A teacher from Denver posted this comment:
“As a teacher for Denver Public Schools, I’m keenly aware of the flip-side of so called school choice… schools choosing their students. School Choice is an outright lie.
“Some schools remain segregated by property values, unavailable to the vast majority of DPS students. The district actively deceives parents into believing a lottery system places students when demand exceeds available space. In fact an indeterminable number of schools are allowed to use what DPS calls SchoolChoiceTool or some garbage name for what really amounts to administrators sitting behind closed doors accepting and rejecting students based on grades, behavior records, attendance data, and standardized test scores.
“The result. DPS is more segregated for Latino students today than when the school board was intentionally segregating African-American students in the years past. DPS school choice segregates the already segregated. Income-achievement gaps are greater than in any other “reform” oriented city studied.
“As they expand and lose their ability to cherry pick the boot camp style charters foisted on Denver’s low-income communities are tanking. Principle and teacher turnover is abysmal. School Choice = inequity = buyer beware gimmick schools = chaos”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you to this teacher for telling the truth about CHOICE in Denver. A few of us have begun to think about ways to demand the CHOICE process be open to the public. That is, as children are assigned to schools, the public should be in the room to ensure a transparent and equitable process is followed. Several oddities occur in student assignments, leaving many to believe CHOICE is about “schools choosing their students.” If you have ideas – other than speaking at school board meetings – how the public can accomplish this, please contact me through my blog site: http://www.kaplanforkids.wordpress.com
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Several oddities occur in student assignments, leaving many to believe CHOICE is about “schools choosing their students.” But that is usually the intent and the actuality. Choice usually means the “choice schools” get to choose their students.
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What is also sad is that in many/most still traditional public school in low socio-economic neighborhoods, charter school methods of control and compliance from Uncommon Schools (Unconscionable Schools), KIPP (Kids In Prison Pipeline) etc…, are being foisted upon these schools. When what the parents and communities really want and need, AS ONE OF THEIR REAL CHOICES, is traditional, comprehensive, well-resourced school within walking distance at ALL levels in ALL neighborhoods. Not this militaristic, bootcamp approach of forced compliance! Just sayin”
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The first type of choice is what corporations think these low socio-economic students deserve, and the second type is what works best with them.
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This is WHY charters should NOT receive public funds. They are not public schools for all.
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Yes, DPS is very segregated, as are most urban public school districts around the country. The choice system certainly doesn’t alleviate this segregation, but it also doesn’t pretend to try to either. If they system was about desegregation, it would only let families in under-performing schools choice-out…and we know how that would go over with our powerful and privileged communities. That being said, I have to strongly disagree that this segregation is somehow worsened because administrators are cherry picking students behind closed doors. This may be happening in other districts, but not in Denver and it certainly isn’t a fair portrayal of the Choice process that is leagues ahead of most urban districts.
All schools are choice schools in DPS. Neighborhood schools use the choice process to accept new students as well, but of course this is after students in their boundary are admitted first and they’re left with open seats. Charter schools are allowed to have priorities, but these priorities aren’t what you’d think– they’re actually very limited and usually benefit families that are already attending (siblings) or benefits families that are low-income (FRL priorities).
There is no rejecting students or deciding who comes to a school; they must take who is assigned. If a school thinks that a student isn’t fit for their program, they wouldn’t be able to simply take them off their list or place that student somewhere else- it just doesn’t work that way. Imagine if it did– how would anything get done? How would any parent get their priority school (which 72% do) or their 2nd choice school? As for the SchoolChoiceTool that this teacher refers to– it’s an algorithm that works in part with a lottery system. Computer software and math…super deceiving stuff. Enough with the cynicism without any real evidence of wrongdoing– there are people in education that have integrity and want systems to work for those who participate, believe it or not. As far as oversight goes, anyone can ask what their lottery number was and how many slots the school had available. The only oddities someone can claim were most likely caused by data entry errors or lost enrollment forms (which will hopefully end when all forms are processed online).
Parents in most of Denver’s low-income neighborhoods still don’t know they have the option of choosing a different school for their kid, which is the real problem with a system that is meant to benefit all families. The parents in these neighborhoods that do use the Choice process tend to struggle because once they have been accepted into a school they still need to figure out how to get their kid there everyday. Transportation is not part of the Choice process yet- too expensive.
