NYC Educator: Reclaiming Our Precious Nouns

NYC Educator: Reclaiming Our Precious Nouns:

Reclaiming Our Precious Nouns

by NYC Educator

Michael Fiorillo wrote a great piece about the "choices" city residents have for their kids. The corporate geniuses who make all the decisions about education have determined, since vouchers have never been popular anywhere, to get into the charter business. Of course, by the sole criterion with which they are measured, test scores, they aren't really any better than the neighborhood schools they displace.

But everyone wants Choice. You can go to the neighborhood school, if they haven't closed it yet, and if it isn't drained of space and resources you may do OK there. Of course, there could be three or four small schools, or maybe a Moskowitz charter, and you may feel like a second-class citizen as the Moskowitz school gets refurbished and yours doesn't. And, of course, the Moskowitz school doesn't take all those inconvenient special education and ESL students, and they oppose any bill compelling them to take a mix that reflects the neighborhood. Better to dump them on the neighborhood school, watch their test scores plummet, then take it