The
best school for your children may not be the one within walking distance.
           Instead of being theoretically tied
to their neighborhood school, city kindergarteners next school year will have a
choice of several schools. The schools available to them depend on which zone
they live in. The city school district has been divided into three zones:
northeast, northwest, and south.
           The new Parent Preference/Managed
Choice Policy was adopted by the city school board late last year. The prime
drivers, according to school board member Willa Powell, are the district’s
busing rate, fairness and equity for all city students, and the concept of
structural displacement.
           “Our children are not where our
schools are and vice versa,” she says.
           Magnet schools saved Rochester from
implementing a choice policy up until now.
           “Boston’s choice model went into
effect about the same time this district was doing magnet schools as a way of
doing voluntary transfers, voluntary busing,” Powell says. “So we kind of
dodged the bullet. The only reason we didn’t have a lawsuit here is that in New
York, we responded with magnet schools. Well, magnet schools lost their
emphasis when they lost their funding.”
           The biggest complaint about the new
policy is that there is no guarantee kids will be able to attend their
neighborhood school. School officials say a guarantee is irrelevant. But a
citizens’ group is pushing for a policy amendment guaranteeing kids the right
to attend their neighborhood school.
           And the movement is picking up
steam, winning the support of Rochester Teachers Association President Adam
Urbanski. Mayor Bill Johnson has not called for the amendment, but says he
understands the group’s concerns. He’s also been quoted as saying that the
outrage over the policy is just the kind of thing that drives people out of the
city.
Concerned
Citizens for City Living, the group pushing the amendment, says the policy, as is,
will hurt the school district and the city as a whole.
           “Obviously, the city is trying to
revitalize itself. And I just think that this type of policy is going to
discourage people from moving into the city,” says group spokesperson Skip
Pleninger. “If somebody comes into a neighborhood, that’s the first question
they ask, ‘Where’s my child going to go to school?’ I think that commitment to
city living is going to decrease and people are going to move out to the
suburbs.”
           The group also expects parental
involvement in the schools to drop as people lose the sense of ownership and
pride of neighborhood they associate with their home schools.
           With the guarantee in place, then
parents can go out and explore other schools, Pleninger says.
As it stands
now, 60 percent of the openings at each school will be reserved for
neighborhood residents living with a half-mile radius of the schools. The
remaining slots are for non-neighborhood residents, if they apply.
           But Superintendent Manuel Rivera,
responding to community concerns, recommended creating a “transitional year”
for the plan at Monday’s policy committee meeting. Rivera wanted neighborhood
slots bumped to 75 percent and to drop the half-mile radius in favor of using
existing home-school boundaries.
           The committee agreed to send a
compromise proposal to the school board for its consideration next Thursday
night, February 12. In it, 70 percent of the openings would be for neighborhood
students. The committee also agreed to temporarily use existing home-school
boundaries to determine neighborhood schools.
           Registration would also be postponed
if the school board follows Rivera’s recommendation. It would start in April
instead of March in order to give the residents more time to understand the new
plan.
           The policy will be reevaluated in
the fall, Rivera says, to see if more changes are needed.
The original
60/40 ratio matches the reality that the district is already busing 40 percent of its
students due, in part, to structural displacement. The choice policy, Powell
says, just keeps that ratio intact.
           “It meant that even though School 46
[for example] can’t fill its seats beyond the 40 percent rate, we said, ‘Every
school, 60 percent,'” Powell says. “Which we thought was more than fair.”
Some of the 40 percent, Powell says, is
not the result of structural displacement, but because of creative parents.
           “Some of that 40 percent is parents
that have figured out how to manipulate the system. They’ve found openings in
schools that, in theory, they have no claim to,” Powell says. “Is it fair some
people have figured out how to move their children from one school to another
by back-door means? If you’re an in-the-know parent you can gain access to
schools, but if you play by the rules, you can’t?”
           Allowing parents to manipulate the
system creates schools stacked, Powell says, with exemplary students.
           “What happens is you’re adding
affluence to affluence and coming up with schools that simply do not reflect
city living, and concentrating poverty more severely in other schools,” she
says.
           It also removes an active, involved
parent from a climate “where that exact kind of leadership could have turned
that school around,” Powell says.
Board member Rob Brown says the
amendment proposed by the citizens’ group is irrelevant.
