In a rush tonight, but thought I would pass along links to several posts by Jane Galt. She’s been writing that she supports school vouchers for equity reasons. She’s been wavering lately on the whole libertarian business, so maybe we can lure over the dark, commie side. Psst…. Jane, commies like Harry B from Crooked Timber and I have made similar arguments before.
LizardBreath gets into the debate over at Jane’s and points out that urban schools are fine. She’s quite fond her public school in Washington Heights. Loud gaffaws from my little office here. I’m from that hood. Old PS 187 was one of the big reasons we left. While that school is fine for a particular type of kid, it is not great for most kids. 95% of our bleeding heart liberal friends fled from that neighborhood when their kids turned five. Jonah couldn’t have hacked it. What would have happened to Ian, our special needs kiddo, in that system?
Apt. 11d 
What kind of kid is the school right for, and why did people flee?
I looked it up on greatschools.net. It’s 17% white, 74% Hispanic. The teachers are experienced and 70% have graduate degrees. It rates a 7 on their 10 point rating scale, which is better than some suburban MD schools I’ve looked at. Test scores are excellent in 3rd grade but then dip below average for 4th and 5th grade. Parent reviews are very positive, but the word “strict” keeps popping up. I’d really like to know what happens between 3rd and 4th grade. It might be the usual academic spiral of doom that starts in 4th grade, or it might be that middle class parents bail out at that point.
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The school population is predominantly Dominican — hard working, family-oriented people. However, the best Dominican families send their kids to other schools. They get them into the local Catholic school or they move to New Jersey. Nearly every white kid in the neighborhood tries to go to a gifted and talented public school in order to avoid going to PS 187. However, the G&T schools are all downtown, so parents with younger kids don’t want to deal with the subway. The kids in PS 187 usually end up there after other options have been eliminated. Kindergartens have 25+ kids in a tiny room. Only a blacktop to play on. It’s super strict – they have a no talking policy during lunch period. A former nun is the principal. Has the reputation of teaching to the test. After the kids reach third grade, the parents take their kids elsewhere.
I have some friends who have stuck it out in the school out of idealism, but they have many worries. They aren’t sure if they should be playing around with their kids’ futures.
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The “best Dominican families”?
bj
And comments on the New Jersey school funding report?
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Wrong school, mine are in the dual language program at 204th and Broadway. I’m actually surprised by what you say about 187; while it was too far from us to be an option, so I don’t have a sense of its scores offhand, parents of my daughter’s best friend did some weaseling to get their daughter into it, and I think of them as somewhat fussily overprotective.
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I recently heard a plausible defence for a no-talking-during lunch policy. The idea is that that way the kids will actually eat. I can imagine that a lot of more excitable, gabby kids spend their lunch time talking and leave the cafeteria hungry.
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Yeah, bj, that sounded bad. What I meant was that families with the most resources sent their kids to Catholic schools or sent them elsewhere. PS 187 was better than other options in Washington Heights, but a lot of local families tried to better.
Is that Amistad, Lizardbreath? One woman told me that her daughter did well there, but her son who needed more structure had a lot of problems there. We ruled out dual language schools, because we couldn’t support it at home.
I have a couple of friends who still have their kids at 187, but there’s been a lot of turnover. The families who are there have strong ties to the city and are unwilling to move to the suburbs. They end up supplementing a lot on the weekends. (Oh, I see your e-mail. I’ll finish up the neighborhood gossip there.)
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The Bookerrising blog (usually worth a read) quoted John McWhorter about KIPP schools today:
JOHN MCWHORTER OP-ED: A New Alphabet
The moderate-liberal commentator and former University of California at Berkeley linguistics professor writes: “The Supreme Court will soon be deciding whether Seattle, Wash., and Louisville, Ky., will be allowed to use bu[s]ing to make sure that their public schools aren’t segregated. In Louisville, for example, the mandate under attack stipulates that no school can be more than 50% black.The idea is that a school like that must certainly be a disaster, and that this means we haven’t gotten as far as we thought beyond the days before Brown v. Board of Education as we’d like to think. That’s why it was worth seeing a KIPP graduation. The Bronx branch shares a building with another inner city public school. It was no accident that there were several police officers stationed in the lobby. Though both schools have students from the same demographic, the KIPP ones have been rocking, academically, for nine years while the kids in the same building at the other school are dealing with the usual problems with sub-par reading skills, discipline problems, poor teaching, and the like. Scratch the surface of the problem with educating poor kids in America, and anyone can see that the main problem in so many public schools is not that everybody is brown, but that nobody is teaching the kids much of anything. It’s partly parenting, partly the teachers, partly the distractions of modern technology.”
Mr. McWhorter continues his commentary: “Some think that we just need to give schools like this as much money as suburban schools get. But many of them do get that much money. And we don’t hear about the fact that when they do, nothing changes. Lousy schools in inner cities in New Jersey have been funded as lavishly as suburban ones since 1998. Nothing is different. What makes the difference is what the teachers do. The KIPP school has a longer school day. There is a culture that puts a high value on students’ paying attention. Plus, KIPP teachers are trained to see their students not as casualties of society who we can’t expect much of, but as fresh young minds ready to be challenged…..There were no white kids around, which makes one think about how we perceive this word segregation. No one has any problem with black undergraduates going to all black colleges. But if students are just a few years younger, it automatically becomes a sociological injustice that they go to a school where everybody looks like them? KIPP is showing us the weakness of the idea that brown children can only learn together if they are middle class or in a classroom with white students.”
My response [that is, the response of Shay the blogger, not dave.s.]: I disagree with Mr. McWhorter that it’s “partly parenting, partly the teachers, partly the distractions of modern technology” that explains why so many poor children underachieve in school. It is mostly parenting, a little bit the teachers, and a little bit the distractions of modern technology that should get the blame. Parental involvement is the most important indicator for how well a child does in school, regardless of race, social class, etc. School vouchers will enable black parents who do care to have more options for their children – be it a school with longer hours and 6 days of learning, a school with a religious vs. secular curriculum, or a school with stronger discipline. It can also provide a wider variety of learning environments – through market competition – for black children with indifferent parents, instead of allowing a few class clowns to ruin it for everyone as too often is the current setup.
Labels: Education
Seems to me [dave.s. here] a pretty strong argument for vouchers/charters.
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thanks, dave s. I’m a huge fan of the KIPP schools. We need a desegregation post soon.
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