Big city school "improvements" driving out middle class?

December 27, 2005 6:24 AM

In Middle Class, Signs of Anxiety on School Efforts. The New York City Department of Education has made a number of changes to gifted and talented and special admission programs, and has increased the emphasis on test preparation. These changes (it is suggested) may start pushing middle-class parents out of the (relatively few) public schools regarded as good. Parents who can afford the $20k tuition and who can manage the admissions process will go to private school ... one supposes those who fall short on either front will go to the suburbs.
posted by MattD (20 comments total)

homeschool
posted by edgeways at 6:56 AM on December 27, 2005

do you consider somebody who can afford $20k tuition for their kids as "middle class"?
posted by PenguinBukkake at 7:23 AM on December 27, 2005

PB -- I don't, but the New York Times apparently does, for whatever that's worth...
posted by MattD at 7:28 AM on December 27, 2005

As the article is inaccessible, might you elucidate a bit on what these "changes to gifted and talented and special admission program" are?
posted by majick at 7:30 AM on December 27, 2005

The article's not TimesSelect, AFAIK.

However, there are three basic issues:

(1) small changes to the admissions policies of a few gifted and talented schools which make the schools less accessible to the incumbent stakeholder families: those who already have one child admitted and are seeking to have a sibling admitted on sibling-preference terms, and those who bought apartments within prior admission-preference zones who are now having their advantage diluted by changes in the zoning.

(2) increasing focus on test-preparation in schools which, due to neighborhood, have been historically high-performing but which are not explicitly selective in admission, as is the case with the gifted programs.

(3) worries that the foregoing may auger even greater changes to gifted program admission, and to the curriciular exceptionalism of the high performing general admission schools.
posted by MattD at 7:36 AM on December 27, 2005

PB - if you're in NYC - yes. Furthermore, there are many middle class families in this country working 2 and 3 jobs to afford private school for their children. Floridians are watching this phenomena of the dumbing-down of the public education system by standardized test first hand. Jeb! instituted many of the same policies written about in the NYT piece during his first term and now teachers spend an inordinate amount of time making sure children can score high on standardized tests. The test scores are averaged at the elementary level and a grade given to the school. The higher the grade - the less outside influence from the state. Students are given the choice of receiving a voucher to attend a private school if a school scores an F. The school is then under the thumb of the state until test scores rise. The role of the parents is completely overlooked in this process as the teacher and school is expected to negate all the problems the children are being sent to school with i.e. parents that don't give a damn and see the public schools as an 8-hour baby sitting service.

It's no wonder the USA is graduating fewer future scientists and deep thinkers with this type of lowest-common denominator thinking.
posted by photoslob at 7:51 AM on December 27, 2005

do you consider somebody who can afford $20k tuition for their kids as "middle class"?

Depends on the area in the country. Certainly not where I'm at. 20K just for school tuition would be upper-crust stuff.

homeschool

I believe that most kids who go through homeschooling end up with overall less skills to deal with the world then kids that go to a public school. Private schools vary. What a student is lacking in school education should be suplemented by their parents, but they don't get the same social interaction through homeschool that they would otherwise get from Public School.

I think Middle School is more about learning how screwed up people are in thie world and learning how to deal with them then actually learning anything from acedamia. At least that is what I got out of it. I hated Middle School with a passion, but I don't regret going.
posted by nickerbocker at 7:57 AM on December 27, 2005

WaPo: Leave No Gifted Child Behind.
posted by xowie at 8:00 AM on December 27, 2005

Big shock, educational system doesn't care about gifted/talented kids unless their talent involves team sports. Film at 11.

I admit I have radical ideas when it comes to education, but I think that many parents in places in New York City are finding that the vast majority of teachers are not interested in kids learning to think, but rather to apply a narrow rule to a narrow classroom example. I am deeply concerned that the Universal Preschool movement will be more of the same, a year of learning to stand in line, take turns, listen to authority figures, and do what you are told. If you are unfamiliar with the work of John Taylor Gatto, it is worth a read. Etta Kralovec is also worth reading, but not particularly relevant to this discussion.

