Did the Nobel Prize Committee choose this year’s economics laureates to influence the growing debate in Boston about how to assign students to public schools? I know we’re the hub of the universe and all that, but the Scandinavians can’t possibly be so focused on our issues. Still, the awards to economists Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth shouldn’t just shine a spotlight on their work on assignment mechanisms. It should also make us pause before embracing changes that restrict the school choices of Boston’s parents — especially those with less means.
Boston has struggled for decades to find an equitable way to assign students to schools. The current system for elementary- and middle-school children splits the city up into three zones. Children entering the system generate a list of their preferred schools, which can be within their zone, or within a mile of their home, or one of the city’s few “city-wide” schools. High school students can apply anywhere. Students with siblings in a school or who live within walking distance of a school have a better chance of getting in. But beyond those factors, a lottery determines which child goes where.
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Gleaser, where did your kids go to school? Presumably somewhere predictable, determined by where you chose to live. No all or nothing lottery, no anxiety, no unknowns. Boston families need the same predictability. Otherwise, when an engaged family lose in the lottery, they leave the city, furthering the downward spiral. BPS offers a false choice with new lines on a map. At least Connolly offers a solution that considers the needs for Reducing the "choice" chaos.
Edward Glaeser lives in Weston. He is a child of great privilege who grew up to have lots of opinions about how people he doesnt know should live. He's famous for being an "urban economist" yet gets up every morning at 6am to join the rest of the suburban schmucks clogging up 128 into Boston, where his children most definitely will NOT be attending public school.
Performing social science experiments on live human subjects, children even, is unconscionable. It was wrong when Judge Garrity (of Wellesley) did it 35 years ago; it's been wrong for the school children of Boston ever since; and it's still wrong now.
Just when the Mayor and the parents of Boston (the actual stakeholders) seem on the verge of making substantive, recovering changes to their public school system, along comes another ivy league theorist with absolutely nothing to lose if he's wrong (his offspring will soon be following his footsteps to Harvard and Princeton from posh public or private schools) to thumb his nose at the ignorant rubes and deign to tell them they're doing it not just wrong, but IMMORALLY wrong.
What an inapt and facetious analogy, comparing choosing a spouse to "choosing" where you live! In addition to using exclusive, sexist assumpions (in our culture men typically propose to their spouses, but in Roxbury and Dorchester it's mostly single women who are "choosing" to live in and send their children to sub-par schools in crime-affected neighborhoods), Glaeser is full of baloney. When he was "choosing" to live in Weston (LOL) were Mattapan and Fields Corner on his list of potential places to live and send his children to school? I highly doubt it. How can he use a model in which choices are unlimited (your ideal spouse) to describe a system of poverty and inequality in which the "deciders" are forced to choose among mediocre, bad, and worse options?
Another nonsense article from an out of touch ivy league suburbanite about public education that misdiagnoses and prescribes more harmful cures for the plague of unequal and woefully sub-standard public education for the children of Boston. The City of Boston can do just fine for herself thank you without your input, Mr. Weston, Mr. Wellesley, and Mr. Winchester.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/magazine/305glaeser.1.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Glaeser
When you don't like the message and you can't debate it succinctly, fall back on the tried and true tactic of attacking the messenger. If local people could solve this problem, it would have been solved long ago. Having as many people as possible try to help would seem to be a good thing, but I understand the suspicion that has been bred over the decades. "Suspicion" is the hallmark of Americans these days, from sea to shining sea.
Busing would not be a problem if Boston had a good school system. I left Boston because of the schools.
Professor Glaeser's take-away point that smaller zones mean less choice and less equity is essentially true, but it can seem like an excuse to not change a system that just isn't working. As the recent MAPC study shows, the current lottery system is working worse than almost anyone thought. The three zones aren't "equal" in any sense of the word. Not all "buyers" (parents) have equal information and myriad structural factors conspire to worsen the chances of certain groups gaining access to the good schools that exist. The result is scandalous. This "market" is even more imperfect than most. The answer, of course, is to improve the quality of schools that aren't working. The BPS is formally committed to that path, but they've been committed to do so for decades and one needed by a pessimist to be skeptical. In the meantime, how to assign kids to schools in ways that equalize access to existing quality schools (however defined) for families for whom that access is important? The current BPS proposals fail, not just because they all point to smaller zones, but because they all will make it even harder for kids in certain disadvantaged neighborhoods to get into a quality school. Every child in Boston has a right to equal access to the good schools that exist in the system. That right trumps my preference to be able to walk my daughter to school. Believe me, I enjoy that walk and that convenience. Let's slow down and figure this out right. The State of the City depends on it.