           “It turns out that if you have 60
percent neighborhood preference in a school, that it is numerically and
functionally identical with 100 percent neighborhood preference in all our
schools… because of the numbers,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of neighborhood
kids in our schools. Our schools are not in the same place as our students
are.”
           “So what happens is you bring people
into the schools from other places, because we’re obviously not going to put
our schools on wheels and move them around to where the students are.”
The worry, of
course, is
that parents won’t get their school of choice. But the goal is for 80 to 90
percent to get their top choice and for zero to not get at least one of their
top three choices, Powell says.
           “There are so many ways that a child
can get into a school under the new system,” she says. “It’s just a case of the
new system is not familiar to parents.”
           Anyone who doesn’t get in has the
option of sitting on a waiting list and from there, several things can happen,
Powell says. Children can move out of the district, freeing up slots. Or the
superintendent can increase class sizes, which would, again, free up more
slots.
           The district purposely set capacity
at the outset below the maximum, Powell says, which provides some wiggle room
for students who move into the district after registration is over. It also
gives the district the option to increase capacity once officials evaluate how
the policy shakes out.
           “It’s possible that every person who
applies for a school will get in, depending on how many people apply,” she
adds. “The only time we have a conflict is if the school is truly over chosen.”
People
complaining about the policy are putting out a lot of misinformation, Brown
says. Those who claim they moved into a neighborhood because the school is high
performing, he says, often don’t know what they’re talking about.
           “They all say their schools are
high-performing schools,” he says. “In fact, they’re mostly wrong about that
because they actually don’t pay much attention to that. They just make it up.”
           Brown uses School 46 parents “who
are now telling us that their school is the highest-performing school in the
city or something” as an example.
           School 46, he says, performs about
the same as School 43, “which is demographically a very different school,”
Brown says.
           “It’s a lot poorer and has a higher
percentage of children of color,” he says. “[School 46] performs substantially
worse than School 7 and worse than School 15 or 23.”
           According to the State Education
Department, the passing rate for fourth graders at School 46 in 2003 on the
state tests is 63 percent in English and 59.3 percent in math. The school’s
trends in both areas, Brown says, are negative.
           School 43, a much poorer school, has
a 58.9 percent passing rate in English and 65.3 percent in math. Trends in both
areas are positive.
           The highest consistent performers in
the district are School 15, with an English pass rate of 87 percent, and School
1, with a math pass rate of 93.9 percent. School 15 is a citywide draw school,
Brown says, and School 1 is a neighborhood school with virtually no
neighborhood children attending.
           “If we look at the places where
people are so very concerned…Who have made a decision that presumably has tied
their real estate to their school choices, we do not find that these are the
most successful schools,” Powell says. “The schools who are clamoring the most
are not our top-performing schools. If parents make decisions based on what
schools are succeeding, there’s no reason to believe that School 46 will be
over chosen.”
No choice
policy deserves that name, says Urbanski, if it doesn’t include parents’
choice to send kids to their neighborhood school.
           The district should guarantee that
right, he says, and then give parents accurate and timely information about all
schools so they can make a truly informed choice.
           Information in hand, parents might
not necessarily choose the highest-performing school, Urbanski says, but the
one whose programs meet their individual needs.
           The school board is saying that
choice must come at the expense of neighborhood schools, Urbanski says, but he
believes the district can have both.
           The worst-case scenario, he says, is
that the race card gets played.
           “I would not support neighborhood
schools if the trade-off would be integrated schools,” he says. “Integration is
more important than neighborhood schools.”
Integration is
exactly what’s
on Adam McFadden’s mind. McFadden represents the south district on city
council.
           McFadden has much to learn about the
policy, he says, but his concern is that without it, “poor kids or black kids”
would be shut out from higher-performing schools.
           “I’m scared that you have a
particular group — a group that may be in the higher income in the city —
actually trying to protect their neighborhood school from letting poor kids
into it. I don’t know enough to say that’s the case. I just want to make sure,”
he says. “No one should be held captive by a low-performing school.”
           McFadden doesn’t buy the argument
that the policy will chase people out of the city. They’re already leaving, he
says.
           “Education is already hurting the
city. People move when their kids turn about middle-school age now,” he says.
“It’s not about school choice more than it is about performance. If the schools
are performing, you won’t have anyone fighting to leave.”
This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2004.
