October 6, 2005
SO MUCH FOR SMALLER CLASS SIZE BEING A SOLUTION:
All for One, None for All: School choice policies sacrifice universal education in favor of personal freedom (Linda Baker, October 3, 2005, In These Times)
On any given weekday here, the residential streets are clogged with parents driving their kids away from neighborhood schools. Harboring visions of creative and challenging academics, upwardly mobile mothers and fathers head for one of the district's 20 special focus and language immersion schools, or other schools deemed superior by virtue of test scores or socio-economic enrollment patterns. As of two years ago, hundreds of Portland kids have also left their neighborhood school under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the national education law under which schools that earn a "failing" designation must give students priority transfer to another district school.Under the district's open enrollment policy, over 35 percent of the Portland public school population now attends a school outside of their neighborhood.
NCLB and school choice policies are often touted as effective strategies to improve educational quality and close the achievement gap between low-income/minority and white middle-class students. But school choice in Portland has also exacerbated inequality, favoring savvy middle-class families at the expense of families in struggling communities. Theoretically, NCLB gives low-income students the opportunity to move to higher performing schools. In reality, the law means the kids who are left behind have even fewer resources than before.
"No Child Left Behind gives the illusion of choice, but it's really about dismantling the schools," says Elisha Williams, a senior at Jefferson High School, a predominantly African-American institution that lost more than 10 percent of its enrollment to federally mandated NCLB transfers last year. When struggling schools like Jefferson are labeled "nonperforming," Williams says, families transfer to other schools, taking per capita government dollars with them. Williams also argues that high stakes testing mandated by NCLB fuels negative stereotypes about African American communities and encourages families to pull their kids from low-income minority schools. "That doesn't seem like choice to me, but fear," Williams says.
Vouchers aren't some temporary extremist measure--even though George Bush did sneak them past Ted Kennedy--they are the inevitable future of education throughout the Anglosphere. In fact, we've fallen behind Australia for the moment in voucherizing education. There the Left has had sense enough to get on board and help shape the future. If Democrats cared about these students, instead of just being beholden to the teachers and bureaucrats who've failed them, they'd be pushing for bigger and better programs and for ways to help the parents get their kids to new schools. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 6, 2005 8:22 AM
-- In reality, the law means the kids who are left behind have even fewer resources than before.--
Since when are smaller class sizes considered fewer resources?
Via Samizdata:
Britain will slide rapidly towards Third World status unless the Government reverses the "unsupportable" decline in maths, science, engineering and modern languages in the state sector, head teachers of leading independent schools warned yesterday.
Jonathan Shephard, the general secretary of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, representing leading boys' and co-educational secondary schools, urged the Government to work more closely with the private sector.
"Despite improvements in state results, the decline in mathematics, engineering and modern languages is unsupportable and has to be reversed," he said. "Otherwise we are heading rapidly towards Third World status."
India and China were turning out tens of thousands of engineers, scientists and mathematicians but in Britain the number of first-year graduates studying chemistry had fallen from 4,000 in 1997 to 2,700 in 2005, he said.
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Freedom and Whisky is good for Scotland's problems.
Posted by: Sandy P at October 6, 2005 11:39 AMUniversal education versus personal freedom. And this is supposed to be a hard choice?
We need to remember that these policies involve real, individual people. No argument against school choice has been advanced which could persuade a parent to sacrifice his child to an abstraction of "universal education." All this discussion of Choice and NCLB and vouchers and all the rest comes down to using the power to coerce and destroy to force people to submit their children to an alien and hostile cultural milieu.
In my observation, this is not at its root a racial matter, for all that race is used as a shorthand for culture. All parents of every race and heritage do what they can to get their children away from the constant fear and distraction of schools which have tipped over culturally.
One of the striking things I discovered while teaching in a large urban system was that almost all of the teachers, of whatever color, had gotten their own children out of general population city public schools. They lived just outside the city, or they used non-publics, or, being "savvy" they had gotten their children into some sort of select public school, as if that were a bad thing.
In order to deal rationally with this issue we are going to have to learn to stand our ground when the teachers' unions play the race card. It is not a case of race, we must tell them, rather it is that you, the teachers and administrators, have failed. You are putting out a product that no one wishes to buy.
Posted by: Lou Gots at October 6, 2005 12:22 PMWhen struggling schools like Jefferson are labeled "nonperforming," Williams says, families transfer to other schools, taking per capita government dollars with them.
But I doubt that they take all those dollars. This sounds like the bogus argument used to defeat vouchers in California in the late '90s. In that case, some of the money would have followed the student to the new school, but not all of it, meaning the remaining students would have higher per capita spending. I'll bet that's the case in Portland.
Posted by: PapayaSF at October 6, 2005 2:17 PM