Turkey Is As Turkey Does

November 25, 2009 (GBN News): NY City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein narrowly escaped what could have been a very embarrassing fate last Saturday. Mr. Klein was traveling through Suffolk County on his way to visit friends in the Hamptons when a hunter accidentally took a shot at him.

The hunter, Samuel Cranbog of Huntington Station, was participating in the annual Long Island Turkey Hunt when the incident occurred. When reached for comment, Mr. Cranbog was apologetic but defended his actions as an honest mistake. “After all,” he told reporters, “If it looks like a turkey, sounds like a turkey, and acts like a turkey, one has every reason to believe that it is a turkey.”

Still, Mr. Cranbog was relieved that his shot missed its target. Noting that his wife is a NY City schoolteacher, he said, “If I bagged a turkey like that, she’d never let me bring it into the house.”

Another day, another broken promise...

Guess what? the DOE has broken yet another promise -- this time to release the class size data by November 23.

See this November 18 article from Gotham schools in which educrats said class sizes would be reported to the City Council by that date -- which was yesterday. I checked with the City Council today and they have received nada.

They already missed the legal deadline of November 15. Indeed, this is the third year in a row they have missed the deadline.

Though no one should be surprised. Surely it will suit their purposes to suppress what is likely to be very bad news by releasing the info right before Thanksgiving...or perhaps over the Thanksgiving break.

I wish I had a dollar for every time these guys failed to follow through. I would be nearly as rich as Bloomberg.

Of course, the class size isn't likely to be fully reliable even when it is released, because of the fundamentally flawed reporting process. But that's another story...

A letter to Tom Toch about high school choice

Hey Tom, I read your recent article in PDK lauding high school choice. You write that the example of NYC shows that high school choice can "harness the power of the marketplace to better serve students’ diverse educational interests and needs and to stimulate improvement through competition for students on a wide scale."

As a NYC parent, I can tell you that this is a highly idealized picture of what actually occurs. The high school admissions process is a nightmare for most parents (and students); even worse than the college admissions process. And your article has some egregious errors.

You write that that “By 2009, some 95% of students won places at one of their top five high schools, and city officials had to assign only 791 students to schools.”

Actually, there were about 7500 students in 2009 -- 16% of the total-- who didn’t get into any of their top twelve choices.

That’s thousands of kids who end up being forced to attend failing schools, and/or schools miles from their homes, and/or schools that specialize in areas that don’t interest them at all. Another 7,000 or so students are automatically assigned to high schools because they show up too late to apply.

As this New School report points out, many of our students are routinely assigned to vocational schools to study trades that they have no interest in pursuing, though they have to pass exams in these specialized areas to graduate.

You would also be amazed at how low the quality of many of our high schools. More than half of our students attend severely overcrowded schools, most of them sitting in classes of thirty or larger, thousands in trailers. Many students travel an hour or more each way to school. As a result, about 40 percent students who enter high school at grade level or near grade level fail to graduate after four years.

And some of the most overcrowded schools are the lowest performing, flooded with high-needs students no one wants, especially special ed and ELL students. Indeed, inequities have flourished under this system of “school choice”.

Moreover, under the current system it has become nearly impossible for students to transfer out of the high school to which they ’ve been assigned – even they identify another school where the principal is willing to take them . You have to be practically mugged first.

This is one of the reasons our dropout and discharge rates are so high . In fact, the discharge rate for students in their first year of high school has doubled under this system of high school "choice", though none of these students counted as dropouts.

You are lucky you don’t have a child who attends public high school in NYC. We would all rather live someplace where our kids could automatically attend a decent neighborhood high school.

Yours, Leonie Haimson, public school parent