Today the Boston Globe finally covered a story that I have been blogging about for almost two years: the Boston Public Schools are segregating children based on the criteria of ‘readiness to learn’ (See page 1 of today’s Boston Globe).
Essentially what is happening in Boston is that a three tier system is being created. At the top of this tier are the Exam schools. In the middle are the pilot schools and k-12 schools which have created admissions criteria that make it extremely difficult for many of the lowest performing and most dangerous to gain admission.
At the bottom are the rest of the regular/traditional schools at all levels (elementary, middle and high).
You can actually see the data for this yourself by checking out the Boston Plan for Excellence latest report. Click here for Boston Plan for Excellence latest report.
And how is this criteria of ‘readiness to learn’ measured by the administrators and staff at charter and pilot schools? With a common-sense indicator: the willingness of parents to play an active role in their child’s education.
Essentially, the story details the obstacles and hurdles that children and families face before they are granted admission into either charter or BPS pilot schools. In many cases, the students must submit a writing sample, recommendations from teachers, and parents often times must attend mandatory orientation sessions, etc.,
I can tell you definitively as a BPS teacher that because these steps require active parental involvement in the application process, this means that the lowest performing/most neglected and neediest children in the system are, for all-intents-and purposes, shut out of charter schools and many of the pilot schools.
A few very important points to be made about this story:
1. Proponents of Charter Schools and Pilot Schools claim that these steps are not intended to weed out difficult or underperforming children. And then remarkably, in the next breath, these people admit that they ARE seeking parents who will play an active role in their child’s education. As though student performance and parental involvement have absolutely nothing to do with one another! Amazing!
2. The end result of this three tier system is that the lowest performing and neediest students are being ‘guided’ by the ‘invisible hand’ into large and small schools where upwards of half of their cohort are also on the track toward failing out. And the teachers in these schools (ie. English High School in Boston, which was just gutted by the BPS and state in a joint agreement) are being labeled as ‘failures’. The same is also happening in the middle schools where the k-8’s are culling the most involved families and higher performing students, thus ‘dumping’ more of the dangerous and under-performing students into a smaller number of schools.
As Michael Fung, the Headmaster at Charlestown High, says in the Globe article (and I am paraphrasing) – any failing school can easily bring their test scores up if they are allowed to dump their lowest performing students.
3. Other than attacking teachers and administrators at these so called “failing schools”, what have either the state or the BPS really done to bring the resources to bear so that “No Child” is “Left Behind”? I would argue that they have done very little other than create a new system of segregation that dumps the poorest, neediest and most dangerous into a few ‘bottom tier’ schools and then leaves the problems created by such a system up to the teachers and administrators at these schools.
After five years of being classified as underperforming, the state has the right to step in and take the school over, which is what happened at English High (for all intents and purposes). One would assume that the central administration of the BPS would offer some assistance to these schools in the years preceeding a state intervention. You would be wrong. In the last five years, the BPS has done virtually nothing to prevent the take over of these schools by the state.
Why? That is fodder for another post. But I will say this: because it is easier to whip-saw concessions out of unions and city employees when you are holding a gun to their heads (ie. the threat of state take-over).
So in the end, is it really about “the kids” as proponents of Ed Reform constantly say? Or is it really just a plan to attack teachers unions, break teacher pay, and assert even more control over teachers work lives?
The data and actions (or inactions), speak for themselves.
Any schools that require any active choice to be enrolled, even if that is just finding out the school exists and locating an application form with just a student’s name and address, will change the composition of the student body.
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I don’t much care about whether the DOE and the Boston Superintendent are colluding to weaken the teacher’s union, using the accountability bureaucracy as their bludgeon. I think that’s a side issue.
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I do care, though, about an honest dialog about No Child Left Behind’s metrics, and particularly how they apply in Massachusetts.
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I’d assumed pilot schools were simply neighborhood schools that would take kids by default, rather than having a choice process driving enrollment; and that in general, pilot schools were schools that were far along the road to sanctions, and converting to pilot status would change the school methodology, but not who is enrolling in the school.
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It appears, though, that pilots are being treated more like charter schools, with lottery admissions and other selection processes. The charts in the BPE report certainly suggest the pilot schools are enrolling a different set of kids from the Boston schools at large.
