Why Neo-Plessyism Failed to Improve Chicago Schools
The market-driven school reform movement intentionally uses test, punish, choice, and no-holds-barred competition to sort and separate students and educators. They scoff at the social science that explains the need for trusting relationships and diversity in schools, as they use the stress of tests and competition to supposedly overcome the stress of poverty.
Reformers ridicule calls for collaboration and integration, as they use segregation by choice to undo the legacy of segregation by economics and race!?!? Then they areshocked, shocked, that their campaign to separate leads to increased segregation.
Reformers in New Orleans, New York City, and Chicago have been especially determined to reward schools that recruit the easier-to-educate, while punishing those schools that are left with even greater percentages of children from extreme poverty, who have endured severe trauma. But, now Mayor Rahm Emanuel supposedly claims that he did not intend to worsen segregation. Perhaps Emanuel is so uninformed about education research and history that he didn't understand that increased sorting would be the inevitable result of his policies.
Reporter Linda Lutton and a study by Chicago's WBEZ public radio shows that the opening of dozens of new Chicago high schools since 2004 has increased sorting in high and low performing schools. Chicago has followed the same pattern as the reforms in New Orleans where, as researcher Andrew McEachin discovered, "High performing students tend to go to high-performing schools, and low-performing students tend to go to low-performing schools."
Chicago followed the same dynamics as reforms in New York City where researcher Sean Corcoran determined, "high achieving kids tended to cluster together and low Why Neo-Plessyism Failed to Improve Chicago Schools | John Thompson: