Academic Xenophobia.

NPR is reporting on school districts who are cracking down on residency issues.

Why?

1. Those parents who are going to go out of their way to "work" the system and exert extra effort to get their kids into your school are statistically more likely to have better motivated students.That's the KIPP difference, the charter difference.  Why not use it? Helping your AYP is nice.
2. It's not like the kid is free-loading. You get the money for every kid who attends regularly and these kids are already going out of their way to get there, so they'll probably have better attendance.
3. The kids are more likely to behave because calling the parents would expose the scam. 
4. District lines are very often arbitrary at best. Gerrymandering the lines doesn't make the bus ride shorter, the school better or the environment safer.

In my mind, I think the best thing would be to make noise publicly. "We're cracking down in the best interests of our community" while making sure that only the troublemakers who try this get caught at it.

Besides, I never quite figured out why it was so important.  We have to educate every kid somewhere and isn't it a compliment that family after family wants to be at YOUR school? I'd be rolling out the red carpet for kids who wanted to come and bragging about it if I could, but maybe that's the private school experience coming out of me.

How do I square this with my stand against vouchers? Because it is a switch between public schools. Most often, vouchers are touted as a transfer of funds from the public school system to a private school and that's the part I don't like.

I can be a member of the local school board (actually have been). I can pick up the phone and directly effect what is going on at the public school in my town. Even as a private citizen, I can walk into the principal's office and ask a question directly - and get an answer (okay, yes, make an appointment and wait a little but you get what I mean). If I am calm, dispassionate, and right, the school will make a change to its policy because I am a taxpaying member of the town and the school is being run by the town for the benefit of any citizen who wishes to take advantage of it.

The Catholic Schools and the private schools won't do that. Why should they?

I do not have a problem with the public - public voucher system. It works well here in Vermont.  I really have a problem when money goes to private institutions which don't follow the same testing and accountability requirements that the rest of the schools do.

Thanks for the Help

Gee, thanks Bill.

Joanne Barkan, writing in Dissent, argues that three big nonprofit foundations (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation), working together, exert a “decisive influence” on public-school education. ”Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making,” she writes.(h/t to the Freakonomics blog, Dubner and Leavitt.)

Unfortunately, this is not just about Bill, Eli and Sam wasting their own money.  It's about three foundations that are pushing an anti-public school agenda that aims to destroy the teachers' union and reduce the educational possibilities for the public. It's about the capitalization of an "industry" at all costs, using tactics that sound good on the face, but are mainly aimed at money.

But, Barkan warns, these market-based reforms are hardly a panacea: “[E]vidence is mounting that the reforms are not working. Stanford University’s 2009 study of charter schools—the most comprehensive ever done—concluded that 83 percent of them perform either worse or no better than traditional public schools; a 2010 Vanderbilt University study showed definitively that merit pay for teachers does not produce higher test scores for students; a National Research Council report confirmed multiple studies that show standardized test scores do not measure student learning adequately. Gates and Broad helped to shape and fund two of the nation’s most extensive and aggressive school reform programs—in Chicago and New York City—but neither has produced credible improvement in student performance after years of experimentation.”

Misguided reform coupled with tragically misguided legislation has left us with the same problems we had before coupled with many new ones.

• We have public schools in which the teachers at the top of their payscale (e.g., here in Vermont) with all the bells and whistles, degrees and seniority, still are earning less than the state median wage. 
• You have charter schools opening up on the cheap, closing down significant public options, simply so that Green Dot and other groups can make a profit. The principal of such can look super while pulling in $200k to $500k but apparently a teacher making more than $30k is the AntiChrist.
• You have organizations like Teach for America, set up solely to destroy teachers who want to make a career of teaching. How? By making it harder for serious candidates to get into places to establish themselves.  Why would a school want a career teacher when it can hire a fancy thoroughbred that will seem flashy and pretty and fast, but ultimately flame out in two years? Instant gratification writ cynical.
• You have reforms that are directly counter-productive, that "everyone knew were going to revolutionize education" but that really wound up wasting a significant portion of that budget that the pro-voucher, pro-private school advocates were pointing to as a problem in the public schools.
• Think: Small Schools Initiative. (Break big schools into smaller ones and then bitch that the smaller ones don't have economy of scale.)
• Think: Technology Uber Alles. Microsoft is the Education King! Every kid should have a laptop! Every kid should have a smartphone! iPod! iPad! Netbook!
• Think: Parochial, Private, Charter, KIPP! Profit is better.
• Think: Merit Pay!
• Testing, testing, testing. Test them in October, release the scores in May. And I'm supposed to do what in the last six weeks of school to change my curriculum to help this kid?

