Julie Vassilatos explains why school choice is harmful: to students, families, and communities.
She writes:
I don’t care what anyone tells me about competition among schools making them all better, or how being able to pursue individual preference is paramount to all Americans. I don’t care. The real impact of choice is entirely, 100% negative on our neighborhoods, on our communities, our cities. All of them.
Because “choice” of this kind quietly diminishes the real power of our democratic voice while it upholds the promise of individual consumer preferences above all else.
Even though Chicago is famously a city of neighborhoods, CPS does not pursue a neighborhood-based model for its schools but rather, choice–the constant proliferation of charter school options, even when neighborhoods don’t want this and even when CPS cannot afford this.
In this model the local community is not important, and the voice of the local residents is not important. The neighborhood school is not the social epicenter for kids in one community and it is not the locus of parent effort and investment of time. In some neighborhoods few resident kids attend the local school and in still others the neighborhood school is shuttered and abandoned.
What is important in this model? Marketing. Test scores. Options.
Schools must now “build a brand” in order to attract students. Schools must maintain high test scores at all costs, regardless of what corners have to be cut in the process. And a multiplicity of schools offers us all a dizzying, and therefore–according to this logic–superior, array of options.
But in a choice district, parents and kids rarely have the one option they most want–a strong, well resourced, nearby, neighborhood school. I think there’s a reason for this.
We’re veterans of choice in our family. I can tell you what I see in my neighborhood.
This is what school choice looks like: no schoolmates in your neighborhood for your whole life.
It looks like children traveling several hours a day to get to and from their schools….
With the choice model, what CPS is doing is investing in severing community. CPS has chosen a school model that fractures and breaks down local bonds among families and within neighborhoods.
But consider: severing community bonds intentionally is not something democracies do. Democracies require stable communities with strong institutions that are of, by, and for the community. Democracies are built on strong stable localities.
Severing community bonds intentionally is something totalitarian regimes do. Because it weakens communities, it weakens individuals, it weakens their democratic voice and power.
It looks like very little political and residential investment into the heart of neighborhood communities.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is exactly right. And we know it because you don’t see this outcry for school choice from parents in affluent and middle class suburbs where there are excellent public schools that their children are automatically sent to.
When you actually attend meetings about the “segregated schools” of NYC with parents of color, their priority is not integration and wanting their child to attend a school with equal numbers of African-American, Latino, Asian, White, and every other possible ethnic group. What they want is good neighborhood schools. Which means well-funded neighborhood schools with small class sizes and resources to deal with the kids who are from at-risk families.
What the “reformers” are saying is THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE! We don’t have the money and the best we can do is offer the “strivers” at your failing public schools a well-funded schools. The rest have to rot because sorry, we can’t afford it. But maybe you can send your child to that other neighborhood where the parents donate more money to subsidize their school because we have also taken the resources from that school, too.
I find it so outrageous that anyone supports this. Talking about stealing possible. They prefer the money is given to the privatizers — the CEOs with the chutzpah to take money right out of the mouths of struggling public schools to feed their own agenda.
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I want a choice. I choose a good public school in my neighborhood.
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So we should just make every neighborhood school good. Sounds pretty simple.
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It is simple if resources are available and if the definition of “good” doesn’t mean “every child must perform at or above average”.
And that doesn’t mean “low expectations”. It means understanding that students learn in different ways and if experienced teachers have enough time and small enough class sizes and lots of support, they can reach students in a variety of different ways.
But I’m probably biased by the fact that my child — who struggled to learn to read — had a very experienced teacher who didn’t panic because she was told that if every child didn’t get from point A to point C by halfway through Kindergarten, that child should be hounded and made miserable because that child wasn’t working hard enough. Instead of going from point A to point G in a month when reading suddenly clicked, I’m sure my child could have been traumatized into hating reading by being made to feel misery for failing to learn what was “expected”.
