Journey for Justice and "School choice" week; just whose choices are being respected??

Last week was “School choice” week.  The entire concept of “school choice week” was invented by Jeb Bush  to promote the expansion of charter and vouchers,  supposedly to allow for more parental choice in selecting their children's schools.  Meanwhile, it was just revealed that Bush's organization, Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), promotes the business of for-profit companies, including several that donate to the organization and at least one corporation in which Bush has stock.

The reality is that the corporate reformers pushing “school choice,” including Arne Duncan, Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee, are not interested in the real-life choices of parents;  but instead in privatization.

When thousands of parents repeatedly turn out across the country to oppose the closing of their neighborhood schools, are their choices listened to?  No, they are ignored, or else the people in charge, like Bloomberg, say that parents are too uneducated to understand the value of a good education.

When parents say that their first priority for their children’s schools is reducing class size, are their choices listened to?  No, instead, the same people who say they believe in parent choice vehemently oppose  lowering class size: Bill Gates insists that class size doesn’t matter, Michelle Rhee pushes for eliminating any caps on class sizes, and Bloomberg say he would double class sizes if he could.

When parents say their children are over-tested and they should be allowed to opt out, do the authorities listen?  No, instead they plan to subject them to even more frequent and longer tests.

Let’s all admit it; “school choice” is a myth,  meant not to give public school parents the choices they want for their children, but instead represent the choices of corporate raiders who want to give our public schools to private interests, like hostile takeover artists who took over companies in the 1970’s and 1980’s, in order to dismantle them and sell them off piece by piece.

Coincidentally during “School Choice” week, on Tuesday, as part of the "Journey for Justice" campaign, parents, students and activists from 18 districts all over the country traveled to DC, testified at the US Department of Education, and demanded a moratorium on the mass school closings that are occurring with the encouragement of the federal government, on the grounds that  their children’s civil rights were being violated.  See videos below by Jaisal Noor of The Real News of Tuesday's events. See also this week’s Village Voice, about the invasion of charter schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn run by Eva Moskowitz and her husband, despite the vehement opposition of parents in that community.

Journey for Justice: Parents and Students from 18 Cities Demand Nationwide Moratorium on Schools Closings and demand US DOE investigate Civil rights violations

Part 2: Chicago Parent and Activist Jitu Brown at "Journey for Justice" Hearings in DC 

Part 3: New Orleans Parent and Activist Karran Harper Royal at "Journey for Justice" Hearing in DC 

A letter to Tom Toch about high school choice

Hey Tom, I read your recent article in PDK lauding high school choice. You write that the example of NYC shows that high school choice can "harness the power of the marketplace to better serve students’ diverse educational interests and needs and to stimulate improvement through competition for students on a wide scale."

As a NYC parent, I can tell you that this is a highly idealized picture of what actually occurs. The high school admissions process is a nightmare for most parents (and students); even worse than the college admissions process. And your article has some egregious errors.

You write that that “By 2009, some 95% of students won places at one of their top five high schools, and city officials had to assign only 791 students to schools.”

Actually, there were about 7500 students in 2009 -- 16% of the total-- who didn’t get into any of their top twelve choices.

That’s thousands of kids who end up being forced to attend failing schools, and/or schools miles from their homes, and/or schools that specialize in areas that don’t interest them at all. Another 7,000 or so students are automatically assigned to high schools because they show up too late to apply.

As this New School report points out, many of our students are routinely assigned to vocational schools to study trades that they have no interest in pursuing, though they have to pass exams in these specialized areas to graduate.

You would also be amazed at how low the quality of many of our high schools. More than half of our students attend severely overcrowded schools, most of them sitting in classes of thirty or larger, thousands in trailers. Many students travel an hour or more each way to school. As a result, about 40 percent students who enter high school at grade level or near grade level fail to graduate after four years.

And some of the most overcrowded schools are the lowest performing, flooded with high-needs students no one wants, especially special ed and ELL students. Indeed, inequities have flourished under this system of “school choice”.

Moreover, under the current system it has become nearly impossible for students to transfer out of the high school to which they ’ve been assigned – even they identify another school where the principal is willing to take them . You have to be practically mugged first.

This is one of the reasons our dropout and discharge rates are so high . In fact, the discharge rate for students in their first year of high school has doubled under this system of high school "choice", though none of these students counted as dropouts.

You are lucky you don’t have a child who attends public high school in NYC. We would all rather live someplace where our kids could automatically attend a decent neighborhood high school.

Yours, Leonie Haimson, public school parent