CURMUDGUCATION: NY: Those Peoples' Kids

CURMUDGUCATION: NY: Those Peoples' Kids:

NY: Those Peoples' Kids

It doesn't get much plainer than this. The headline of the New York Chalkbeat piece is "Hoping to attract gentrifiers, a troubled school gets a makeover and new admissions policy."

The story is about Satellite West Middle School, a school redesigned to focus on science and art, renamed the Dock Street School for STEAM Studies. And it addresses this question posed by Patrick Wall in the article: How can middle-class families in gentrifying areas be convinced to send their children to local schools with less-than-stellar reputations?

Because District 13 runs on choice (parents can apply to any middle school), Dock Street must find a way to appeal to the now-increasingly-upscale parents in its community. And that means being more careful about who, exactly, they let in. Not just improving the quality of the education offered by the school, but by screening admissions. By making sure that only the Right Children get in.

It is an understandable dilemma for parents, and I'm never willing to say to a parent, "Look, you should put political and philosophical concerns ahead of your own child's concerns." 

But the new development underlines two big lies about the value and benefits of charters to a city's education system.

First, it shows, once again, the one real trick that charter operators know and which some public systems have learned to adopt-- to get a better school, you need to swap out your old students for "better" ones. When a charter or turnaround specialist or state takeover district manages to improve a school with exactly the same student population that was there when the school was deemed "failing" in the first place, that will be noteworthy. But mostly they do what Dock Street is doing-- bar the door and only let in those students who will improve the school. That's exactly what Cris Barbic learned just before he gave up on Tennessee's state takeover district.

That's great for the school, and good for the newly acquired batch of students, but it still leaves a whole bunch of students in the wind, without a school intent on educating them.

Second, it shows that the power of charters and choice to "free" students from their zip code is an CURMUDGUCATION: NY: Those Peoples' Kids:



College Board's Real Business

Here's the morning's promoted tweet from the College Board

College Board Search's PSAT database increased 4.1%. Reach these students today! https://t.co/sOSYdVqbbY

— The College Board (@CollegeBoard) January 12, 2016

That link takes you to the College Board page tagged with "Transformed Services for Smart Recruiting." Here you can find all sorts of useful headings like

Student Search Service (registered trademark)

Connect with students and meet recruitment goals using precise, deep data from the largest and richest database of college-bound students in the nation.

Enrollment Planning Service (trademark)

 Achieve your enrollment goals with powerful data analysis tools that efficiently facilitate exploration of the student population and inform a smarter recruitment plan.

Segment Analysis Service (trademark)

 Leverage sophisticated geographic, attitudinal and behavioral information to focus your enrollment efforts and achieve better yields from admission through graduation.

That last one, with its ability to leverage attitudinal and behavioral data-- how the heck do they do 


College Board's Real Business