Peter Greene has often heard reformers say that children’s destiny should not be defined by their zip code. He read an article by one of the bigwigs in the New Orleans experiment, who argued against neighborhood schools and in favor of the greatest possible choice so that children’s schooling would not be tied to their zip code.
Greene responds that neighborhood schools build community cohesion.
Greene proposes an alternative to breaking up neighborhood schools:
“We’ve tried many solutions to the problems of schools that are underfunded and lack resources. We move the students around. We close the schools and re-open different ones (often outside that same neighborhood). Does it not make sense to move resources? We keep trying to fix things so that the poor students aren’t all in the poor schools– would it not more completely solve the problem to commit to insuring that there are no poor schools?
“Doesn’t that make sense? If the neighborhood school is not poor– if it has a well-maintained physical plant, great resources, a full range of programs, and well-trained teachers (not some faux teachjers who spent five weeks at summer camp)– does that not solve the problem while allowing the students to enjoy the benefits of a more cohesive community?
“Community and neighborhood schools have the power to be engines for stability and growth in their zip code. Instead of declaring that we must help students escape the schools in certain zip codes, why not fix the schools in that zip code so that nobody needs to escape them?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Follow the money…busing kids around sells fuel, generates bucks for businesses re-outfitting new locations and for those who own them. Imagine the hue and cry if a public school were operated on a for profit basis with taxpayer money!
Ohio ed reform is a sad, embarrassing joke:
COLUMBUS, OH – A northeast Ohio educational service center that is trying to open an unauthorized community school has “so completely disregarded” state laws that the Ohio Department of Education is reporting its leaders to the state’s educator conduct office.
In a letter sent Monday, the Ohio Department of Education accused Portage County Educational Service Center leaders of trying to circumvent the law and mislead students and teachers by opening a new charter school under a defunct school’s state identification number.
Ohio already has banned the center from opening new charter schools—for the second time in three years—because students in schools it has authorized have shown poor academic performance.
The letter noted that the operator Portage County Educational Service Center had contracted with for the new Cincinnati school, to be called Hope 4 Change Academy, had no experience running a K-12 school. It also said the center failed to confirm the school operator would protect the health and safety of students and ensure academic rigor. The letter maintained that the center did not require the operator to prove it was financially fit to open and maintain the school.
This summer, the department has encouraged schools it considers “effective,” such as Cincinnati Public Schools, the Cincinnati Diocese and several high-quality charter schools, to accept children from VLT Academy, a defunct charter school in the same area. The Portage County Educational Service Center had marketed Hope 4 Change Academy to VLT students and families. The department of education now is requiring the center to work with “legitimate school providers” to transfer the students it has already registered.”
The state doesn’t have any actual statutory authority to stop the school from opening, so they’re begging them to stop opening schools, although the “authorizer” ignored them the last 2 times they asked and opened new schools anyway. Now they’re reduced to “encouraging” Catholic schools and charter schools to accept the students the rogue charter enrolled.
About 3 months ago, there was a series of newspaper pieces on our insane charter school policy, and lawmakers held press conferences and issued stern warnings in response. The ODE jumped in to stop regulation by insisting THEY would start regulating the schools. But they can’t regulate the schools. They don’t have any regulatory authority because charter lobbyists wrote the charter school law.
Any state that is following Ohio’s ed reform plan is crazy. Don’t listen to national ed reformers. Travel to this state and actually observe what is going on. Talk to people. Read local media in each city or part of the state. You will not believe it how “choice” has played out here. It’s a chaotic, corrupt mess, there’s not a thing the state can do about it under current law, and our lawmakers are so completely captured they will never pass any real regulation.
http://education.ohio.gov/Media/Media-Releases/Department-of-Education-Accuses-Portage-County-Edu#.U_8f9WSwK9S
Micromanagement, toxicity and misery for the public schools, insanity and corruption for the rest. What a great reform package. And Arne’s best answer is a year delay, like all of those waivers that merely allowed partial implementation to take place. He is a resounding failure. Education is definitely a major blind spot for Obama. What a huge disappointment.
Stebelton, chairman of the Ohio House Education committee is on the ALEC Education Task Force. A total of 6 Ohio House education committee members are also members of ALEC. Wonder if that has anything to do with the mess Ohio’s public schools are in?
When you read the stats on the charter schools Ohio “holds accountable” by closings, that’s baloney too. The schools are closed and then re-open with new names, many times in the same location.
“On Romig Road, the manager continues to be Virginia-based Imagine Schools, one of the nation’s largest for-profit education companies.
Imagine has a significant presence in Ohio. Last school year, the company operated 16 charter schools, received $46.9 million in state tax dollars and enrolled 6,582 students, according to the company’s website and state financial records.
Of the schools that were rated, all but one received a “D” or “F” in 2012.
The process of flipping a failing school is an easy one.”
