Experienced educator Arthur Goldstein recently visited the George Washington Campus in Manhatttan. It used to be the George Washington High School and had some famous graduates, but those days are gone. Now it is the G.W. Campus, containing multiple small schools, all schools of choice.
All high schools are now schools of choice, and there are hundreds of them. The student ranks 12 schools in order of his choice, and the school decides which students it wants. The middle schools are also schools of choice. You are not likely to get into your school of choice unless you can show your test scores.
The effect, of course, was to downplay any notion of community schools (thus downplaying any notion of community, valued by neither Gates nor Bloomberg). Parents now had “choice.” They could go to the Academy of Basket Weaving, the Academy of Coffee Drinking, or the Academy of Doing Really Good Stuff. Of course by the time they got there the principals who envisioned basket weaving, coffee drinking, or doing good stuff were often gone, and it was Just Another School, or more likely Just Another Floor of a School, as there were those three other schools to contend with. (Unless of course Moskowitz got in, in which case it was A Renovated Space Better Than Your Space.)
Last night I learned that middle schools in NYC also are Schools of Choice. I don’t know exactly why I learned this last night, because my friend Paul Rubin told me this months ago. I think I need to hear things more than once before they register with me, though. Anyway last night I heard from someone who told me that one of the schools her daughter might attend required test scores as a prerequisite. So if her family had decided to send their kid there, opt-out may not have been a good option.
I live in a little town in Long Island. My daughter went to our middle school, as did every public school student in our town. We are a community, and our community’s kids go to our community’s schools. If I opt my kid out, she goes to that school. If she scores high, low, or anywhere in between, she goes to that school.
Goldstein realized that the choice policy is an effective deterrent against opting out of tests. If you opt out, you won’t get into your school of choice. You might rank 12 schools, and get into your last choice, or end up with no school assignment and get sent wherever there is an opening, which might be an hour or more from your home, with a theme that has no interest for you.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The impact of choice not only suppresses opt-out, it serves to funnel the poorest students, mostly poor minority students, into a separate and perhaps unequal school. Homogeneous grouping works against poor minority students. I thought we learned this about forty years ago when I first started teaching. I taught in a junior high with homogeneous grouping. It made the top groups easy, and the bottom group full of slow learners, minorities and conduct disorder cases. I can understand why this policy was embraced by Bloomberg. It puts all the poor minority students together, and it makes it easier for the charters to pick off the students in “failing” schools. Not only is this policy a community destroyer, it should be against the law if it forces minority students into an all minority school. http://www.nea.org/tools/16899.htm
What you said, retired teacher. I can’t think of a more stupid system unless, of course, you want to eliminate all the strengths of public education
Again the obfuscation of a word, something edudeformers and GAGA adminimals are so good at doing. They imply the choice is with the family when in fact it is with the schools-a de facto sorting and separating out mechanism tending to weed out the “undesirables”. Hell, might as well just send those undesirables straight to prison. Won’t save the taxpayers dollars but will enrich the few as is desired.
The weapon of “choice” for rheephormers does not discriminate between public school staff, students, parents and their associated communities.
Almost everyone gets a beatdown.
Equal dis-opportunity. That’s how the heavyweights and enforcers of the “new civil rights movement of our time” wield their bludgeon.
But for THEIR OWN CHILDREN “choice” looks very very different.
Bill Gates. His two children. Lakeside School. First three paragraphs from the athletic director:
[start]
Our interscholastic athletics program is an integral part of the educational experience at our school. The creative minds, healthy bodies, and ethical spirits that are so much a part of our school mission are lived out on the fields of play as they are in the classroom. Here at Lakeside, the ideal of the student-athlete is alive and well.
While we are a small school, we choose to “play big” when it comes to athletics. Our commitment to sports is reflected in our diverse offerings (23 varsity teams, most of which have sub-varsity and Middle School counterparts); widespread participation (over 80 percent of our student body participates in at least one sport each year); and level of competitive success (13 of our varsity teams competed in the highest possible level of state or national championships in 2014-15).
All of our student-athletes have access to top-notch facilities that include three gyms, a natural-grass soccer pitch, two artificial turf fields lined for multi-sport use, an all-weather track, a newly-renovated boathouse, a weight room, and a large sports medicine facility. Student-athletes are also supported by outstanding human resources: Our staff includes close to 100 coaches, two assistant athletic directors, two certified athletic trainers, and two certified strength and conditioning coaches.
[end]
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=136700
Do the vast majority of folks in public schools know how to make such good choices?
According to the rheephorm narrative, no, that’s why choices have to made for them by those that make better choices…
😏
Charters have simply adopted the model used by successful athletic coaches forever. Recruit the best “scholars” and then make selective “cuts” so that you have the best test taking team possible.
“They could go to the Academy of Basket Weaving, the Academy of Coffee Drinking, or the Academy of Doing Really Good Stuff.”
This reminds me of the late great, George Carlin.
The od thing is, I have just been doing a spread sheet with the names of KIPP schools. The focus on branding charter schools as a means to market them is obvious, and also ta way to insinuate that schools not branded with “uplifting” words are inferior.
