As the father of five children, no issue concerns me more right now than the quality of their education. That’s why I’ll attend tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting and support its members’ voting to replace 25 long-struggling schools with better options.
Like every other parent, I want nothing more for my kids than for them to attend great schools that give them the knowledge and skills they need to achieve their dreams. (They have big ones.)
But when it came time to enroll them in our local schools in East New York, there just weren’t any good options. Our zoned schools have low test scores and too much violence and generally are not well-regarded in the community.
Instead, I opted to send my three school-aged children far from home, to public schools in The Bronx that offered safer and more supportive environments that make up for the inconvenience. Now that they’re in 3rd, 5th and 7th grades, the hour-long commute each way has become part of our routine — even if it still takes a toll on them, their extracurricular activities and homework time.
With my two youngest nearing school-age, my hope is to keep them closer to home. Every neighborhood should have high-quality public schools so that parents don’t have to make the tough choices I have had to.
As a lifelong New Yorker, I understand that some schools slated for closure are neighborhood institutions and that an emotional connection compels us to want to keep them open and try to make them better. But the fact is, some schools have been failing for so long — since I was a kid myself even.
That’s why most local families flee them if they can, hoping to win a seat in a charter school, or a gifted and talented program, or a school out of the district (like I did). The problem is, seats in these schools are so limited that a child’s future comes down to luck.
Not only is that unfair, it’s also bad policy. We’ll never create a first-class workforce in this city, let alone overcome poverty, as long as we let children attend schools we know won’t prepare them for college or jobs. The only option is replacing those schools with something better.
The question, of course, is how we guarantee that we end up with better options than what we have now. Luckily, some evidence finally points to which school models work and which don’t.
For example, not every charter school is great, but there are certainly enough examples of high-performing ones that we should be repeating their successes in as many neighborhoods as possible. (The bad charters, by the way, should be closed, too.)
There are also hundreds of new small high schools in communities across the five boroughs that a recent study by MDRC, a social-research firm, showed are helping many more students of color graduate than the large high schools they replaced. That gives me hope that my eldest, now two years from high school, will have an array of options to choose from.
Yes, education leaders have a responsibility to do everything possible to fix struggling schools and to provide a soft landing for those students now enrolled in schools they plan to close. But we also have to admit that sometimes even the best efforts of teachers and other faculty aren’t going to be enough.
Each year we keep a struggling school open, we make it more difficult for the children in those schools to catch up and succeed.
We’re all in this together, and if a school’s not good enough for one family, then it shouldn’t be forced on anyone else’s children, either.
Frank Manning started volunteering with Education Reform Now after meeting an ERN canvasser in East New York.