Here in the City of Rochester (New York), the school district serves 59,000 students from preschool to adult students. Like most urban school districts in the United States, the educational outcomes are abysmal - less than a 50% graduation rate, sub-par scores on national tests, high rates of teen pregnancy, etc. At $14,850 per student, the district invests 71 percent more per student than the national average. The problems it faces academically are clearly not related to spending.
The district offers school choice - rather than having neighborhood schools, students/parents provide their order of preference and a lottery is held to assign students to a specific school. The idea is that families can select the better performing schools or ones that fit their child's needs best. Conceptually, this makes sense. Unfortunately, this generates a number of issues and ultimately is counterproductive. Specifically:
1. Neighborhood school strengthens the fabric of the whole neighborhood. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child. When a school is specific to a neighborhood, it brings families closer together and in more contexts. This intimacy facitates a broader and stronger support system that trancends the classroom and family unit.
2. Neighborhoods are reasonable proxies for demographics, which have the greatest impact on the specific needs of students. Neighborhoods tend to coalesce into groups of people with similar educational attainment, social status, wealth, and interests. While school choice is intended to break down these barriers, that can be counterproductive to all students. Students with both parents involved and who's parents enrich their learning throughout all aspects of their lives can have more energy focused on broader and deeper learning. Students who lack strong parental guidance, who's parents have limited education, and who are surrounded by crime and poverty require the school to provide more structure and serve part of the parenting role. By blending these two groups in an effort to achieve equality, the result is ultimately that the former group is held back from reaching its potential and the latter does not get the attention and focus that it needs to break the cycle of poverty. If parity means a worse outcome for both groups, how is that fair to either?
3. One of the biggest determinants of where families move is schools. The school choice system means that you cannot move into the city to a specific neighborhood to ensure a specific educational experience. Given the poor performance of the city schools, this contributes to the pressure pushing the middle class out of the city. Poor families stay because they cannot afford the suburbs, and wealthier families simply send their children to private schools. This contributes to urban decay, suburban sprawl, and a constantly declining urban tax base.
4. School choice requires that many students must be bussed or driven to schools miles away rather than walking or taking a short trip to a local neighborhood school. This increases costs and is the antithesis of being green.
In my opinion, it is time for the city school district to free itself from outdated concepts of what constitutes politically motivated social justice and take a more pragmatic approach. Ultimately, if changes result in significantly better outcomes for the most challenged as well as the most privileged students, and contributes to the stabilization of the tax base as families stay or move into the city, how can that be less just than the vicious cycle of unending urban decline?
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