Like I said, Thanks. Now would you all please go somewhere and stop helping?

PJ O'Rourke gets Stupid

So PJ O'Rourke, who used to be funny, has deflated into a wizened, cranky conservative who's drunk the anti-public Koolaid. He has forgotten his basic economics, his basic statistics and his basic humanity.

Oh Well.

"What’s been learned is that it costs a fortune to send kids to school. Figures in the Statistical Abstract of the United States show that we are spending $11,749 per pupil per year in the U.S. public schools, grades pre-K through 12. That’s an average. And you, like me, don’t have average children. So we pay the $11,749 in school taxes for the children who are average and then we pay private school tuition for our own outstanding children or we move to a suburb we can’t afford and pay even more property taxes for schools in the belief that this makes every child outstanding."
"Close all the public schools. Send the kids home. Fire the teachers. Sell the buildings. Raze the U.S. Department of Education, leaving not one brick standing upon another and plow the land where it stood with salt."
Opinion: End Them, Don’t Mend Them: It’s time to shutter America’s bloated schools, by P.J. O’Rourke, The Weekly Standard, June 21, 2010

Okay, let's take a few of these:
We all pay between $1000 and $5000 towards education every year, kids or not. That tax money covers the tuition for any child or dependent, for twelve years, maybe thirteen. PJ seems to think that the entire cost of a single kid's education comes out of his pocket and therefore should go back into his pocket. Frankly, PJ, you're getting a deal but you're too stupid and you insist on getting your little moppet into Miss Porters. Too bad.

Very funny, the jibe about teachers only working part-time. I have no answer to that except to feel good that I work for much more of the year than a columnist does. What does PJ get in exchange for writing 10 inches, 100 times per year? Much more than I do and he works a grand total of four days a year.

Yep, PJ you're right that scores on AEP haven't risen much. What's your point? That kids should be getting more and more intelligent? Try this on for size, PJ. New England prep schools have identical results as their in-town Public competitors on SATs and ACTs when you look just at those who are taking college-prep and AP courses. In fact, more millionaires' kids in Mass go to public schools than to private ones.

Teacher:student ratios - well, you got me there. 15:1 is the average. Of course, a basic statistics course will also tell you that for every class of 10 there's a class of 20 and for every one-on-one, there's a group of 30. Trust me, there are a lot of 1-1s.

PJ doesn't like 1-1 teaching. Those kids who need specialized help are apparently trash to be thrown out, according to his scheme. "A yearly benefit of $26,000 should provide some tutoring and therapy—or a pocket full of Ritalin." Maybe, but that's not an education and it falls far short of what a private school would charge for a disabled student.

What public education does, unfortunately for the conservative blowhards, is provide a good education for a majority of its students. Parents know that. That's why they continue to send their kids there. That's why school budgets (in Vermont at least) have a 98% record of being passed by their towns. It's also why there are very few private schools - and the ones that are here are having terrible enrollments.

Capitalism at work?

Don't tell PJ.

Closing Schools and the Law of Averages.

Pissed Off Teacher has it right.

When you try to raise scores by closing schools, you don't eliminate the problem, you sweep it under someone else's rug. You can pretend that the bump in the middle of the new rug isn't there and you can safely ignore for a while but sooner or later, like a Ponzi scheme spirally out of control, you have to address it.

Unfortunately, the rug in question isn't on Bloomberg's head, it's another school.

In some ways, it's like debtor's prison - your problem is your fault and you deserve punishment for having it, even if it's not your fault and you had no control over any of the decisions leading up to it. You still get punished even though the punishment makes the whole situation worse.

Closing School A does not teach it's students any lesson other than "Money talks and you have no voice." NCLB, vouchers, and many of Bloomberg's policies might not have been INTENDED for the purpose of closing public schools and replacing them with private schools, but the effect is shaping up that way.

What a sorry country this would be if all the public schools closed. The charters could ignore all those students who don't "meet the criteria."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If the solution is "Schools without Restrictions" then lighten those restrictions. Don't eliminate the schools, unless you don't want THOSE people's kids to get an education.

Closing Schools - Now what?

Pissed Off: Out Of The Mouth Of Babes says:

The kids were all abuzz about some of the borough's schools being closed. They were worried that these kids will now be coming to Packemin. They didn't understand why these schools were being eliminated. I told them about the school's poor academic records and their failure rates. The kids immediately piped up with "Bad kids are bad kids. So now they will all come here and bring our school down too. I bet we will be the next school closed."

Toles had it best: