Today was magnet signup day for Cincinnati Public Schools. Vigilant parent and Enquirer reporter Jim Plesinger blogged from the line at Fairview-Clifton German Language School. It seems that early campers-in-line got more than a bit testy with latecomers who managed to get forward in the line. But nothing else mattered when the principal came out to announce that the school was adding a kindergarten class for the coming year, and all parents would enroll their children.
CPS has an awful time distributing spaces in its popular magnet programs, even as its other schools continue to struggle. But it has been our experience, not to mention that of other gentle readers, that the confusion of signups is worth it. In the end, a form of sanity generally prevails, and most folks get what they sought.
Or at least we hope they did. Some of our peeps asked us about signup strategies. Our advice, as it is in nearly every situation, was to play it cool. Don't panic, don't prove you're a Parent of Extreme Devotion. Just show up on time, not early.
Plesinger seems to indicate that everyone went home happy. We hope that's really everyone, including the folk who just showed up on time.
Update: One SWNIDish peep reports enrollment success and confirms that some folks got pretty testy about the chaotic process. We await other firsthand reports.
16 comments:
It is only because there is such a shortage of high quality urban education that there are lines backed up into the street in 20 degree weather.
There is only a shortage because of the goverment monopoly of primary education, confiscatory taxes, and uncontrolled union spending in virtually all government schools.
The Soviet union rationed potatoes, butter, and toilet paper in just this way for half a century. Don't get in line without your Siberian wolf coat.
Agreed, but it's worth remembering that education isn't a commodity in the same way as potatoes. Effective education requires teachers, students and parents. The urban schools that succeed do so as much because they attract and retain engaged parents (and hence better teachers over time), something that new suburbs tend to have thanks to their inherent demographics.
Remember that successful suburban schools are burdened by the same issues of monopolistic control. Yet somehow we don't complain that their monopoly ought to be broken with vouchers and such.
We like breaking the monopoly. But we don't think that urban schools will shoot ahead if that feat is managed.
Disagree slightly, SWNID. Education in the USA is not a commodity like potatoes, but is is a commodity in the following sense: you must be in a certain income bracket to receive quality public education, so it is no longer a public good but has become a private commodity.
The whole system of magnet student selection is even economically biased. Only people with flexible jobs or the finances to take a day or two off have a chance of getting their kids in the top schools due to the fact that you have to wait outside 24 hours beforehand to get your kids in. Unless of course you are tied to white collar insiders who can get your kids in without waiting outside (which is a "good ol boy" nework I and Mrs. SWNID know all too well :-) How about a blind lottery to even the playing field? I would love to see it occur, but I doubt it does.
In the end the kids in suburbs are no smarter than the kids in the 'hood. Switch their circumstances, or better yet set up a educational system that meets the needs of the poor and it is proven kids perform at the same academic level.
We disagree slightly, CG. In point of fact, camping out was not necessary yesterday. Those who arrived at the announced signup time got in. Campers just assuaged their anxiety. Who can't manage to get off work to spend an hour signing a kid up for school?
But more to the point, what makes the magnet schools good is not that they have more resources or that the parents have more money but that the schools have a critical mass of parents who are engaged in their children's education. While such parents tend to be middle-class and up, one can manage the feat from lower echelons.
It is primarily the culture of poverty, not the economics of it, that makes good education hard to obtain. We state this not as a value judgment but an empirical fact.
Actually, not everyone did get in. A letter to the editor in today's Enquirer came from a parent who is on the waiting list for following the rules. As everyone who knows me can attest, I am a huge proponent of both Fairview and Walnut Hills High, though I also recognize that neither is as perfect as anyone would have you believe--no school is. But they do provide wonderful educations, and their students are challenged to live in a diverse world. BUT, this is a horrible PR move by CPS. How on earth will we ever convince anyone to stay in the district when we play these kind of games? College-educated administrators should be able to figure out a better system.
Just to be clear: there are two issues on the table here.
One is whether magnet-school signups in CPS are well managed. We say no, and we think everyone says no.
The other is whether public education in an urban setting is a kind of commodity that is better managed with a free market, or contrariwise whether it is the kind of commodity that the rich will always have more than the poor. We say a nuanced no to both aspects of that question, disagreeing with our interlocutors and inviting further discussion.
Parental involvement beyond, making your kids go to school, checking up on homework now and then and stressing to them that you won't accept poor effort should not be neccessary unless a child has special needs. It's ridiculous that parents have to go through such lengths in order to have their children educated
It's not that hard to get a good education from a good school and difficult to get a bad one. However, it is very difficult to get a good education from a bad school.
Christine, you've left out all kinds of stuff that parents do to support their kids' education: feeding, clothing, housing, nurturing, encouraging, disciplining, getting them to bed, getting them up, surrounding them with books and games and trips and people, sheltering them from violence. Of course, that's just ordinary parenting, but it's not as common as it ought to be. In some communities, it's downright rare.
And what makes urban public schools different from their suburban public school counterparts is not that the suburbs have more money (many spend less per pupil) or that the teachers are better (though they often are) but that the suburban schools have a student body in which most students have most of the above and the urban schools don't.
But the schools get blamed for it, as if it's the school's fault that most of the kids come to school (when they come) with piles of garbage in their lives. Our teacher friends could tell you stories.
