This is the portrait of “choice” in Detroit.
It is a disaster for children. They constantly change schools.
There are 31 students in class 8B in Bethune Middle School. Collectively, these students have attended 128 schools.
Their parents choose and choose and choose.
Most students have attended four or five different schools by the time they are in eighth grade.
Does anyone believe this instability, disruption, and churn are good for children?
Here is Jan Resseger’s commentary: She says that choice “accelerates student mobility, stresses educators, and undermines education.” As the embedded article shows, the more frequently students change schools by eighth grade, the lower their scores on the state’s annual tests.
Is it helpful to have no long-term, reliable relationships with friends or teachers?
Would Betsy DeVos do this to her children?
What do you think?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A better question is why they change? Perhaps they are seeking a stable school and solid teachers?
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Um, yeah, so why does it take that many tries to find that???
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Seems they never find a stable school, and they are lured by empty promises. That school over there is surely better.
Churn depresses student achievement.
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Consumer culture. Why do people buy the latest iteration of the smartphone when the old one works just fine All boils down to marketing–who has the school du jour.
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Some good questions. At the school in which I’ve served for the past ten years, we’ve had a high rate of faculty churn over the past four or five years. Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon has not exactly stabilized the school. When I broached the subject of faculty churn with the principal of this institution last spring, he genuinely didn’t see this as a liability to institutions like public schools.
I’ve never had much luck reasoning with this man, nor with any of his assistants.
On October 3, I resigned myself.
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Markstextterminal,
Man, you seem to have the epitome of adminimals that you deal with. My condolences.
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Oh, man, the stories I could tell you. I’ve worked under four principals, two of them corrupt and incompetent, the other two, who aren’t smart enough to be corrupt, were just incompetent.
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The sad part is that so many teachers can say the same thing although perhaps not with the corruption part.
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THERE it is.
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And congrats on your resignation and should I assume retirement?
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Thanks, Duane. I’ve actually accepted a job at another underserved public school in a small city in New England. If you could transfer the demographic composition (i.e. diverse) of the school in which I currently work and move it into an old New England school building, replete with a grassy campus, a playing field, and–windows! (I work now in the the building that formerly housed New York University’s Stern School of Business which has windows only on the top three floors, just one block south of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan)– you would have the school to which I am moving. I really have had more than enough of the New York City Department of Education.
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Good luck for you in your new position!
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Your comment ” When I broached the subject of faculty churn with the principal of this institution last spring, he genuinely didn’t see this as a liability” speaks volumes. In the top-down “fixer” administration game so many modern-day administrators, supervisors, coaches, facilitators, evaluators, test managers (etc. etc. etc.) have been selected for leadership because they will ONLY spout — and believe — the reform-our-way party line.
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” because they will ONLY spout — and believe — the reform-our-way party line.”
Sounds a lot like authoritarian regimes, eh. Eventually they collapse, unfortunately in the meantime far far too many students are harmed and abused.
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Churn in Detroit schools has been a documented problem since at least the mid 90s. Studies then showed that the average Detroit student moved 3 times a year within the district, often for inability to pay rent/evictions, lack of bus routes to a new job or other factors that push families to relocate. Sup. Vitti’s efforts in Detroit schools are supporting and stabilizing schools and will reduce teacher turnover. When SBE members recently toured schools even the unexpected school stop had engaged students, teachers running well-disciplined classrooms and evidence of good school leadership.
Every family craves consistency for their child. While intradistrict and interdistrict school choice (students going to traditional public schools other than their neighborhood school) and charters (same thing) have added to the problem, family economic struggles drive much of this problem. Detroit is starting to support families with coordinated school busing and better mass transit to jobs. The right solutions are being put in place, but they’re not fast enough to change the lives of so many Detroit children who’ve already left school or graduated.
Michigan’s the only state under USDoE intervention for special education (with the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau and Washington DC) – 29% of our special ed students drop out of school. Michigan’s middle class and above white and African American 4th grade boys – wealthy suburban children – rank 49th in reading on 2017 NAEP. That’s statewide, not just Detroit. Lots of work needed throughout the state for every child, every family and every school.
