A post yesterday reported that Florida is considering eliminating district lines so that students may choose to attend any public school, so long as there is space available and parents provide transportation. Michigan has such a system, and districts spend millions of dollars advertising to “poach” students from other districts because every new student means additional money.
As reader Chiara points out, Ohio has the same system, and it has intensified racial and economic segregation.
Open enrollment, which allows children to transfer from one school district to another, leads to widespread racial segregation and concentrates poverty in many of Ohio’s urban school districts, including Cleveland and Akron.
That’s one finding of a Beacon Journal study of more than 8,000 Ohio students who left city schools last year for an education in wealthier suburban communities.
The majority of students who participated in Ohio’s oldest school choice program are disproportionately white and middle class. Students attending the schools they left, however, are nearly twice as likely to be minority and seven times more likely to be poor.
The program gives parents the option to enroll children in nearby school districts without changing their home address. By doing so, parents must find their own transportation — an act that in itself narrows who is able to make the change.
Where is the NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU? If a state adopts a policy that demonstrably promotes segregation, shouldn’t someone sue them for knowingly enacting a program to segregate children by race and income?
And, our “governor” John Kasich is a supporter of privately owned public charter schools with less regulation than community public schools. He keeps taking money away from the community schools and funneling it into the pockets of his greedy corporate friends.
The so-called reforms in testing will not help the children or schools. By reducing the amount of practice test and diagnostic test time, it will probably guarantee worse results on the PARCC tests. He does not “get it”. He never does, but he has a bunch of evangelical admirers that are fooled by his rhetoric.
Where is the NAACP, the Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU?
Unfortunately I think all have been co-opted to support high stakes testing with disaggregated test scores in the belief that this is the only and best way to protect the civil rights of students.
Wade Henderson, President and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, with 200 members, including these, has argued for a reauthorization of the ESEA testing mandates and found 27 of the 200 members of Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights willing to sign a letter supporting this agenda. Many organizations that did sign on have been carefully cultivated as supporters of the testing as a panacea by Gates and other foundations see http://www.civilrights.org/press/2015/esea-reauthorization-principles.html
In ESEA hearings, Elizabeth Warren backed the continuation of testing to “account” for federal investments in education.
I suspect that districts and states are spending far more on implementing federal testing mandates than the federal government is giving to schools. I am very disappointed in Elizabeth Warren. At least she has the responsibility to learn something about public education from educators rather than just accepting the reform line. She is very knowledgeable in her own area and should have enough smarts to realize she should be talking to knowledgeable folks in education and area in which she is ignorant rather than relying on the business lobby.
And so with the burden of transportation on the parents/students comes the increase of traffic, energy use, and pollution resultant of the substantial number of students shuttled in personal family automobiles in a myriad of directions and destinations. Yup, that helps
the environment for the future of our children.
This could be a good thing if set up properly, perhaps having an EOP policy, plus providing bussing throughout the extended districts. My brother lives in New Jersey and they have a County Wide school district that they are happy with. Their children go to the local high school, but there are numerous options such as a culinary or a gifted high school.
However, they are white and privileged. I’m not sure what happens to minority students.
Ellen #OnceAgainGoodIdeasMadeEvil
One of the problems with the Ohio reform was transportation costs. They were prohibitive. They would be spending money on transportation that could be spent on education, and to benefit a small group of students who have a leg-up anyway. It doesn’t make much sense in more rural districts either, where people have to drive miles.
Because it’s a public system, I think they have to pay more attention to the effects on all the children. Here, there was very little thought given to the children who stayed in the “sending” schools- those children were harmed to benefit the “choice” students. I don’t think that should happen. They have to anticipate system-wide effects, or they can’t justify it on cost-benefit.
Chiara – whatever system you use, there are always unintended consequences. Back in the late 1970s -1990s in Buffalo, we had “sister” schools – one from a white neighborhood, one from a minority (usually black) neighborhood – which combined into a mixed population who attended a PreK to second grade building in one area of the city, then in a third to eighth grade building in another. This was Buffalo’s attempt at integration. There were also numerous magnet schools which took kids from all over the city – chosen by a lottery system.
Now, forty years later, the schools (public, charter, and private) are more segregated than ever. White flight continues to have an effect as there is now less than a 20% “majority” mostly from either South Buffalo or the affluent Parkside Area.
Ellen #NotExactlyADreamComeTrue
It gives one an appreciation for how complex these systems are, especially when one ed reform is piled atop another over decades and years.
So, what role did the open enrollment reform decades ago have on the strength of the Cleveland and Akron systems today?
If the open enrollment reform “concentrated poverty in many of Ohio’s urban school districts, including Cleveland and Akron” how does that prior experiment relate the current ed reform experiments? Were Cleveland and Akron weakened by the first reform, leading to where we are today, where reformers are pushing privatization as a fix?