The ignorant reformers who have never taught a young child, or who think their two years at a TFA school makes them experts remind me of ignorant OBs. You have to be pretty ignorant to think that just because the “average” woman’s labor progresses at 1cm dilated per hour, it doesn’t mean that if a woman’s labor is progressing a bit slower then an immediate c-seciton is in order. Understanding that labor can go from 1-5 in 24 hours and 5-10 in one hour or some combination of that is part of the art of being a doctor. And a teacher understanding that children learn at different rates is part of the art of being a teacher.
That doesn’t mean that newly minted interns with no experience are always wrong or that old doctors always right. But if doctors were graded on whether every woman gave birth 10 hours after her labor officially began because that was the “average”, we would have the stupidest medical system in the world and the highest C-section rate in the world. But that is what the “reformers” think should be done with education. That seems to be how their dream charter schools are designed. If a child isn’t learning xx by grade xx, an immediate c-section (i.e. label them special ed so you can get them out of your school) is necessary.
All of which is a digression about the fact that “reformers” don’t seem to care anymore about what really makes a “good school”. They care about test results only and any practices a school makes to get to that “good” is acceptable, even if the cost of it is borne by all the children who aren’t “average”.
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The conversation was SWITCHED 2o years ago.
I was a cohort for the REAL Pew funded, Harvard run, New standards research about THE EFFORT-BASED PRINCIPLES THAT UNDERLY LEARNING.
Click to access polv3_3.pdf
From day 1 in the seminars run by the Univ of Pittsburgh’s LRDC (their Ph’d arm of staff developers who train the nation’s STAFF DEVELOPERs) the ONLY conversation wash about LEARNING…what does it really look like, and what facilitates an enable sit in the human brain…the emergent mind of a child.
People walk into a class or school and can be called by pretty bulletin boards. It is so easy to fool people. They do not pretend to talk into a hospital and grasp what is working, but everyone knows what good teaching looks like… and are clueless about how kids learn.
Now we have the charlatans and snake oil salesmen, people who have never been in a classroom with 15 kids, let alone 40, telling an ignorant citizenry what TEACHING LOOKS LIKE!
DUH!
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Julie Vassilatos has it right and it doesn’t just apply to cities, but to small rural communities as well. Consolidation is increasingly pushed to control costs, but communities fight to keep their schools because they are the center of community life.
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The agenda’s of the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives lead to totalitarianism.
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When did we stop prosecuting powerful people and instead just collect fines?
“At a press conference this morning, the Justice Department, the Department of Education, and a group of state attorneys general announced what Attorney General Loretta Lynch called a “landmark settlement” of fraud charges against for-profit college company Education Management Corporation (EDMC). The company will pay $95.5 million — the largest False Claims Act settlement ever with a for-profit college — to resolve a 2007 whistleblower lawsuit claiming the company illegally paid its recruiters based on the number of students signed up.
Lynch called the settlement “a historic step forward in our collective ongoing fight against fraudulent and abusive practices in the for-profit college industry.” She called EDMC “a high pressure recruitment mill.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan added that EDMC “outright lied” to the government when it certified its compliance with the law prohibiting sales commissions.
Last year EDMC took in about a billion dollars in taxpayer-provided student aid: $335 million in Pell Grants and $650 million in federal student loans. Those numbers dwarf today’s settlement amount, a disparity that Lynch chalked up to EDMC’s financial situation.
It makes matters worse that EDMC admitted no responsibility for its actions in the case. Indeed the company’s new CEO, Mark A. McEachen, issued a statement calling the lawsuit “without merit.”
Was there some “immunity for CEO’s” law passed when we weren’t looking?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/davidhalperin/unrepentant-edmc-ceo-will_b_8576800.html
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AH, now you nailed it. You and I cannot settle, and in fact, contracts for anything and everything come with ‘arbitration ‘classes’ that make it impossible to sue.
THEY have tied the people in knots while why slide along like the snakes they are.
