Snake Oil (and vouchers) Don’t Work. Community Schools, Do!
It’s fitting that “National School Choice Week,” the annual promotion of vouchers, tuition tax credits, and other schemes that siphon money from public schools and take opportunities away from students, falls in January. Everything about “school choice” leaves students out in the cold.
School choice is about schools that take public money, hand it over to private schools that have little or no accountability to taxpayers, and then pick and choose their students. Our students deserve more than this coldhearted, profit-driven approach to education. They deserve something that puts their needs front and center, providing the support and tools to help them flourish.
There’s a great model in place across the nation: community schools. We’re part of the Coalition for Community Schools, and I’ll be sharing NEA’s perspective this April as a featured speaker at the coalition’s National Forum.
These schools are first and foremost places of learning, but what sets them apart is their focus on the entire child. They can include partnerships with doctors, social service providers, mentors, and more, offering everything from medical care and counseling for students, to job resources and emergency assistance for parents.
Commonsense tells us that students can’t focus inside the classroom if their basic needs aren’t metoutside the classroom. That’s the premise of community schools.
Each of these schools is different because every community is different. At the outset, parents, educators, and community partners come together to figure out what the students’ needs are. They devise a plan based and pull in partners that can help. They change and update the plan as needed, responding to any gaps that exist.
Community schools are dynamic, constantly adapting to what’s happening around them. They’re influenced by what happens around them and because of that, they have an influence that goes well beyond the school doors. I visited one of them last year: Brooklyn Center Arts and IB Community High School. I was over-the-moon excited by what I saw – and so is the entire city. The school district adopted the community schools model in 2009.
Brooklyn Center is a city of about 30,000 just northwest of Minneapolis, on the banks of the Mississippi River. It’s part of a metropolitan area of about 3.2 million people. More than 43 percent of Brooklyn Center’s public school students are Black, 22 percent are Hispanic, 16 percent are Asian/Pacific Islander, and 16 percent are White. More than 21 percent are English Language learners, and 80 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. Many are recent Snake Oil (and vouchers) Don't Work. Community Schools, Do! - Lily's Blackboard:
