On October 16, the New York Daily News reported that "Parents of students in failing city schools filed a class action lawsuit against the Education Department yesterday, arguing the city plans to illegally deny transfers." The suit "seeks to stop the city from denying transfers under the federal No Child Left Behind law." Said one mother (of five-year-old twins) who is party to the class action, "My kids deserve an education and they aren't getting one where they are."
She's not alone. On September 12, the Daily News published excerpts from letters and emails with which parents reportedly "bombarded" school chancellor Joel Klein in late summer, begging for their children to be given exit visas from bad schools: "The conditions that my son has to face every day are deplorable," wrote a Harlem mother. "I am very concerned for my son. I think he wasted a whole year at this school," said a Bedford-Stuyvesant mom (in a handwritten seven page letter). "My son have not [sic] had a science teacher since November." "In the schoolyard there is no control and according to my son it is the same in the lunchroom. His class barely gets through a lesson because of the lawlessness allowed."
It's well known that New York lacks sufficient space in good schools for everyone who has the NCLB-conferred right to exit bad schools: some 234,000 youngsters in elementary/middle schools alone, more than a quarter of the Big Apple's total enrollment.
About 5000 of them actually applied for transfers this fall. Last year, 33,000 applied and 7000 were able to move. School system officials would have you believe that the decline in transfer requests is because parents are seeing improvement and don't feel the need to change schools.
Hah. What's really going on is that the district is doing everything in its power to discourage families from exercising choice. Obviously, last year's record of many seeking but few getting transfers would dishearten any parent contemplating a move. But that's not the whole story.
This year, New York won't allow any high-school students even to request a transfer. (In 2003-4, some 1600 did.) Astonishingly, a deputy chancellor told city council members that it's the kids' own fault if they're in bad high schools because they should have made wiser choices in the first place! "They had an opportunity to choose not to go to one of those [failing] schools," she said.
It's good that the city now lets entering high-school students apply to multiple schools. (How many get their top choices, I do not know.) But to deny subsequent transfers is un-American—and callously blind to the changing lives and priorities of teenagers.
As for elementary and middle schoolers, the city sought to "cap" NCLB choices this year at 1000—in a system of a million. The Daily News says Klein "backtracked after being hit with widespread criticism and claims from state and federal officials that they never approved a cap." (Nowhere in NCLB can I find language suggesting that such a thing would be kosher.)
To make matters worse, the city waited until August to notify parents that their children had the legal right to change schools—while warning that "Not every student who applies will be offered a transfer."
And not until a month after the school year opened did the city get around to processing the transfer applications. (New York is not alone. Cleveland students didn't learn about their right to transfer until late August, and will have spent at least a month of the new year in their old schools before the city acts on their applications.)
All this came out at a mid-October City Council hearing in New York, where one witness was U.S. deputy education secretary Eugene Hickok. Shamefully (if the New York Times can be believed), "Dr. Hickok did not criticize New York City's plan to limit how many students could transfer out of failing schools." Instead, he praised Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein for trying to create more choices via their charter-school and small-school initiatives.
To be sure, New York, like most cities, needs more supply in order to satisfy more of the demand for sound education options. Klein & Co. deserve plaudits for recognizing that. It's true, too, that NCLB created a right that American public education today lacks the capacity to fulfill, which is why national estimates suggest that only about two percent of those eligible to move last year under NCLB's public-school choice provision actually did so. It's even true that lots of unfilled demand, while frustrating to parents and hurtful to children in the short run, puts needed pressure on the system to change over the long run.
Still, at a time when upper middle class parents are completing their kids' applications to private schools for autumn '05, one wonders how poor and working class youngsters will ever "close the gap" if they have no decent alternatives to the failing schools they're now stuck in. One notes, too, that, for their own political reasons, states are keeping limits, caps, and constraints on the charter schools that might function as viable options. (See "More charter news" below.)
Though we're familiar with evidence of massive pent-up demand for school choices among urban poor and minority families, that's not the whole story. Seven new charters opened this year in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs. "I'm not anti-public schools" says a Wyoming Township mom whose kindergartner enrolled in a Spanish immersion charter school. "But I knew what I wanted for my child and the district couldn't offer it."
A few smart districts are making creative use of charter opportunities to add their own school options. Klein is trying to do that in New York as are Arne Duncan in Chicago and Paul Vallas in Philadelphia. The school board in suburban Decatur Township, Indiana, has asked Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson to sponsor a charter high school for youngsters who have difficulty in traditional settings.
Shouldn't state and federal policies, programs, and funding schemes be making this sort of innovation and supply-creation easier instead of harder? Wouldn't that have been a swell topic for this fall's political candidates to address?
"Sue Ed. Dept on transfer ban," New York Daily News, October 16, 2004 (no longer available online)
"No escape from worst schools," by Joe Williams, New York Daily News, October 15, 2004
"The schools at a crossroads," New York Sun, October 15, 2004
"Fewer city students seek transfers to better schools," by Elissa Gootman, New York Times, October 15, 2004
"NE Ohio schools must offer transfers," by Janet Okoben, Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 14, 2004
"Let kids go, parents beg," by Joe Williams, New York Daily News, September 12, 2004 (no longer available online)
"Charter demand rising in suburbs," by Megan Boldt, Pioneer Press, August 31, 2004 (registration required)
"District asks mayor to charter school," by Michael Dabney, Indianapolis Star, August 11, 2004 (subscription required)