Here are some names of KIPP schools, most with Academy attached at the end.
Infinity, Aim, Pride, Freedom, Diamond, Shine, Spark, Aspire, Inspire, Dream, Strive, Reach, Ascend, Rise, Lead, Leap, Empower, Impact, Zenith, Believe, TRUTH Academy.
With names like those those are sure to be great choices. Stepford test central. If choice means test prep, testing and more testing, this is not the choice for us. We want choices like Lakeside see above 👆🏾
This policy is equivalent to the Gerrymander in politics, where politicians choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives. The perverse incentives that this kind of filtering creates concentrates virtually all of the worst aspects of reform and makes the schools and their students subservient to toxic, irrational policies that have no basis in reality and no place in any school of any kind. As with the Gerrymander, it protects incompetent decision makers from accountability and institutionalizes wrongheaded ideas. It must be destroyed.
Exactly.
Its a lot easier to win the game when its rigged.
The reformers must just be intrinsically evil people who like to see the little people (the poor people) squirm and dance to the reformer tune for no reason other than the reformers’ entertainment.
One Newark, the app in New Jersey, was torture for families. One household, 4 kids, sent to 4 different schools, by public transit bus, at 6:30 a.m. in the dark, when there was a school right around the corner. One Newark sent children into charter schools when they didn’t want to go there (butts in seats to “prove” there was desire for charters).
When you live next door to your neighborhood public school, and the hoops you are made to jump through send you across town, THAT is not choice, that is insanity.
The reformers must get their jollies out of torturing the rest of us peons, for no reason other than they are despicable human beings.
Not sure I agree with you, Donna. I can never decide between whether they are stupid or evil. I actually think they are stupid, blinded by big egos and self-certainly and convinced that they are doing good.
And the test scores of the special and ELL students limit their equal access to their local schools? And the racial segregation that results based on generations old language differences? The inability of parents to build the schools in their own communities? And the rights of parents to Opt Out is invalid?
So all the laws that govern public education are fake.
Diane, school choice doesn’t always work in that negative way. In fact, in NYC, middle schools were forbidden to consider the state test scores in the admissions process. Some middle schools have their own school or talent based exams and if a student wants one of those schools, he or she would voluntarily audition or sit for that test.
The impact of choice did NOT affect “opt out”, at least in District 15. Furthermore, the schools that are more concerned with test scores are becoming increasingly LESS popular, and the more diverse ones are becoming increasingly MORE popular. One recently added District 15 school — Park Slope Collegiate — used to be nearly 100% low income non-white students. In 2 years, they became majority white because so many middle class parents chose the school without considering the racial make-up, but because it was an appealing school. To address this, Park Slope Collegiate asked for and just received special permission to give priority to students who attended elementary schools that served high numbers of low-income students. Thus you can expect that this “choice” school will return to having more low income students that the past year.
An even newer school — MS 839 — is ALL lottery, period. Anyone can rank them and they pull names out of a hat. It is also VERY popular. School for International Studies had 11% white students in 2014-2015 and next year will likely have an even higher percentage.
In fact, there are parents of all backgrounds who like all the schools for different reasons having very little to do with whether there are rich or poor, white or non-white, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Muslim students there. Does that sound like someone’s idea of utopia? It is not. Those parents are acting in their own self-interest (really, the best interests of their child). But those families don’t buy into the “reformers” insistence that a school is only as good as its test scores. Parents aren’t stupid — at least in District 15 — and they understand that a smart kid will score high and learn enough even if he isn’t test prepped endlessly. Middle school is about learning how to learn, and students don’t need to be pushed to their limits every day in school to score high on the SHSAT. In fact, it might even backfire.
Here is what people outside the schools don’t understand. Parents — at least most of them — don’t really care whether the child sitting next to theirs is white, Asian, African-American, or any other ethnic background. They care about whether the school has the funding and resources to take care of ALL the students in the school and address their needs. Instead of understanding that the answer to failing schools is to make sure each school has the resources to address every child’s needs, the reformers think that the answer is to market to the best of the kids to take them out.
There are liberal Park Slope parents who tried to get a movement started to make elementary schools more diverse. But the parents who lived in Sunset Park didn’t care whether there were white kids in their school. They didn’t want some of their kids sent to a school out of their neighborhood to manage diversity while other kids were brought in.
They wanted a good well-funded elementary school for the kids who lived in their neighborhood. That means small class sizes, resources, and everything a wealthy suburban public has, and everything a private school has. Shipping in some white kids and shipping out some of theirs doesn’t address the problems of an underfunded public school. MONEY does.
If you spend the money to create a GOOD school, parents of all races will come. But the reformers effort usually involved “let’s force some middle class white kids into a failing school because their parents pocketbooks will then be forced to subsidize all the kids there. That is so wrong. Fund ALL the schools properly. Quit spending $700,000 on a rally and then pretending there is no money to turn a failing public school into one that parents will happily choose to send their kid.
My D3 opt out students were left out of all listed choices for ms! Test scores were used against those opting out.