools. As charter schools proliferated across Chicago (long before Arne Duncan and Barack Obama foisted them on the rest of the USA through the bribery and coercion of Race To The Top, Chicago was doing it), the city’s community public schools were being sabotaged by the Board of Education.
The sabotage was most clear in the “general high schools” and the details of how it was done are vast, but one of the most simple was austerity.
The selective enrollment high schools do not have to take “extra” kids. They have a set number of kids, their classes begin on time, and their students have a stable school year from the first days of class. That’s how my eldest son got his high school education at Whitney Young.
Meanwhile, the city’s “extra” kids — ranging from new arrivals from all over the world to those whose families are so negligent (or non-existent) that they don’t know until October that school had started — are poured into the general high schools.
So by October, the general high schools have more kids than they did in September. The result is that the schools need more teachers. But the Board of Education holds back assigning teachers until as late as possible. Then, program changes take place all around.
So…
while the families whose children are in the selective high schools (or the charters, since the 21st Century began) are chugging along with their year, the thousands of families whose children are in the general high schools are watching (if they notice) that school hasn’t really begun until October (or later).
Since much of this victimization is done to the most vulnerable families, there wasn’t a lot of complaining over the years, except from teachers like me who decided to work in those “at risk” schools and serve those kids. Since the election of Karen Lewis and the CORE team (of which I am a part, serving on the steering committee and now being a delegate from the CTU to the national and state conventions), the Chicago Teachers Union has been creating a series of reports and research studies about how these insidious policies evolved, and how they work today.
Some of us on the research team and in the leadership (myself; Carol Caref; Jesse Sharkey) taught most of our careers in the general high schools and came to the leadership with that knowledge. Others came from the selective enrollment schools.
But all of us, as we elaborated our study of the history, knew that these policies were wrong.