Education can be a wonderful thing, but it is increasingly falling on parents to do the right thing, either by spending lots of money on private schools, dedicating one's life to homeschooling, or spending every evening debugging what the school has been teaching the kids all day.
posted by ilsa at 8:25 AM on December 27, 2005

All schools that test teach to the test. Middle class is always vague: what you call middle class to someone else is upper or lower. Income is tied into cost of living in various areas of countryl Any parent educated will see to it that his child gets into the best school system he or she can afford. Texas represents a nice example: parents complained about affirmative action that left some of their good white students exculded from colleges in Texas. Texas revamped program. If your kid got in top 10$ of high school he was guaranteed college admission. Promlem: 10% bracket in crap schools sent poor students to college and left out good students at competitive high schools. Solution: parents pulled their kids out of very good and competitive schools and put them into crap high schools to make sure their kids got into top 10% bracket. Parents will find a way to work the system and the system will find a way to screw up the kids.
posted by Postroad at 8:33 AM on December 27, 2005

Ilsa, part of the article's background is that New York has, historically, cared about gifted education.

Pretty much everywhere where there are middle class parents to form a constituency for them, there have been gifted and accelerated learning programs in primary schools, including the pull-out programs common in other districts but also full-time dedicated programs.

And New York's schools for gifted high schoolers are famous literally around the world -- there are plenty of immigrant parents for whom "Bronx Science" and "Stuyvessant" are just about the first words they learn in English. (Although two thirds of those words are actually Dutch...)
posted by MattD at 8:34 AM on December 27, 2005

According to the article: The school system is overwhelmingly minority and poor, and many of the parents who have fared best at getting their children seats in choice programs are white.

Historically, middle-class parents have been active in parent associations and have been able to steer school resources their way. They're now feeling threatened by attempts, perhaps heavy handed, to steer resources the other way. But steering resources the other way is only attempting to redress a long-standing existing imbalance.

I don't think that buying private education is necessarily a good answer. It's just a way of buying test scores, and a confusion (by the middle-classes) of privilege with merit.

All schools that test teach to the test.

At the same time, you have to provide the resources to support teachers to do this. For instance some kids need more help, and others need less - and many schools are underfunded - and while teaching mixed ability sounds fine, a lot of the teacher's time is spent making sure the various ability levels in a class do not get bored with or feel excluded from the class, rather than teaching the class.

Parents will find a way to work the system and the system will find a way to screw up the kids.

Exactly.

Ilsa, part of the article's background is that New York has, historically, cared about gifted education.

Yes, I thought that the point was that NY is now trying to extend the gifted programs to poorer communities, leaving middle class communities with a smaller slice of the pie.

Those w/o logins, try bimbyflam/bimbyflam.
posted by carter at 8:47 AM on December 27, 2005

From that WaPo article: "Surely we can find a way to help low-achieving children reach proficiency without neglecting the needs of our gifted learners."

Of course we can. Unfortunately, it's against the law to do so. The practices of "clustering" or "tracking" gifted students in public schools have acquired a racist stigma due to fewer students of certain minority groups qualifying for admissions to such programs.

Combine that with NCLB, and you have a nearly perfect assault on the next generation's intellectual class, apart from a small number of the wealthy.

"The article's not TimesSelect, AFAIK."

I clicked on the link. It asked me to register for something. I assumed that meant walled garden content.

Oh. Sorry. After some research it appears that your link was malformed. Let's try a corrected link to the article, and give you a tool for coping with this problem with such links the future.
posted by majick at 8:50 AM on December 27, 2005

I can see it both ways. Parents usually want the best for their kids, no doubt, but far too many of them only look at and think in terms of the bottom line, i.e., Ivy League or bust. Yes, NCLB is bullshit, but it wouldn't have caught on so quickly and vehemently if so many liberal and enlightened parents hadn't continued to fall into the numbers trap re: the myth that there are only first-tier schools and community colleges, and your kid is either going to end up a brain surgeon or a truck driver.

Anecdotally, some of my NYC friends are getting to the point where they want to start families. Not one of them is planning on remaining in or near the city--I can't muster much sympathy for the families in the article, if only because it seems to me they've known for years what they were getting into. Not that it shouldn't be better, but who the hell moves to NYC for the public schools? Sure, some of them are great, but this strikes me as annoyingly yuppie on all fronts. Of course you have to pay for private school if you want a decent education in certain parts of the county--I'd argue DC is even worse than NYC in terms of this.
posted by bardic at 9:36 AM on December 27, 2005

majick: From that WaPo article: "Surely we can find a way to help low-achieving children reach proficiency without neglecting the needs of our gifted learners."