And I think what is particularly noteworthy here (a point I wish I’d made in my original posting) is that even though the pilot schools were modelled after charter schools (somewhat), they were supposed to give teachers and administrators the flexibility we supposedly need to reach the lowest performing and most at risk students (as opposed to additional resources).
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Unfortunately, the data shows pretty clearly that pilot schools, like the charter schools they were modelled after, are excluding at risk students and those who are failing the MCAS – the very population of kids that they were intended to serve.
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And as for caring about undermining unions, I would ask you this: is it okay to use the kids as pawns in a scheme to whip saw teachers on the issue of health care costs for the city?
I don’t live in Boston, but I live in Springfield, and the characteristics of the school systems are similar.
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As a middle-class parent committed to living in Springfield, I am faced with some difficult choices about schools. I will likely choose a private school, specifically to avoid large numbers of “students not eager to learn” (which I take as the opposite of having “readiness to learn”).
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Most other people move out of Springfield when their children reach school age for the exact same reason. They would prefer to move to a district where there are very few children not eager to learn. Those districts have long ago self-segregated because people don’t move there and pay more money for a house unless they are concerned about and involved with their children’s education.
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Until this state can figure out a way to distribute “students not eager to learn” evenly among all communities, then communities with high concentrations of such students, such as Boston, Springfield, Holyoke, Lawrence, etc., need to give parents of students who ARE involved with their children’s education a mechanism to avoid the problems that come with those students. If such a mechanism is not provided, those parents will simply move elsewhere, and when that happens the economic segregation that allows other communities to exclude such students grows even stronger due to increased demand in those systems.
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I don’t care what anyone says, given the choice of two classrooms, one of which has 95% students who have a “readiness to learn”, the other of which has 30% of students who have a “readiness to learn”, the latter classroom will put my child at a disadvantage simply due to the high number of students who are not eager to learn.
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I would choose a diverse classroom over an all-white classroom any day of the week, but my child’s education is paramount in my decision, and I think that the biggest drawbacks to classrooms in urban areas is the high percentage of students who are not eager to learn.
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While I agree that ultimately, no segregation should occur, I am only willing to live out that position if everyone else in the state is going to live it out too. But that’s not happening — education is becoming more and more segregated between cities and towns, and this is growing specifically due to education. Why should I willingly place my child at a disadvantage, in a classroom where she will be exposed to kids who don’t value education because their parents don’t value it?
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We’re currently in a feedback loop, prices in certain communities are high because the schools are perceived as very good, and this drives up demand in those communities (who limit supply of housing) which in turn raises the bar higher so that only the most committed parents move to those towns.
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How can you overcome significant parental barriers? Are you willing to send your child to a school where 90% of the students live below the poverty line, where many students come and go during the year, where a significant number of students are involved with DSS, where a non-trivial number of students as young as 12 are getting pregnant, where a non-trivial number of students have a parent in prison, where a non-trivial number of students live in a drug use and dealing culture?
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Those students definitely should not be thrown away, but the biggest problem in urban schools is that there are just so many of them, to the point where solving the problem is overwhelming. Even reducing class size or paying teachers more isn’t a panacea — I still wouldn’t send my child to class of 10 kids with a teacher making $100k if 5 of those kids wasn’t interested in learning, and had it burned into their heads from early childhood that education is worthless.
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I have yet to see a large-scale solution to the problem of the results of concentrated poverty in a school system. All “improvements” I’ve read about have involved changing the makeup of the schools or classes. Raleigh has instituted income-based busing and this is showing good results. Why? Because it’s easier to deal with 20% problem kids than 50% problem kids.
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In the past 20 years I have seen a significant change in the perception of suburban school systems. They are viewed as the equivalent of private schools. How did this happen? Proposition 2.5 has allowed those communities to define themselves as being “good for education”, and the simple act of buying a house is the admission procedure.
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Urban systems need a mechanism to combat that kind of self-selection, and using parental involvement as a screen is the best way to provide this, because it is ambivalent to both race AND economic situation.
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If we can make urban school systems more attractive, this will alleviate a whole host of other problems, primarily the cycle of overdeveloping suburban and rural areas, and even the high cost of housing. People love the idea of high housing prices in their community because it keeps out certain people. They fight against density because that lowers the price of housing units. But if urban areas become en vogue again, urban areas are committed to develop dense housing, and this will ultimately strengthen our state because we will once again have high concentrations of a wide variety of people (attractive to business) rather than high concentrations of poor people (which drives business away).