Chump change for settlements, and the CEOs see their compensation rise to hundred’s of times what the employees in the companies earn. There is not a shred of accountability for criminal behavior AT THE TOP in this nation. The housing bubble took away the home of the people, BUT the same bank practices are in place and the bubble is growing again, because there isn such thing as failure for .
Without accountability, the human animal does as it pleases, and with 1 in 25 lacking the ability to empathize, these critters rise to the top.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/sociopath-next-door-unabridged/id359786585
Add to this, the liar’s paradise that is our media, where in the name of ‘balance’ any and all opinions rise to the same level as facts, and one gets to see men who wish to be PRESIDENT lying with impunity, twisting truth until there is no relationship to observable reality.
Today’s culture is corrupt, and with the destruction of the schools, we have an ignorant public fed on lies, and lacking access to the law. The American Dream is a nightmare for too many people, and the only thing that separates us from the rest of the world’s craziness is 2 HUGE OCEANS! And even that can be breached.
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I don’t know how these crooks pulled it off, but they used OUR money to buy OUR government to do THEIR bidding to rob from US who paid for it all in the first place.
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Around 2007-08 when Wall Street crashed. The feds had to bail them out and hardly anyone went to jail.
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At least there’s some talk that Glass-Steagall is coming back in 2016. I doubt it,
but it would be a step in the right direction.
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This parent, like so many who write here, recognizes the truth NOW, but has no idea that it was over 30 years ago that this plan was hatched by the billionaires, to privatize the schools, and disguise the assault with Orwellian rhetoric with terms like “CHOICE” — which offered the opposite, and “REFORM” which actually deformed teacher practice and replaced real learning methods with rote memorization and authentic performance evaluation, with standardized tests.
The national narrative became one about TEACHING not LEARNING
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Learning-not-Teacher-evalu-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-111001-956.html
Then the legislatures told THE PEOPLE, that austerity was necessary; (it was the opposite of the actual needS that would have led to a financial recovery for the middle class. (BUT, the culprits who stole our national wealth made out like the bandits they were.)
Suddenly public schools which simply needed smaller classes and upgraded facilities in the 21st century, like our bridges and infrastructure, were starved first,.
Austerity budgets hit the service sector hard. While police and fire services felt a hit, the ‘schools’ were targeted to be decimated… because respect for teachers could be eroded in the media, and the profession of pedagogy (Learning by the brain) , like medicine and law, is complex and hard to grasp, so the public could be bamboozled
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
Offering ‘charter’ schools with no transparency led to enormous fraud https://dianeravitch.net/?s=charter+school+fraud which was easily hidden because there are15,880 districts and folks in Oshkosh have no idea how they threw 80,000 LA teachers to the dogs, and how they systematically destroyed the largest of the systems NYC
Magic elixirs with no evidence required http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html has always been the way it is with ‘schools’ because people have no conception OF HOW LEARNING TAKES PLACE IN THE HUMAN BRAIN. They rely on pundits, and talking heads on tv.
Teachers need a college education because they cannot be trained, like medics. YOU may let a medic treat you in an ambulance, but you want a doctor to diagnose and treat you. A law clerk may help you , but you need an attorney if you go to court. Not anyone can teach, but the public was sold that by the narrative put out by the EIC https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf
They were able to foist their narrative about ‘schools’, because people do not realize that schools represent our INSTITUTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION and THIS the core of the American Dream —the road to opportunity for al
The national conversation was directed int he media by the EIC for 30 years.
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/08/subverting-the-national-conversation-a.html
That is how they sold ‘no choice’ charter schools to an ignorant public, and now with ordinary people unable to find a neighborhood school as they once did, unable to put their kids in a safe place where learning is enabled, ‘choose’ a place which operates with no oversight.
