After a year of deliberations, a special committee convened by the mayor proposed a new student-assignment system in Boston Monday evening that would allow more children to attend school in their own neighborhoods while allowing an element of choice.
The recommended system, which would represent the biggest potential change in the process in more than two decades, would guarantee that parents registering their children for kindergarten will have at least six schools to choose from, including at least four of medium or high quality.
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A year of effort, and still there is little predictability for people with children new to the schools.
EURO falls 300 Points yesterday, stock market dives, and this is what the Globe reports as NEWS?
Go read the Herald if you so dislike the Globe. The sky is falling. The sky is falling. The hand wringers and head shakers are waiting patiently for you to join them. The decision about where a family sends their children to school is one of the most important decisions in life. Critically important to many people with a host of implications including housing values, crime rates and the economic future of the city.
EURO falls 300 Points yesterday, stock market dives, and this is where you spent your time commenting?
The lead should say: "Mass. Dems, today, announce a government-controlled school voucher program." This changes little because, guess what, thousands of parents give fake addresses to get into the district of choice every school year. Trash the GOP for the idea of giving parents the choice of where to send their children for education, and when nobody's looking, call it your idea and create more government jobs to oversee it...genius.
They admit there are good and bad schools so wouldn't it have been time, effort, possibly money, better spent studying and recomending ways the under performing schools could improve?
"School choice" is a ridiculous concept. Every parent wants to "choose" the same thing: Convenience and quality. Perhaps the committee feels that parents will be happier with an inferior result if they feel like they had a part in selecting it, but the reality is that in any given neighborhood, any parent is only going to want to send their kid to ONE school: The one with the highest test scores!
And then of course there's the problem of how performance is measured. Far too many parents look at MCAS scores as a way of determining school quality, but this is mostly a metric of the quality of the student body. The quality of the *school* is determined by measuring the change in MCAS scores for a given student (particularly for a difficult student) in a given year. The current method shows you what you already know: That students with troubled lives have trouble in school. This method shows you how much the school is helping those troubled kids.
It turns out that when you use this method of measuring performance, a lot of schools previously considered "failing" suddenly look like some of the best. And schools that parents tended to flock to (almost always in nice neighborhoods), turn out to have rather dismal performance. To put it another way: It's very easy for a mediocre teacher to appear successful if they're at a school where most of the students are children of well educated people and will almost always get straight As and high MCAS scores anyway. And a stellar teacher is likely to look pretty bad if they're in a classroom full of kids with broken homes who started the year failing every class. Even with a miraculous turnaround, the kids from broken homes are never going to come close to MCAS scores of the kids from the better neighborhood.
If Connolly gets his hands on the schools he will ensure that everyone walks to school. PS--He won't fix all the terrible schools in Boston. 12 month school years, 8 hour school days, 18 kids per class and teacher evaluations yearly might do the trick. Even this won't work if the parents just don't give a damn--most of the kids are sent off to be baby sat. SAD but TRUE!
Bussing is the problem!