In places like Cincinnati, a few schools develop a different culture from the rest of the district, in our experience largely because they manage to attract and retain a critical mass of decently functional families. Meanwhile, the other schools in the district struggles to deal with its overwhelming population of dysfunction. Getting good teachers and administrators to stay in such schools is just one of the many problems that they face.
The moment that we recognize that schools depend on the parents and students as much as on the teachers, we can at least decently assess the present, even if it deprives us of our most cherished oversimplifications. We admire educational leaders like Michelle Rhee who tell teachers to stop complaining about parents, but the teachers do have a point. Muffy from Bannockburn is ready for school in ways that Brandy from Pilsen is not.
Along the way, we'll say something about the "great lengths" to which some parents went to enroll their children in CPS magnet schools. Yes, it's great lengths to camp out in the cold overnight. But it's greater lengths to pay tuition for years or to move to a different community, both of which are more common responses to the crisis of urban education. The reason people are lined up is that they've found a tremendous bargain. That's why they and we did it, and we'd do it again.
And it's easy to get a bad education at a good school. Just do nothing. We see it all the time.
I would contend that you cannot take economics out of the equation. After all, don't you become a member of the "culture of poverty" by not having enough money to make ends meet? We think what makes magnet schools good is a combination of more resources, engaged parents, and motivated students. Remove one of those factors and the school decreases in quality. And we know plenty of people who can't get an hour off of work without their being some sort of repercussions.
Chief Interlocuter
The culture of poverty is both a cause and a product of economic poverty. Vicious circle and all that.
Yes, indeed, there are folks who can't take off work without consequences. But do they not have friends and relatives who can do the deed in a pinch? None of this is to say that the signup setup is fine as it is, only that there's a lot more that keeps folks from signing up than their work schedules.
There are parents who will crawl over broken glass to enroll their kids in the school that they want. And there are those who won't. Some of each exist in all economic categories, but there are far fewer of the former in the underclass. And the former kind are the kind who make sure that their kids are ready to learn.
We think it would be good public policy to work to enroll more economically marginalized kids in good schools, but for schools to be good, they must have a critical mass of students who are well supported at home. Otherwise, schools are overwhelmed with classroom management and remediation.
Swind,
I stick by my original contention that parents should not have to be willing to "crawl over broken glass" in order to see that their kids are educated.
I also don't think that lack of parental dedication can be used as an excuse for bad schools.
When I was in high school, I went to a school in San Jose that wasn't in the best part of town. It was obviously not a true inner city school, but it was no lily white suburban school either. It was mostly minority and had many refugees and immigrants. (I used to say that you could walk down the hall and hear 5 languages spoken)
More than half the kids were on free or reduced lunch. But it was a good well-run and safe school. The teachers and administrators made sure it was that way. One of the feeder schools was known for being complete chaos with little learning going on. Those same kids came to my high school.
One of my teachers told my why she had transferred to the high school. She got no backing from the administration at the middle school and finally had enough and left. Yet the high school, while not perfect, took the approach that the adults would remain in charge. They did not whine about a lack of parental support. (they also did not call the parents over every minor incident)
True this was when you could still expel a real troublemaker and I suspect that San Jose public schools are worse now. But kids are not worse, and I really don't think parents are that much worse either.
Christine, your remark "it was obviously not a true inner city school" makes our point. Were there not a critical mass of decently supported students at your high school, your experience would have been much different.
In a generation, public schools have become more economically and socially isolated than ever before, largely because mobility enables communities to be more economically and socially isolated. Schools like yours are rarer not because teachers and administrators are different but because school populations are more extreme.
We note your remark about "not calling parents over every minor incident" as well. In a failing school, no one ever calls the parents because there's no response. It's not too much of the wrong kind of parental involvement that's the problem but complete parental indifference.
Granted that good teachers administrators do better with marginal student populations than poor ones, the point remains that the blanket condemnation of urban public schools for educational failure is uncritical and unrealistic. In the main, suburban schools are better not because of the teachers or administrators but because of parents and so the students.
Swind,
I grant you that there are greater numbers of bad parents rearing bad students in the inner city. But I really can't believe that most parents are indifferent. If so there would not be such a hue and cry from parents every time Chicago Public Schools tries to shut another one down. Yes, in Chicago almost any parent that can sends the kids to private school, but there are still plenty left that can't afford it.
There are many reasons why the schools are so bad. I just don't think that one can keep using the tired excuse of bad parenting and just let it end there. There are plenty of bad schools in suburban and rural areas too. And while a critical mass of "good parents" might help a school improve its test scores, it will do nothing in and of itself to help those at risk, badly parented students that the teachers have give up.
Fair enough, though we still suspect oversimplification (just how involved is a parent who protests the closing of a failing school?).
Just note well that we are responding to the oversimplification that says this school is good and that one is bad without considering whether the students are any better or worse prepared to be educated. "I moved to the suburbs because the schools were better" may be true and sincere, but it's simply wrong to blame everything on teachers in urban schools.
Note also that the critical mass of well-prepared students actually give schools the luxury of giving more remedial attention to the underprepared, as opposed to spending every moment on classroom management and intervention for the student population as a whole.
We'll say as well that Chicago may be much worse off than many districts where change initiatives are underway.
Swind,
I think we can agree that blaming everything on the teachers is an oversimplification of a school's problems as is blaming everything on the parents.
I thought William Ayers, Obama, and ACORN fixed Chicago schools. Check it out. It's on Obama's resume`.
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