CURMUDGUCATION: Rescuing Strivers from Those People

CURMUDGUCATION: Rescuing Strivers from Those People:

Rescuing Strivers from Those People

Today in Bloomberg View, Mike Petrilli is airing out his ideas about how charters should be the lifeboats that rescue strivers from the chaos of disruptive students.

His thesis is pretty simple-- strivers suffer from being trapped in classrooms that are disrupted by non-strivey students, so if we could screen for strivers and get them into a safe, striver-friendly school, rescuing them from chaotic public schools where disruptive students are, for a variety of both good and bad reasons, allowed to suck up the disruptive lion's share of time and attention.

As I said just a few days ago, when Petrilli was defending Eva Moskowitz's push-out policy, his point is not completely without merit. Every teacher on the planet has had That Student, without whom their class runs so much more smoothly. And every teacher understands the impact of the group-mind in a classroom in terms of atmosphere and what can be accomplished. And every teacher who's been working for more than ten years has seen the impact of policies that have aggressively pushed for all students, regardless of skill or inclination, back into the regular classroom.

However, I have some huge problems with Petrilli's narrative.

The Myth of the Climb to the Middle Class

In his very first paragraph, Petrilli provides a definition of a striver:

Low-income strivers -- impoverished families who follow the rules and work hard to climb the CURMUDGUCATION: Rescuing Strivers from Those People: