Only in New York do seventh graders have a summer reading assignment like this: the 600-page New York City High School Directory. It's the first step in year-long odyssey that includes seven summer workshops, [http://schools.nyc.gov/ChoicesEnrollment/High/Calendar/default.htm] fall tours, interviews, exams, and auditions that will determine which of the more than 400 high schools these kids will attend in fall 2010.
If you're lucky (or talented) you may wind up in a great school. But, as a new report [http://www.newschool.edu/milano/nycaffairs/publications_schools_thenewmarketplace_thirdarticle.aspx] (disclosure: I am one of the authors) shows, if you have bad luck or bewildered parents you may wind up at a school you hate that's a 90-minute commute from home.
Whatever happened to the good old zoned neighborhood school? In lots New York City neighborhoods, the zoned schools have been a disaster for decades. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has closed most of them down and opened 200 new small themed schools in an effort to expand school choice and make the system more equitable. He thought, quite rightly, that poor kids shouldn't be automatically assigned to failing zoned schools. Now all students, not just those applying to selective schools, must fill out an application for high school in the fall of their eighth grade year.
Klein has had some success, and there are more options for kids than there were before. But the report by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School http://www.newschool.edu/milano/nycaffairs/default.aspx] shows the pitfalls to this approach.
For one thing the process is unbelievably complicated. Look at this road map from the report:
[PDF]ROAD TO HIGH SCHOOL Download file
Something this complicated almost guarantees that kids who don't have activist parents will wind up in the worst schools. School choice isn't an answer for these kids. Fixing neighborhood schools is.
...wherein only the most aggressive parents driving their kids through it can get to the promised land of education in Mayor Really Really Rich Guy's, and Chancellor Liberal Guilt Guy's system:
A selective or screened-entry high school (same goes for middle school) where clued-in white parents can land their kids in schools that cater to the high side of the achievement gap in a system that seems fine with segregation.
For parents whose kids on average end up on the low side of the achievement gap, there's school closures rather than school improvement, and an odd couple of Reverend Sharpton and Newt Gingrich willing to sell inner city parents a Charter School.
Or, as this report points out in so many words, warehousing. Yes, Chancellor Klein would rather talk about the "small schools" he wants more of than the "big schools" his "small schools" are causing to get ever more crowded -- and less successful.
You want your neighborhood high school, or middle school, back?
Simple: Kick Chancellor Klein out of the neighborhood.
(How can being anti-neighborhood result in INCREASED segregation? A good question for one NYC Public School product himself: Joel Klein.)