Back-to-school complaints surface over public school choice
North Carolina’s New Hanover County Public Schools has approved only 62 out of the 303 requests parents made to transfer their children out of schools that failed testing expectations under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), according to the Wilmington Star News. The school system must offer the choice to all eligible students, thus gauging how many are interested in it. But the system could not afford to grant all requests this year, Assistant Superintendent Rick Holliday said. Following federal NCLB guidelines, the district has given priority in granting transfers to low-achieving and economically disadvantaged students, he said. The school system doesn’t appear to be breaking any rules, said Charlotte Duren, the state schools’ NCLB specialist. But after reviewing some of the district’s letters on the transfer choice, she said the district could have done a better job explaining to parents why their requests were denied. In the past week, a number of parents from the county called the N.C. Department of Public Instruction expressing their displeasure with being turned down, Duren said. One parent thinks the right thing to do would have been to decide on the transfers “either on a first-come, first-served basis or a lottery.” Holliday and Emma Jackson, the county schools’ Title I director, said they had no choice but to prioritize their neediest students
Wilmington Star News, 8/20/08, By Ana Robiero
[Editor’s Note: Variations on the summer of our discontent with public school choice under NCLB are below. First, after 2,300 students in DeKalb County, Georgia, applied for transfers, the school board, confronting the need to buy or lease 45 more buses, has voted no longer to provide bus service to transferees but instead to reimburse parents for mileage. Next, an Athens Banner-Herald editorial complains about NCLB’s “dangerous assumptions” that “there are no endemic problems within school systems” and that “schools that do meet performance benchmarks will be willing, even if they are able, to take on students from lower-performing schools,” citing a Georgia district in which all middle and high schools are in “needs improvement” status, “leaving no place for any Clarke County middle school or high school student, at least within the county, to go in the hope of getting a better education than he or she currently is receiving.” Next, a state delay in finalizing test results means Texas parents will have to wait until more than six weeks after the first day of school to find out whether their children are entitled to transfer “to a higher-performing campus.” Laments over both lack of choices and late notice are reported in the Washington Post article about D.C. schools.
Speaking of dangerous assumptions, the Post article highlights one the Athens Banner-Herald editorial makes, reporting that “some parents and school activists caution that No Child Left Behind's by-the-numbers view of the school world is limited and overlooks hopeful things at some schools tagged as failing.” For an example of an editorial that supports NCLB accountability but at least discusses the nuances and attempts to warn readers to be cautious of the "failing" label, see the link to the Baker City Herald in Oregon.
The next link is to information on a September 2007 federal publication, “Giving Parents Options: Strategies for Informing Parents and Implementing Public School Choice and Supplemental Education Services Under No Child Left Behind,” and an earlier transfer controversy in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After that is a link to information on an NCLB pilot program allowing districts to reverse the order of offering public school choice and SES. NSBA’s proposals for NCLB would avoid frustrations like that in New Hanover and focus limited resources by, among other things, requiring that transfers be offered in the first place only to low achieving students within the student subgroups that did not make adequate yearly progress (AYP), rather than to every student at a school. See the summary at the last link and scroll down to “Public School Choice.”]
Fox 5 Atlanta WAGA, 8/6/08, By Tony Thomas, with Leigha Baugham
Athens Banner-Herald, 8/11/08
Houston Chronicle, 8/14/08, By Jennifer Radcliffe
Washington Post, 8/17/08, by Bill Turque
Baker City Herald, 8/14/08
NSBA School Law pages on public school choice and SES
NSBA School Law pages on switching order of tutoring and transfers
NSBA quick reference guide to NCLB reauthorization bill