Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg named as his next New York City School Chancellor, a woman who has had the privilege of sending her two children to a boarding school in Connecticut at a cost of over $45,000 per student per year–which is more than the median household income for a family living in Brooklyn. It’s equivalent to the entire salary of an entry level New York City public school teacher with a bachelor’s degree. In her storied career as a media executive Cathie Black (who as far as I can tell only has a bachelor’s degree) readily admits to never having had to deal with unions.
And I’m sure that as a mother of children who went to private school in Connecticut, she will have a great deal of empathy for the parents and children who went, last night, to the informational meeting about the Brooklyn Prospect Charter School because they believed it to be a viable middle school option despite the fact that the entering class of one hundred 6th graders will be chosen by lottery.
Priority is given to students residing in District 15 and last year there were over 700 students from District 15 who applied to this particular charter school. No one from outside of District 15 was considered.
Another charter school, Community Roots, which is open to any child eligible to attend public school in New York City placed 420 names into the lottery for 37 available kindergarten seats in 2009.
At a meeting of 5th grade parents at PS 8 (in District 13) the prinicpal said the long term survival of that good elementary school is dependent on good middle school choices.
The parents of children who attend PS 8 in Broooklyn Heights are hard put to come up with more than three District 13 schools to which they are willing send their children, after taking into consideration the commute using public transportation (bus and subway), the diversity of the student body, and the academic offerings. Most of the middle schools to which PS 8 Brooklyn Heights parents would send their children are also open to applicants from Districts 14, 15, 16 and 17 if not all of Brooklyn. At the same time, there are no schools in District 15 which are open to the children of District 13.
One of my mommy friends who moved to Brooklyn from Canada five years ago, with a toddler, a preschooler and a kindergartner bemoans the fact that if only they had chosen an apartment a few blocks away from the one where they live now, their children would be able to apply to the more academically challenging and diverse middle schools of District 15. As residents of District 13, they are shut out of middle schools within walking distance of their home.
This is crazy-making.
We are like many Brooklyn parents who send our kids to public school because we attended good suburban public schools. We found progressive schools and we think we are giving our children an enriching urban experience because they attend school with children of color whose parents are professionals with advanced degrees. Then they get to middle school. We don’t have a zoned middle school. We go out and visit as many middle schools as we can. We discover we have been sheltered. We discover that our schools are selective. We suddenly think we have gifted children and scramble to get them into one of the gifted and talented schools that look an awful lot like ordinary high quality suburban schools. The ordinary urban public schools aren’t good enough for our kids because they already know they’re going to college. As parents, we fear our own children will be ill-served by a school that aspires to attain standards.
Our children are not cans of soup. We are not looking for efficiently produced consistency of quality in test results. We want our children to go to a school where they will be inspired to learn. We want them to discover and nourish passions that may lead to career paths.
If I give a school a 10-year-old girl who self-identifies as a geek and plans to become an engineer, I want her to come out of middle school ready, willing and able to do advanced math and science in high school even if she switches her passion to fashion in the 7th grade. I don’t think that’s too much to ask since there are schools which do exactly that. But, there seems to be a shortage of these schools and an abundance of the soup can model.
If a child doesn’t win a lottery to get into a small charter school or test in the top half of the top one percent in order to get into gifted program and is assigned by the NYCDOE computer to a random school where they are uncomfortable and is hard to get to using public transportation, that child might start staying home from school and fall so far behind they begin to fail thereby further limiting options for high school. Eventually that child becomes demoralized and drops out. That’s how it happens. It’s a track that starts in middle school just as straight as the one that propels a different set of kids from good middle schools into one of the selective high schools and on to a universities like MIT.
Our 10-year-olds are young, passionate and impressionable. We parents are filled with dread because we know the least consistent, most interesting kids are the ones who could go either way.
The father of one of My Kid’s friends has gone completely grey since school started in September. He’s not the only one. Another mom I know said her hair is falling out and I have lost weight.
The man at the podium boasted about the charter school’s diversity with children from 40 different Brooklyn elementary schools.
I don’t think that will be the case for the incoming class. My daughter, who was with me at this open house, was sent to the gym for activities with the other children. When she came back, she reported that the kids were asked which elementary school they attended and volunteers were all chosen from among those who had said either PS 321, PS 29, or Brooklyn New School.
At the tender age of 10, My Kid is beginning to suspect that she does not go to one of the “good schools”.
But, good press is a fickle mistress.
When My Kid was 6-years-old her school was “so good” that Chancellor Joel Klein showed up with his attendant media circus for The First Day of School. They were so busy putting on a big show for the morning news programs that they didn’t even notice that they were scaring some of the first graders who were afraid to go into a classroom full of cameras and microphones and grown men in suits.
The New York City Department of Education had recently abolished the districts by merging them into larger regions when my friends and I were looking for kindergarten placements for our children. Districts 13, 14, 15, and 16 became Region 8. We were told that there was no longer a separation between Districts 13 and 15. We were sold magnet schools and told that the old school district boundaries didn’t matter. We were told that it wouldn’t make any difference wether our kids attended PS 11 or PS 261 or PS 29 or PS 8 or BNS. In 2007 after my daughter was settled into her elementary school, the regions were dissolved and the gerrymandered segregated districts reinstated.
This morning I ran into the parents of one of my daughter’s classmates. They were with a real estate agent looking at apartments in District 15.
I suspect Cathie Black author of Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life) would approve. But what about Cathie Black, the next Chancellor of New York City Department of Education?
She’s made a career out of not being afraid to lay people off. She must realize that as Chancellor of the New York Department of Education, she will be responsible for educating all of the children of more than a million New York families, not just those with the means to navigate the system.
http://video.forbes.com/fvn/ceo/cw_black121108