Blindsided by universal enrollment plan. How did we get here?
by Christine Carlson on Jan 29 2014 Posted in Commentary
It came in like a wrecking ball ...
I’ve been subjected to hearing my 10-year-old daughter play Miley Cyrus’ song "Wrecking Ball" many times. Some parents hear this song and envision the provocative music video. I’ve come to relate it to the universal enrollment plan being proposed for Philadelphia's schools. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and I was blindsided.I consider myself a fairly informed public school parent. I attend School Reform Commission meetings, participate on various workgroups, and faithfully read this publication's morning news roundup. So, when the Great Schools Compact, an education-reform initiative that seeks to replace poor-performing seats with high-quality alternatives, released its agreement at the end of 2011, I didn’t recall any red flags about universal enrollment as a plan to privatize the School District’s placement office and assign students to one school.
About a year later, I attended a meeting where Compact members presented an update on their activities. They were pretty excited at the time because the Compact had just been awarded a $2.5 million grant from the Gates Foundation to pursue three of its initiatives: creating an urban leadership academy, sharing best practices for teacher effectiveness, and producing benchmark tests to align with the new Common Core standards. There was no mention of universal enrollment as something that was actively being pursued.
So, how did we get to the point where the Compact has presented a detailed timeline to City Council outlining their plans for a third-party, fee-driven, single-choice algorithmic system? It came in like a wrecking ball and I wondered how I could have possibly missed it. When I looked back, I found that universal enrollment, as originally presented in the Great Schools Compact, is not what is being proposed now.
The Compact document, dated Dec. 20, 2011, does include universal enrollment as one of its commitments to action. Here is how it's described.
We will pursue a system of “universal enrollment”—i.e., aligning schools’ application procedures, from public announcements to application materials to lottery dates and other timing, as uniformly as possible. Expanding the number of high performing schools will only truly serve parents and students if they are