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Pro-choice advocates rarely point out the logistical difficulties regarding choice. Often they are from urban areas with high population densities and within a quite short travel time numbers schools can be found. But I grew up on the S.F. peninsula and in the county seat and the number of publicly-funded high schools in my city was one, exactly one. To provide “school choice” additional high schools would have to have been built. The number of junior highs was also one but there was a second school not that far out of the city. There were three elementary schools.
In rural areas, the opportunities for choice are even fewer. And when you decide to offer “choices” you have to split up larger schools to make smaller schools and when you do that you lose economies of scale, that is things get more expensive. If you break up one high school to make two charters, you now have two school administrations for the same number of students: two principals, two secretaries for the to principals, etc. If you end up creating a new school district, you also get to have more district administrators.
How is having more administrators for the same number of students a benefit? And how much “choice” do you really have? Maybe that second HS is a “STEM magnet” school and your child is a musician. Maybe that second school is a virtual school and your child doesn’t like computers or has social issues, etc. Only when schools reach a certain size can they actually have the resources to address individual needs of students.
So, my question is “why is ‘school choice’ always seen as ‘a good thing’ without details?” Why are people using “school choice” as a justification when it is at best a poorly defined term.
And the strangest thing of all is carving out support “for profit charter schools” from public school budgets. I have yet to have anyone explain to me how extracting profits from a school benefits students. I do not see many schools bragging about how much of their income is not spent upon educating their students (except possibly on Wall Street).
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“How is having more administrators for the same number of students a benefit? And how much “choice” do you really have? Maybe that second HS is a “STEM magnet” school and your child is a musician. Maybe that second school is a virtual school and your child doesn’t like computers or has social issues, etc. Only when schools reach a certain size can they actually have the resources to address individual needs of students.”
Great points.
There’s also this insistence that there are only two kinds of public schools- “wealthy suburban schools” and “failing schools”. That’s just flat out not true in Ohio. There are strong schools located in places that aren’t a “suburb” of anywhere and are mixed income.
I think there’s also a focus on really high-priced real estate markets, with the insistence that “no one” can afford a solid public school and we’re all rigidly divided by zip codes. You can rent a house here for 500 dollars a month where there’s a middle school that just won the Blue Ribbon award.
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This letter is so many steps ahead of theoretical Ed Reformer who has all the answers.
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“I don’t care what anyone tells me about competition among schools making them all better, or how being able to pursue individual preference is paramount to all Americans. I don’t care. The real impact of choice is entirely, 100% negative on our neighborhoods, on our communities, our cities. All of them.”
Well, that settles that, then. Everyone into your community and all your kids into their community school, no exceptions!
Good-bye, Central Park East I and II, Brooklyn New School, Manhattan School for Children, and Castle Bridge. It was fun while it lasted. Good thing Dante got out of Brooklyn Tech while he could, Mayor de Blasio—it, Science, Stuyvesant, the Urban Assembly Harbor School, Beacon, and scores of other choice high schools will now self-destruct. All of you kids flourishing with a free and appropriate education in a private school at NYC DOE expense? That’s done with. And in what would be the biggest change of all—get ready, PS 321, PS 107, PS 29, PS 234, PS 6, PS 290, PS 41, etc. There’s no more outsourcing of self-contained special ed kids to other schools: prepare for gen ed class sizes of 40 or more!
Buck up, residents of hypersegregated and isolated East New York, Austin, Englewood, Soundview, Melrose, etc: you can fix your schools! I know you’ve been hearing this separate but equal drivel for 50 or more years, and sure, it’s weird that so many of the people who work in these community institutions that must be preserved at all costs don’t look like you and don’t live in the community, but never mind! We just need a little more time and a lot more money and we’ve got this.
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You got it right. They did it…Total destruction.
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Susan Lee Schwartz: correct me if I’m wrong, but since the fanboys and fangirls of charters and privatization and vouchers [oops! “opportunity scholarships”] and such are huge huge fans of “creative disruption” and “innovative disruption” then, in the interests of fair play and even-handedness and logic and decency and consistency—
Shouldn’t they welcome the same applied to them and their self-serving schemes to pile up $tudent $ucce$$?