“Flipping” is a term you may be familiar with- prior to this it was applied to real estate speculators. It’s now Ohio public education policy, thanks to national lobbyists and “thought leaders” who wrote our state law and then moved on to lobby YOUR state.
http://www.ohio.com/news/education/failing-charter-schools-often-close-reopen-with-little-change-1.426798
In the best of all worlds, the neighborhood school would not be a poor school. For too many urban students, the failure of poor schools is one of driving forces behind the charter movement. Scapegoating teachers has been a strategy to “reform” failing schools when the real issue is funding and enrollment borders. We know that peer learning is powerful. Maybe we should redefine the neighborhood. and encourage the creation of neighborhood school borders designed to distribute middle class and poor students by mixing urban and suburban students while trying to keep travel times as reasonable as possible. This redesign could work since many middle class school districts are adjacent to urban school districts. It would be a logistical challenge, but the potential reward could be huge. Failing neighborhood schools are not a great solution. I grew up in Philly and attended a public magnet school, long before the term existed. There was no loss of neighborhood identity by attending this school. We got an identity from the institution rather than the neighborhood. In any case it can’t be any worse than the mess they have made in Newark where the plan is devised by non-professional bureaucrats in a hap hazard way. I know there would be lots of resistance from suburban school districts, but decisions should be made to benefit students, not what’s politically expedient.
Greene is right. Often in areas of with high rates of poverty, crime and street gang violence, stability is missing in a child’s life. A well funded public school staffed with dedicated, well trained and supported and supportive teachers offers that stability, an oasis in an insane and dangerous world. When these public schools are well funded, they have proper security and the teachers have better support to create a learning environment against many challenges.
I taught in these schools for thirty years. More than 70 percent of the children were on free or reduced lunch. There were street gangs. There were drugs. There was violence and crime. I witnessed drive by shootings more than once from my classroom doorway. The more of a say the teachers had in how the school was run, the more of an oasis of education the school became.
Those public schools were an oasis that was mostly a zone free of that world because of teachers who often stayed in the profession for decades. Most of us worked as a supportive team even when we had lousy administrators, district administration and an unresponsive, ignorant school board. Through our union, teachers had a voice that stood up to bad budget cut decisions when they would impact the education of our students and we often protested without fear of being fired.
For instance, a few years before I retired, the children of former students started to show up in my classroom and what was amazing was that those former students were more supportive as parents than their parents had been, because after they matured and became parents themselves, they knew that I was on their side and wanted what was best for their child’s future.
Read the following quote and you may see what I mean:
“School readiness reflects a child’s ability to succeed both academically and socially in a school environment. It requires physical well-being and appropriate motor development, emotional health and a positive approach to new experiences, age-appropriate social knowledge and competence, age-appropriate language skills, and age-appropriate general knowledge and cognitive skills (9). It is well documented that poverty decreases a child’s readiness for school through aspects of health, home life, schooling and neighbourhoods. Six poverty-related factors are known to impact child development in general and school readiness in particular. They are the incidence of poverty, the depth of poverty, the duration of poverty, the timing of poverty (eg, age of child), community characteristics (eg, concentration of poverty and crime in neighborhood, and school characteristics) and the impact poverty has on the child’s social network (parents, relatives and neighbors). A child’s home has a particularly strong impact on school readiness. Children from low-income families often do not receive the stimulation and do not learn the social skills required to prepare them for school. Typical problems are parental inconsistency (with regard to daily routines and parenting), frequent changes of primary caregivers, lack of supervision and poor role modelling. Very often, the parents of these children also lack support.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/
It’s far too easy for some distant elected state or federal representative to pass ignorant and unjust laws that demand perfection. Teachers are not miracle workers. There is no way that 100 percent of the children in the United States will be college and/or career ready by age 17/18 or any age. That goal has never been achieved in history in any country on this planet.
Properly trained and supported teachers can only do their best. As long as they are making the effort to teach in a properly supported educational environment, those teachers have a much better chance to reach more students.
This madness of testing that was forced on the public schools thanks to Bill Gates will never work. To make this rank and yank look like it is working, they are cherry picking facts to report to the media in an effort to fool the public.
It’s not clear to me what Greene means by “move resources.” Move them from where?
Well, for starters, move a few hundred billion from the annual Defense Budget to public education. For instance, do we really the largest and the most aircraft carriers in the world—more than every country in the world combined?
China has one. Russia has one. And they are both really old and small compared to most of the carriers in the U.S. Navy.
I had assumed he meant “move resources” from one part of the education system to another, but he may have been thinking of what you have in mind.
“For instance, a few years before I retired, the children of former students started to show up in my classroom and what was amazing was that those former students were more supportive as parents than their parents had been, because after they matured and became parents themselves, they knew that I was on their side and wanted what was best for their child’s future.”
New definition of an effective teacher = Influence across at least a generation. Note that i did not use the word “impact.”