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Charters encourage disruption, and make a bad situation much, much worse.
When children live with instability, sensible people would create schools that provide stability, an anchor.
But we are not talking about sensible people. We are talking about helicopter policymakers who don’t live with the consequences of their decisions.
E.g., members of the State Board of Education.
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I think ed reformers DO believe disruption and instability is good for children.
I read them a lot. They completely dismiss any downside to “disruption”. That assumption is it will be all upside.
It’s really nutty thinking, in my view. I think they have completely internalized the view that they have to burn the village down to save it.
You just can’t even believe the level of denial that there could be any possible downside risk.
This is one of them, predicting what privatization will look like:
“School district bureaucracies are paired back. A system of great schools replaces the traditional school system, with families having access to an array of autonomous district schools, charter schools, magnet schools, and private schools – all of which have much more operational control. The lines between these types of schools begins to blur, and the political fights between these types of schools subsides. Non-profit organizations run a lot more schools than today, but school districts still serve the majority of children.
A lot of entrepreneurship, a little bit of competition, and a lot of best practice sharing make all public schools better. It’s a great time to be a public school educator.”
It’s not just that they don’t study or grapple with possible downside risk, they do not believe downside risk exists.
It’s terrifying. They’re eradicating a huge public system millions of people rely upon and they have no idea what will replace it, or whether the replacement will be an improvement. They don’t even really think about it. There’s just this vague handwaving about “markets” and “innovation” and they fire up the bulldozer and level another school system.
They don’t even go back to these places after they parachute in and “transform” them- none of them mention Detroit anymore. It was privatized and then they all ran away.
https://relinquishment.org/2018/10/09/public-education-25-years-from-now/
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Disruption is good for those children, not for our children.
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They also don’t know the difference between “paired”and “pared”.
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Who ARE these children who love “disruption”, anyway? I don’t know any children like that. The children I know like order and consistency and reliability. They like to know the adults they deal with. They like to make friends and not move away from them every 3 months. They like to go to school with their siblings and cousins and neighbors.
I think the people who adore “disruption” are the full time adult lobbyists for ed reform and their billionaire backers because the whole gang are out of a job if places like Detroit refuse to upend their public school system every 5 years.
Betsy DeVos is wrong. Public schools aren’;t AT ALL like food trucks. That’s moronic. It makes no sense. That she got this far without anyone having the nerve to tell her that is a shame, but better late than never- she needs to be told.
Their attempt to turn public schools from parts of communities into contract service providers will fail, because it’s a profound misunderstanding of the role public schools play in children’s lives. It’s how adults see the role of schools, and it’s specifically how WEALTHY adults see schools.
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Ohio has open enrollment for public schools in the county where I live. Kids may transfer from district to district, they have to apply and they have to get there, but that’s the only real barrier.
Superintendents here all backed it but they’ve had it for a decade now and think it’s a flop. They say the kids who transfer were having trouble in their home school and the same problems they had in the old school crop up in the new school, after a “honeymoon period”, leading to another transfer, and another adjustment period, and another loss of familiarity and friends, etc. They think it’s generally a loss for the student, in terms of consistent academic progress.
But no one can say that publicly here, or the “choice” fanatics who run my state government will start screaming about “government schools” and “avoiding competition” and the superintendent who raises what he or she has observed over a decade will be portrayed as some kind of idiot who is “attached” to the “status quo”. They’ve learned that, so they no longer raise objections to even the dumbest ed reform ideas. I don’t blame them for shutting down. The echo chamber will fling slogans at them and destroy their career if they question anything.
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Charters = Jim Crow
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” Does anyone believe this instability, disruption, and churn are good for children?”
Of course.
This is the premise of work at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, including work in K-12 education. Rationales for these disruptive polices can be found here in abundance. Many are also moneymakers and settled “reformy” ideas. https://www.christenseninstitute.org/k-12-education/
For more on the founder of the Institute and other ventures, who has become a star in the world of business, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_M._Christensen
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And in an amazing stroke of hypocrisy, these same adults cheering for disruption make dead certain that their own kids have structured home environments with schedules and routines that are comforting and reassuring.
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