I mean, otherwise we’d have to conclude that self-styled “education reform” at the expense of public schools and the vast majority of students, parents, school staffs and communities is just a case of double think and double talk and double standards.
😱
Just the thought of saying one thing and doing another puts me in mind of one of those very dead and very old and very Greek guys:
“Hateful to me as are the gates of hell, Is he who, hiding one thing in his heart, Utters another.” [Homer]
😎
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Hey there NOT so Krazy, it is Orwell’s world come to pass.
Jut got this from Randi Weingarten ”
“A group called the Center for Individual Rights, which the American Prospect recently revealed has been funded by the Koch brothers, other right-wing one-percenters, and even white supremacists, is trying to make it even harder for public service workers to band together at work in order fight for benefits and wages we can use to provide for our families. If they win, it will hurt teachers like me, as well as nurses, social workers, firefighters and others in public service. And it will hurt the people in our communities—my union and others around the country negotiate and speak up for the communities we serve every day, and this case would make it harder for us to do so.”
Imagine the Orwellian nature of a Koch funded organization that purports to be for “INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.” LOL. Orwell is turning over in his grave!
Sometimes, I am dumbfounded, when I hear the names that the charlatans of the GOP apply to their organizations like ALEC,– People For The American Way– but then, the American way — today– ISWAY OF THE WEALTHY 1/10th of 1%, of 158 families who own more than all the rest of us. It is the ‘way’ of American oligarchs — what THEYwant, and what they have sold to an ignorant public.
They get their way with the people, or we would have our infrastructure repaired, and bullet trains criss-crossing our nation where endless highways now support gas-guzzling vehicles. We would have a one-payer health system. They got their way with our Supreme Court with Citizens United, which united no citizens and all the corporate entities into ‘peoplehood.”
If we the people had our way, the WAY the CONSTITUTION promised to promote the common good, WE THE POPLE would have neighborhood schools, that are safe, healthy and quiet environments, with no more than 18 children in a classroom, with well educated and well compensated professional teacher-practitioenrs WHO are autonomous in their practice, and supported by administrators who organize the programs and hire the support personnel, as well as supplying the needs of the classroom so that learning is facilitated. Those things by the way, WERE the underlying principles of learning for the REAL new Standards.
Orwell knew what would happen when the pigs took over the farm.
We see what happen when the snakes took over the schools.
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Whoa: Tim beats his own personal record for highest density of straw men, red herrings and half-truths in a single comment!
Congratulations, and let us all toast the master!
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No strawmen or red herrings whatsoever, did you read her piece? She is talking not only about charter choice, but about choice within traditional district CPS schools. Kids belong in their own neighborhoods with neighbor children who are their classmates, Julie says so!
Julie and you and other Plessy v Ferguson fans should realize that all parents who choose a public school other than the one assigned to their child based on her residence have not done so frivolously or without a great deal of thought. And not allowing kids to leave isn’t a real strategy to improve schools.
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And an encore provided, no less!
Bravo, from this Plessy vs. Ferguson fan!
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It really ought to be liberating for you, Michael, knowing that I know that you have no issues at all with cream-skimming, sorting, and excluding so long as it doesn’t threaten headcount. It’s settled, let’s move on.
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Ooh, ya got me!
Finally, at long last, busted for the being the closet segregationist I truly am!
Oh, how I loathe myself!
And congratulations, Tim, for ferreting out and exposing the true racists among us!
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Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
Marketing, tests scores, and “options.”
How simple it all sounds.
But I wonder what would happen if the Gates Foundation, the Waltons, and all the other gazillionaires pushing the testing standards and charter schools would spend as much money on improving neighborhood schools in poorer areas, and also spend some of their resources in doing something about the profound problems of poverty in our country.