Witnessed this in a school where I taught. Senior faculty knew the community–deep history– and many stayed in place for a full career. They were admired and respected in ways NEVER captured in the truncated annual stack ratings of teachers now imposed on the teaching workforce. All was not perfect, but the teachers who were perceived as obstacles to securing the safe haven for learning were weeded out by administrators who were not afraid to have that difficult discussion–you need to find a different job or place to work. None of these administrators hid behind numbers.
My kids attend an urban school, and what you say is so true. This is why I am weary of the “tired teacher waiting for retirement” meme. While sometimes true, I find the teachers that have been able to stick it out are the most dedicated, not only to teaching, but to the students and their families as a whole.
Parents often note that many of our best teachers are the ones who live in the community. Not because of any special teaching skills, but because they understand where the kids are coming from, see them in the grocery store, are able to more easily come to board meetings, etc. I know that living in our city isn’t for everyone, but many parents and community members have often voiced the suggestion that there be some sort of incentive or financial bonus for teachers who live in the city. It seems that these sorts of programs are actually decreasing, rather than increasing, around the nation. Anyone know of any districts that currently have residential incentive programs?
In my district at least, school catchment determination is a mix of neighborhood and an effort to integrate schools. Geographic proximity is given more weight in elementary schools, and this results in large differences in the percentage of students eligible for free and reduced price lunches across elementary schools, SES integration dominates at the high school level so some students living less than a mile from one high school will be assigned to a different high school over four miles away.
If you try to enhance cohesion at the neighborhood level, you increase SES segregation in your school system. If you view community cohesion at the city level, you decrease neighborhood cohesion by splitting neighborhoods with catchment line boundaries and decrease SES segregation.
“well-trained teachers (not some faux teachjers [SIC] who spent five weeks at summer camp)”
The problem, of course, is that all of the rigorous studies show that TFA teachers are at least as good, if not better, than regularly-trained teachers.
As good or better by what measure? Standardized test scores?
Meh!
Rockhound: what you said.
😃
But have you considered the distinct possibility—1% to 14% according to the usual unconfirmed rumors from the American Statistical Association—that someone has helped us follow doctor’s orders?
¿?
“A day without laughter is a day wasted.” [Charlie Chaplin, “Doctor” of Laughology with a speciality in Smile-esthenics]
I don’t know about you, but after reading the comment you referenced, I have not wasted this day.
😏
WT,
Let’s look at the TFA from a different perspective than the ability to teach.
Studies show that the more experience a teacher has, the better job they do in the classroom—and that comes from years and decades.
TFA’s retention rate at 4 years is 33% and 86 percent of those who stay transfer to higher performing schools with much lower rates of children who live in poverty and at-risk children. That means that only 4.6 percent of TFA recruits stay teaching in schools with high rates of poverty and at-risk students.
The retention rate for regular trained teachers is more than 50 percent and they tend to stay in the same school.
Then there is the group of teachers that beats both TFA and regularly trained teachers: Urban residency training programs that are for one full school year in a master teacher’s classroom with a year or more of follow up support from the teacher training program. The retention rate at four years is 86 percent and these teachers are ranked high by principals and stay in the schools that need them most.
Stability is extremely important for at-risk children, and teachers who stay in the same school longer create that stability. TFA recruits have a revolving door out of the teaching profession or to other schools where the students are easier to teach making them look good over the long term compared to teachers who stay in schools with high-risk kids who offer challenges to teach.
These “bigwigs” don’t to open the schools in THEIR zip code to the choices available to children raised in poverty… otherwise they would welcome low income housing options in their neighborhoods.
wgersen,
High quality schools can cause higher rents and property values in the catchment areas, so maintaining affordable housing in the area assigned to a good school might be difficult. In the recent rezoning of PS 321 in Brooklyn, for example, one of the families whose apartment was removed from the catchment area estimated that the value of the apartment dropped by $100,000 due to the rezoning. I have no doubt that the reputation of PS 321 drives up the cost of living in that catchment zone, but I do not know if the $100,000 figure is accurate.
It’s a vicious circle: people in affluent zip codes set up $100,000+ “walls” that block less affluent neighbors from entry. Do you think a “school-choice reformer” in a NYC suburb would allow children in the city to “choose” to attend their public schools? They will rightfully point out that they’ve chosen to live in a high-cost suburban house despite its higher taxes because they want their children to get a good public education. They, in effect, acknowledge that money makes a difference. Will the affluent suburban residents allow their NYS taxes to increase so that the per pupil expenditures in the Bronx will match theirs? In a just world they would. In our world, they offer city kids a “choice” within NYC and claim that everyone has an equal opportunity to learn… and “throwing money at the problem” is no solution at all.
wgersen,
You might look at the enrollment at the Community Roots Charter School and compare it to PS 321.
Community Roots Charter School is diverse (41% white, 37% African American, 11% Hispanic, 7% multiracial) and 26% of the students are eligible for free or reduced price lunch.
PS 321 is mostly white (70% white, 11% Hispanic, 10% Asian or Asian/Pacific Islander, 9% African American) and only 11% of the students in that school are eligible for free or reduced price lunch.