Of course we can. Unfortunately, it's against the law to do so.

That's incredibly misleading majick! There's a significant difference between declaring that schools shall not get disproportionate (by a per-pupil measurement) dollars for GATE programs and not really funding such programs at all in lieu of LCD focus on standardized test scores- the latter of which is what the WaPo writer was concerned about.

The former issue has good reasoning behind it, which is to avoid the self-fulfilling cycle of rewarding middle/upper class schools with more funding, which leads to better test scores and thus more gifted kids being "discovered", etc. There is plenty of reason to believe that innate "giftedness" is fairly well spread across the economic spectrum, and that funding patterns that give disproportionately more money to one segment of the economic strata will surely "find" more gifted kids.

Disclaimer: I tend to be one of those people who believe that our existing definitions of gifted are fairly limiting, and that many kids are severely under challenged by the school systems. I believe that in this country, we have tragically underwhelmed even 'average' students, resulting in a nation that is far less educated that it could be. The electoral, et al, ramifications of this I leave to the reader to derive.
posted by hincandenza at 9:49 AM on December 27, 2005

That's crazy, bardic -- if you want your kids to get an education, you have to move out of a city? Crazy.

The real story should be: "City officials say that judging by the number of children eligible for free lunch, the class divide in the system remains stable: About 80 percent of the children are poor, with no increase in middle class flight."

NYC is not 80% poor. Those who can afford to apparently already overwhelmingly leave the public school system.
posted by Tlogmer at 11:29 AM on December 27, 2005

It's really only recently that schools teach to the test. In an ideal world, the school should test to the teaching, if it tests at all. Tests are only one way to assess learning. Standardized tests optimize on cheap, but are not an effective measuring instrument. That standardized tests are being used as the basis for district or school funding or teacher salary is asinine.

On top of that, state standardized tests are inherently hypocritical since Accreditation Requirements typically include the necessity for a variety of assessment methods.

To add more fuel to the fire, accreditation also typically requires that "Instruction addresses the individual needs of students, enables all students to have successful experiences and promotes independent life-long learning." Which is anathema to teaching to a test.
posted by plinth at 11:38 AM on December 27, 2005

If the test were a valid measure of what the kids should and do know at any given grade level, I don't think anybody would have a problem. But the article specifically talks about drill and kill methods of test preparation. That means the kids don't actually know how to use (for example) grammar in real life, but how to tell which of four multiple choice answers to a grammar question is most likely to be correct.
posted by ilsa at 3:50 PM on December 27, 2005

carter: I don't think that buying private education is necessarily a good answer. It's just a way of buying test scores, and a confusion (by the middle-classes) of privilege with merit.

This seems written by someone who doesn't really understand private education. For one, if your kid is smart, you can get scholarships. That's how I got private education. And that education wasn't about test scores, at all. (I test well regardless.) It saved my ass by being a *real* education, with small classes, tracking, and little to no busywork—all things that public high schools don't have, to the detriment of all their students.

In general, this problem is really hard. Most middle class folks I know support public education in theory but find it hard to sacrifice their kids to theory.
posted by dame at 9:14 AM on December 28, 2005

In general, this problem is really hard. Most middle class folks I know support public education in theory but find it hard to sacrifice their kids to theory. - dame

Exactly. We not only have the "teach to the test" problem, we have "Robin Hood" tax laws. We had a good school in our neighborhood. However, the parents of kids from schools that got F's get the first choice of public schools, which means in some cases, kids from this neighborhood can't go to school in this neighborhood, because the school is already at capacity. The district magnet schools are being "reformulated" to be regular schools, with some AP classes.

My next door neighbor moved here for the schools, is paying the absolute maximum tax rate in the state for schools, and yet, for her children to go to public school, they would have to be bussed almost an hour away. No kindergarten or first grade kid needs to spend two hours on a bus.

Most of the local private schools are very fundamentalist. One has to go into one of the bigger cities to find secular private school, or moderate religious schools.

The rate of home schooling, just in my neighborhood, is sky rocketing. If mine don't qualify for scholarships at one of the secular or moderate private schools, I will probably home school until such a time that we can sell our house and move somewhere with a rational school system.

I hear Vancouver is nice...
posted by dejah420 at 7:12 PM on December 28, 2005