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But that is precisely what should have occurred. Instead austerity politics served schools which needed funding. The government is there to fund things for the common good, according to the Constitution. Society is the root of our nation , and it is not socialism to fund those things like the transportation systems, the health systems and the education systems which we all need. Capitalism run amok, privatizing everything.
40 million children live in poverty. How will they rise out of that without public schools.
The EIC knows this. https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf
That impoverishment of our citizens was the plan. An ignorant , stressed citizenry and a propaganda machine like none in history. This is 1939 in Germany, and the only thing that makes the impoverishment of our nation invisible, is the spending of the 1%. The media shows us cars, recreations and luxuries and says ‘this is America.” No it is not. Those high rises that dot the NY skyline do not house the people.
Schools make nations great and it is this sharing of knowledge that makes a democracy.
Click to access hirsch.pdf
The oligarchs know this, and they intend to get’em young and keep them ignorant and poor.
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Can I choose to send my kids to Univ of Chicago Lab?
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Why can’t we make every school like Lab?
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Require stringent admissions standards, refuse to accommodate students with even mild disabilities or those who don’t speak English, that kind of thing?
maybe Lab should walk the walk and start taking random kids from Woodlawn and Englewood and South Shore. No tests, no interviews, no tuition. Put up or shut up.
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Hi, Tim.
What are your reactions to what Julie wrote?
Is there any validity in anything that she wrote?
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Sorry, Jack, if it wasn’t clear in my original post on this comment. My reaction is that Julie is another big “separate but equal” fan who doesn’t know (or, even worse, doesn’t want to know) how the sausage of Chicago’s wonderful stable localities was made and how it has been maintained. Families should be able to seek options outside of their own brutally isolated and hypersegregated neighborhood.
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When charters act like charters—the secret sauce of $tudent $ucce$$! It’s cage busting achievement gap crushing 21st walk-on-water educational miracles of innovative disruption!
😱
But when anybody else acts, or even seems to act, like charters—let them “walk the walk.”
I am honestly embarrassed to read such empty hypocritical drivel.
“Where’s the beef?”
😎
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Brava Julie. Brava. I stand behind you 100%.
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This is the best post I’ve read in a while. Insightful. Impeccable. Not as huge as fighting Big Data, but darn close. Public education requires equity, the opposite of market competition. Forcing schools and districts to sell themselves takes away their ability to focus on teaching and learning. Charter schools don’t just siphon funds, they are a constant, existential threat to funds. The quality of education goes down the drain while everyone chases the funds instead of the goal, education! My district spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on Twitter feeds and other advertising websites, just for example. And look, I’m sorry if, like me, you live in Not Beverly Hills. But sending your kids to a charter school in Still Not Beverly Hills will not improve their situation. But if Not Beverly Hills had funding to rival actual Beverly Hills, that would be something.
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BREAKING – UTLA is hard at work unionizing charter schools in Los Angeles. Amazing news!
http://www.wsj.com/articles/unions-eye-l-a-charter-schools-1447720745
Except . . . just because charters are unionized doesn’t mean that they won’t have a cream-skimmed, self-selected student body, or siphon funds and involved families away from community schools where assignment is based on residence.
Selective exam and gifted-and-talented schools are okay, creaming/siphoning unzoned lottery schools like the Brooklyn New School and Central Park Easts are okay, the big real-estate sort and PS 321, PS 107, PS 29, PS 234, PS 6, PS 290, etc. not having any self-contained seats is okay, and even actual charter schools are okay. It just could not be any clearer what this is all really about.
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This seems to be what you are saying:
It’s okay for a charter schools to suspend 20% or more of the 5 year olds who win their Kindergarten lottery in schools that serve many low-income minority students. It’s okay for for charter schools to test every child who wins a spot for 1st grade and higher and tell their parents they must repeat a year if they aren’t already at grade level.
