The danger of choice?
To be completely honest, school choice isn't a subject I've delved into in as much depth as other educational topics (as one of my friends put it, it seems sort of like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic unless you address more fundamental issues like teachers and pedagogy). I believe that modest and carefully watched market forces can create positive pressure for change, but I also believe there's the potential for a tightrope with no net underneath. Something stuck out to me while I was reading Jay Mathews' piece in Thursday's Post about Maury Elementary School in Alexandria, Va., whose scores skyrocketed after multiple years of failing AYP (80+% free and reduced lunch, 75+% minority, and 92% passing the 3rd and 5th grade English exam. Take that, demographic determinists). While the article was lauding Maury's progress and was obviously intended to show that pressure to improve can work, I couldn't get around this:
Now, don't get me wrong: If that's what it takes to get a struggling school going, then that's a formula to replicate (presuming it wasn't all drill-and-kill test prep, all the time). However, it seems like the option to have students transfer didn't lead to the success, it was pressure followed by solid leadership and deliberate action taken to save the students who were left.
At the same time, I know there's an argument that choice helps low-income students by giving them access to better schools. Why didn't Maury's low-income families take advantage of that opportunity, then? I keeping coming back to the subtle challenges of poverty as perhaps articulated best by Barbara Ehrenrich's Nickel and Dimed: A school that's further away is, relatively speaking, probably harder to adjust to for low-income families than more affluent ones. Then, of course, there's the more conceptual debate over whether we shouldn't be fixing bad schools rather than abandoning them.
This post is more or less me thinking aloud, but I am left wondering: if the theory behind school choice is that pressure will be put on the bad schools to improve because there will be movement away from them, doesn't that presuppose as an axiom that there's equal opportunity for movement? And if that opportunity doesn't exist, what structures can be built into a limited choice system that can keep the benefits without injuring disadvanaged students?
A number of people I really respect are pro-school choice (I almost wrote pro-choice there... wrong debate!), so I imagine there are responses to these concerns out there. Or, maybe I'm missing something in my understanding of the proposals. Anyone?
That seems to me the danger of school choice. Isn't it going to give rise to "middle-class flight" leaving in a lurch the families who are tied to a location because of limited job opportunties? Wouldn't we see a new pseudo-segregation, except not by race, but by income level? Maury is obviously a success story and enrollment is up a notch after the latest round of progress, but look at what it took:No school in the Washington area has felt more severely the weight of the 2002 law that not only tracks how well children do on state testing but also demands that schools improve their performance every year. In 2004, Maury students passed the state reading test at the lowest rate in Alexandria: 38 percent of third-graders and 59 percent of fifth-graders passed.
That triggered a provision of the law that allows parents to transfer their children to a better-performing school. Maury's enrollment dropped from 166 to 131. Middle-class parents were the first to leave, pushing the school's percentage of low-income children above 80 percent. (emphasis mine)
In 2003, with the federal law taking effect, Alexandria Superintendent Rebecca L. Perry tried to shake up the school: She required all teachers to reapply for their jobs and gave each one who made the grade a $3,000 bonus. In 2004, she moved an unusually successful and energetic principal, Lucretia Jackson, into Maury and provided funds for new carpets, new tile walls, a new media center and more classroom space.
When Jackson arrived at Maury in the summer of 2004, she organized open houses for parents and put a sign out front that read, "Wanted: More Children to Love and Educate." She brought in volunteer tutors, made sure that no Maury class had more than 20 students and added hour-long after-school lessons three afternoons a week.
She patted backs, asked teachers what they needed and kept a close eye on test results.
Now, don't get me wrong: If that's what it takes to get a struggling school going, then that's a formula to replicate (presuming it wasn't all drill-and-kill test prep, all the time). However, it seems like the option to have students transfer didn't lead to the success, it was pressure followed by solid leadership and deliberate action taken to save the students who were left.
At the same time, I know there's an argument that choice helps low-income students by giving them access to better schools. Why didn't Maury's low-income families take advantage of that opportunity, then? I keeping coming back to the subtle challenges of poverty as perhaps articulated best by Barbara Ehrenrich's Nickel and Dimed: A school that's further away is, relatively speaking, probably harder to adjust to for low-income families than more affluent ones. Then, of course, there's the more conceptual debate over whether we shouldn't be fixing bad schools rather than abandoning them.
This post is more or less me thinking aloud, but I am left wondering: if the theory behind school choice is that pressure will be put on the bad schools to improve because there will be movement away from them, doesn't that presuppose as an axiom that there's equal opportunity for movement? And if that opportunity doesn't exist, what structures can be built into a limited choice system that can keep the benefits without injuring disadvanaged students?
A number of people I really respect are pro-school choice (I almost wrote pro-choice there... wrong debate!), so I imagine there are responses to these concerns out there. Or, maybe I'm missing something in my understanding of the proposals. Anyone?
This entry was posted
on Monday, February 06, 2006 at 10:51 AM.
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