Good day, CharterFolk.
I start today with news from my own hometown. Sacramento’s enrollment practices have finally been recognized for what they are:
Sorting devices allocating better opportunity to those with means, and worse to those without.
The practices cited in the legal resolution were among those I profiled in this post several years ago.
It had built upon what I had written about Sacramento a little earlier, calling it a place with “little equity to lose.”
It documented the sad trend we see in so many urban settings: broken economics leading school districts to use shady budgeting and exclusionary admissions practices to try to keep more affluent families in the district, leaving less affluent families in abjectly terrible schools.
The surprising thing is that these practices were found unlawful. The fact is that they are commonplace. School districts across the state do the exact same thing, Los Angeles certainly among them.
Over the years, I’ve written about the same thing happening in Oakland and San Diego, as well as many places across the country.
Public education is about the building of walls.
Walls meant to keep certain kids out, and others in.
This week’s story from New Hampshire brought it home fresh for me.
Courts recently ruled that, under the state’s open enrollment law, any school district that doesn’t have an open enrollment policy has to shift local tax proceeds to districts serving students from their area.
But the school districts don’t want to approve an open enrollment policy because that specifically allows students to leave.
So what are they now doing?
Approving open enrollment policies but then stipulating that the number of students approved for transfer is zero.
Meaning the district gets to wall in its own kids, and its own tax proceeds.
Can’t make this stuff up.
Over time, the rough beast keeps slouching further toward our broken urban school districts.
The St. Louis unravelling proceeds unabated, manifesting all the same brokenness as Sacramento.
Colleston is doing as good of job as anyone in the country writing about the tragedy that is urban education, chronicling the challenges in Milwaukee. His post this week is particularly good.
The ironies abound in Milwaukee. Charter school advocates worked for years to help address the funding inequity between charter schools and district schools, finally achieving a success that began to close the gap.
What did the district do?
It passed a new parcel tax that only funded district schools, not charter schools, opening up the gap again.
One place in America is attempting to evolve things so that such nonsense can never recur.
Indiana is proposing to create new structures in Indianapolis that would put all schools, charter and non, on an equal footing.
It’s some of the most important new architecting of public education that has been tried in generations.
It’s the kind of solution I think will ultimately spread across the country, including ultimately to my own hometown.