It’s okay for large cohorts of at-risk students who won Kindergarten spots via the lottery to disappear over the years.
But it is NOT okay for Central Park and Brooklyn New School – who don’t suspend their 5 year old students and don’t experience huge attrition rates of their entering Kindergarten class – to exist?
Did you ever think that unions might prevent children from being treated like products and the ones that are defective and hurt your bottom line are sent away?
Did you ever think that if there is no agency willing to do oversight of a charter school, that charter school would be free to have as many “got to go” lists as they want, and that charter school would be free to simply refuse to sent renewal forms home with the 6 and 7 year olds who they just find too much bother to have in their schools?
If you want to have charter networks the size of entire school districts in small cities and bigger than most suburban school districts, you have to educate an appropriate number of children with disabilities and even — shock — behavioral problems. Is Central Park East 11,000 students with almost no special ed seats? Does PS 29 have 11,000 students? Does Brooklyn New School?
FYI — if Brooklyn New School and Central Park East were suspending over 20% of the 5 year olds who win the lottery and making “got to go” lists and mysteriously large cohorts of the starting 2nd graders disappeared by 3rd grade, you could call that “creaming”. The data is at the NY State website and if you can find an example of large numbers of students at those schools disappearing after 2nd grade, please cite that here. But compare that to Success Academy Bed Stuy 1, where the number of low-income students who were in the school in October of 2nd grade mysteriously shrunk by 40%!!! by the time they took the 3rd grade test. Now THAT is creaming! Did it happen at other charter schools you know?
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This person is ‘thinking’ very well…he is simply NOT considering anything that does not fit his belief, like th facts that YOU mentioned, besides, if he can engage people here with his fallacious arguments, then he has fulfilled his ego needs for the day. He does not wish to argue, he wants to fight, so nothing you say, and evidence you produce will have any effect…h evil continue to attempt to erode your POV.
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Susan,
Under a Vassilatos Plan, East Side Middle School would serve all children living in a small box drawn around 331 E 91st St, not just academically gifted children from much of Manhattan south of 96th St. + Roosevelt Island. In her eyes, a school like ESMS destroys communities–kids living in TriBeCa and kids living in Holmes Towers or the Chelsea Houses should never cross paths.
Do you think choice NYC DOE schools like ESMS destroy communities?
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I am not sure what you mean. Are you comparing a PUBLIC school which is a magnet school, to charters by saying that both are an example of choice?
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Vassilatos’s piece complains about the choice model not only with respect to charters, but also with traditional CPS schools–read the vexed paragraph beginning with “On our street alone we have kids in 4 different schools.” (Oh the humanity!)
Do you think an all-choice academically screened school like ESMS is destroying communities?
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NYC has overdosed on choice. Choice segregates students. It opens the door to charters and eventually to vouchers. Yes, it is a blow at the common school idea.
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Nailed it!
Call it what you want – I call it SPOKE. Billionaires looking to reorganize populations use public policy planner pimps at the universities to target communities to redistribute land. Charters facilitate the segregation and the breakdown of soul of the communities.
Charters get the Public school land rent free.
Once set in motion, migration will set in. So-called Affordable Housing will be offered to the “right” people on the list in areas where schools are meant to succeed. The Banks and other INVESTORS of AH (who make good ROI) get loads of local, state and Fed money/land to build. They will hold that land and property for the time of deed restriction and when the balloon payment comes due in 40 or 50 yrs, it can be paid off in TODAY’S dollars. Property can be sold as condo’s, torn down and redeveloped, etc., and the investors (Trust Money) are the true beneficiaries.
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It is a burden to many parents in low income areas to put their child on a bus to go across town. Many of these parents work nights, work two jobs just to make ends meet. When I listen to parents right now during parent conferences, I am surprised how stretched they are with work or going back to school. Fortunately in our district you can go to your neighborhood school. But to be forced to ‘choose’ seems like it adds an extra burden on these already burdened parents.
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