If we’re honest with ourselves, the choice system does work for parents & students that actually use it. There is a very small percentage of families that don’t get at least one of their top 5 schools and that is because they got a really low lottery number and there weren’t enough spots available at the schools they chose. The challenge is reaching the parents who don’t know there are other options from their neighborhood school, or of course, the challenge of making all neighborhood schools as appealing as some of these non-boundary schools that parents are choosing instead.
Most parents that use choice now are folks that already have a great neighborhood school– they just want a BETTER neighborhood school. I think we need to limit choice to the students that need it the most and tell parents that are already at performing schools, to be happy. Choice in DPS isn’t perfect, but it has nothing to do with Schools choosing their students.
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In NY State, charter schools are not allowed to choose their students; however, nothing is stopping them from “choosing” which of those students they want to make miserable and suspend over and over again so they will leave. Even if the children are 5 years old and still in Kindergarten.
In fact, if it is a charter under the “oversight” of the SUNY Charter Institute, there is a distinct incentive to rid yourself of certain children. SUNY is only concerned with the performance of the students who remain in your school, so the more low-performers you get rid of, the better your results will be. The more you try to keep all students, the more likely your results will be mediocre.
Perhaps the oversight is different in Denver.
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You are using the facts to deceive. Charters may not be able to choose the students they want, but they still counsel them out right before testing, so basically they are choosing. The worst students get kicked back to their neighborhood school, which has to take them.
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1st hand observations: charter schools “interviewing” 3 year olds & their parents to be selected as new students for their prepreK classes.
Surprise: only high functioning children & involved parents were chosen. Poor parents with low performing children were not chosen, but told they were on the waiting list. Probably still waiting.
Practice for years. Any vacancy at the school was used to pressure the charter teachers to enroll their own children.
Total Thrust: High test scores & corporate $M.
School gave weekly tours for wealthy donors, even Arne came to visit for PR purposes.
Claim to have the highest test scores in the city & state.
Selection was only part of the plan.
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A news organization in NYC wrote about how a girl entering 2nd grade won a lottery spot in a coveted charter school chain. But the charter school tested her and told her parents she would have to repeat 1st grade again if she wanted to come to the school. Needless to say, she went back to her public school and never took the spot. Perfectly legal in NYC for charter schools to do this with any child they want to discourage from filling their empty seats. After all, it’s all in the name of “high standards”. And the only students who are allowed to fill the seats in older grades (many of which are open due to the policies I mentioned above of making a child feel misery if they aren’t working at grade level and encouraging them to leave) are the students who are tested and found to be acceptable for entry into that grade. If you don’t want them, just tell their parents they will have to repeat a year and you can discourage many from even enrolling. If a few do enroll and it turns out that repeating 1st or 2nd grade doesn’t bring them to grade level, see above for how you make them feel misery until they leave. Thus opening another seat for a child who can be tested to see if they can join that grade.
The charter schools that don’t use these practices have mediocre results compared to the ones that do. Soon I’m sure more and more charters will embrace these “best practices” on how to rid yourself of the kids you are obligated to accept but NOT obligated to teach if you can convince their parents to withdraw them from your school. And since there is no one who cares what methods you use to get them to withdraw, a charter is free to use whatever method works best to get them out, stat. Dishonesty in the pursuit of “high standards” is cheered by charter supporters.
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As a former DPS teacher, for an innovation school, our demographic was about 50% latino, 50% african american. There was one white student- the principal’s daughter
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Racial segregation in schools is back, folks. I work in DPS at an innovation school and have worked in suburban schools in both Utah and Colorado. I’ve lived on both sides of the fence, and I am not a white female, as so many teachers these days seem to be. So, you could say that I have a slightly different view.
Choice or no choice, testing or no testing, with or without corporate control of curriculum, teacher salaries, or board positions, the big deal here is that we live in a racially polarized society that is controlled by fear. Unless we as parents (yes, I am both provider and consumer) stop making decisions for our kids based on fears of them not succeeding economically–because, let’s be honest, in America if it isn’t about race, it’s about the almighty dollar–we will always be at the mercy of the corporate, white-male owned and operated machine.
The system is and always has been designed to preserve a status quo. While we middle class folks sit around debating about the details, billionaires count their money and send their kids to private schools or overseas where they learn true intellectualism and critical thinking skills that keep them on top. This way, we are too distracted to find real solutions and dethrone them.
Though most of my students come from “low-income” families, they are learning to recognize the deficit language with which people talk about them. They are being taught to recognize the forces at work that continue to oppress them through means both covert and overt. They will rise up eventually, but the adults parenting and teaching need to lead by example.
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