Registration Process a Fiasco: New Orleans Parents Struggle to Secure Places for their Children
Here is what the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washingtonpronounces on its website as the heart of “portfolio school reform”:
“A great school for every child in every neighborhood. The portfolio strategy gives families the freedom to attend their neighborhood schools or choose one that is the best fit for their child.”
New Orleans is one of the Center’s prime examples of the implementation of the “portfolio” theory it has been promoting. Reorganized by the state after Hurricane Katrina—with financial support from the federal government, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and other philanthropies—the New Orleans Recovery School District (RSD) has progressively closed all of its traditional public neighborhood schools and replaced them with privately operated charter schools. As of the fall of 2014, the district will now be fully charterized. All parents and guardians must now select a prioritized short-list of schools from the array of options, file an application through what has, thankfully, finally become a centralized process, and wait to see where their child is accepted.
Except that the application process doesn’t seem to be working very well. It seems in a lot of cases that parents are struggling to get their child into the school that seems to them “the best fit for their child.” The mess that happened in the application process on Wednesday, as reported by Danielle Dreilinger for the Times-Picayune, raises an essential question about the theory of school choice: Is it possible to ensure that all children can select into a school that is the best fit for them when school placement is based on competition, a competition that will inevitably have winners and losers?
Dreilinger reports: “New Orleans public school enrollment faltered badly Wednesday when Registration Process a Fiasco: New Orleans Parents Struggle to Secure Places for their Children | janresseger: