Unequal Access and Denial of Opportunity: the Collateral Damage of Portfolio School Reform
Last week, after New York City’s former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, expressed an interest in running for President, this blog reviewed the history of the school reform scheme he imposed during his three term tenure as mayor. In 2002, he convinced the state legislature to grant him mayoral governance of the city’s schools. He and Joel Klein, the prominent attorney he appointed as his schools chancellor, imposed what was—nearly two decades ago—a new kind of school governance scheme.
The New York City Schools were among the early so-called “portfolio school districts,” and the district remains part of the Portfolio School Reform Network, big city school districts which adopted portfolio governance theory from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a Gates-funded think tank at the University of Washington, Bothell.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein launched this scheme in New York City by creating district-wide school choice, breaking up large comprehensive high schools into small schools with curricular specialties, encouraging the opening of a large number of charter schools, co-locating many schools—small specialty public schools along with charter schools—into the same buildings. Those running the school district would consider all of these schools of choice as if they were investments in a stock portfolio. The district would hold on to the successful investments and phase out those whose test scores were low or which families didn’t choose.
Portfolio school reform has created collateral damage across the school districts which have experimented with the idea. After the Chicago Public Schools, another district managed by portfolio school reform theory, closed 50 schools at the end of the 2013 school year, the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, and separately a University of Chicago sociologist, Eve Ewing tracked widespread community grieving when neighborhoods lost the public school institutions that had anchored their neighborhoods.
But there have been other kinds of collateral damage beyond the tragedy of school closures. In CONTINUE READING: Unequal Access and Denial of Opportunity: the Collateral Damage of Portfolio School Reform | janresseger
