Detroit is emblematic of a city where choice has gone mad, and children bounce from school to school, forming no attachment to friends or teachers.
What kind of cruel adults inflict this disruption and chaos on small children?
Here is an article with typical non-solutions.
A unified enrollment system to make it simpler to switch schools. More data, so schools know more about those they admit.
How about stable and well-resourced community schools with wraparound services, experienced teachers, a social worker, a psychologist, a library, arts programs, more like the LeBron James school in Akron? How about public schools so rich in people and programs that no one wants to switch?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Gee, I remember when people complained about bussing for just this reason …
Silly me, I guess churn is okay if it increases segregation …
bingo
I remember back in the 1970s when school bussing for integration, was going to take all children into the promised land. Little children were ripped out of their neighborhood schools, and forced to ride the busses out of their neighborhoods to “mix” with children of different races.
Liberals/progressives welcomed school bussing for racial balance.
Now, they have discovered the merits of keeping children in their neighborhood schools.
No one ripped little children out of their schools.
You live on a different planet.
Charles lived on a planet called Fox.
States and communities achieved that by committing to end all the other racially discriminatory practices like residential redlining and rental discrimination. And for a while they kept those promises. Now they have discovered the end runs of charters and vouchers.
Schools must be designed with this in mind. Small pre and post test replace the big and useless test so teachers have immediate information to assure students are taken from where they are, not where we pretend they should be
To hell with pre and post testing. Just more of the same ol same ol testing nonsense. Who on almighty declared that testing is the end all be all of the teaching and learning process. Horse manure.
New America, one of the shilling think tanks for charter schools.
Wouldn’t it be great if we hired some people in the government who are actually interested in assisting public schools, instead of people who want to “reinvent education” and eradicate public schools?
“Schools in Lumberton, N.C., and others in flood-affected areas of the state have been closed for nearly 5 weeks due to damage from Hurricane Florence. The staff is frustrated, parents are impatient.”
What are North Carolina education officials up to? Promoting another voucher initiative? Busting labor unions, again? Campaigning against certain kids using certain bathrooms in the schools that are closed?
I know better than to expect assistance from Betsy DeVos. She thinks public schools are food trucks, so no help there.
It MAY behoove public school parents to hire some public employees who support public schools. These two things are connected.
Time for disaster capitalism to strike in NC and Fla!
Don’t go giving them any ideas now, Diane! 😉
….. in Detroit, where about 200 traditional public, charter, and private schools have closed since 2005.
The suggested solutions in the article are non-starters or they are in place and do nothing to prevent churn. The churn is a sympton of schools being treated as if more or less profitable retail stores or fast food stores in a franchise.
One of our local activists compared closing schools to closing K-marts; the comparison was so exact. It is only about money, never about clients.
Charters = Jim Crow
“Choice” is all about giving the corporations the right to choose students they feel will be successful. The most vulnerable get shifted to whatever school will take them, and many times it is a public school depleted of resources and large classes due to “choice” drain. This is the opposite of what they need. Sometimes “choice” splits up siblings and causes children to travel over a hour to get to and from their school. What we have in many urban districts is a system in which capitalism takes priority over students. Young children do better when they are in a stable environment, not precarious, profiteering chaos.
What kind of cruel adults inflict this disruption and chaos on small children?
Psychopath like Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump — but it isn’t their fault because its in their blood. They were born that way.
Apparently, in Michigan, school systems are not required to provide transportation for students.
“Most Detroit students — 65 percent — travel to school in a car while 20 percent take a yellow bus to school, the study found.
Another ten percent rely on public transit, but Detroit’s public transit system is not as extensive as systems in other cities. That means that in a city where roughly 25 percent of residents do not have access to a reliable vehicle, Detroiters who want to find a better school for their children sometimes have to make difficult journeys to access quality schools.”
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/detroit/2018/10/11/just-a-quarter-of-detroit-students-attend-schools-in-their-own-neighborhoods-the-rest-commute/
Given this, it seems likely that at least some of the churn is due to the challenges of poverty. How do you get your kids to school when there is no reliable transportation for them? If you have to move, how can you assure educational continuity for your kids if there is no school bus, no public transportation, and you don’t – in Motor City – have a car of your own?
I wonder whether De Vos had a hand in this policy, too.
The Grand Old Pharaohs do not believe in all that bull about Democracy, Equality, Freedom. They believe in a multi-tiered pyramid society with the Master class on top and various grades of slaves below. There will be the education appropriate to masters for them and the education appropriate to slaves for everyone else. Screw all that nonsense about liberal education for equal citizens.