Half Changed World

I wanted to pick up on Dave S’ last comment about the role of peer groups and selection in schools. There’s no doubt in my mind that KIPP schools and their like have a real advantage over the local public schools in their areas, in that their students have parents who value education enough to send them to KIPP.  That doesn’t mean that they’re not providing value-added — in most cases, the local schools were failing with those exact same students.  But it does mean that if you extended the school day at all high-poverty schools and otherwise copied the KIPP model, you probably wouldn’t get the same results.

And our old school suffered from negative selection — it’s not just that the parents hadn’t made a deliberate effort to send their kids there, but that any parent who didn’t want their kid to attend it could opt out.  And this was true long before NCLB, since it was a "focus" school and Alexandria schools allow parents to opt out of any of the focus schools (as well as out of the schools with a year-round calendar). So there was a real shortage of involved parents.  For example, when the school finally acknowledged that D’s class was having a new teacher in February, and invited us in to meet her, I was the only parent to come to the event.

Some of this is about class and race — JHAA’s student population is 80 percent low-income and 92 percent non-white, and that alone would scare off some white-middle class parents even if it were the best run school in the city (and it’s not).  (See this paper for a discussion of how parents "may prefer poorly run schools with good peer groups over those
that are more effective but enroll worse students" and The Failures of Integration for data on how rare it is for whites to live in majority non-white areas.)

But from listening to people around the neighborhood, I think that highly involved black parents were even less willing to send their kids to the school than highly involved white parents.  With a few exceptions (including the PTA president), they were less confident that their kids would do fine academically regardless of the problems with the school, and so less willing to take chances. 

Alexandria’s wealthy enough, and supportive enough of education, that the school had plenty of resources even without the support of an active group of parents — it’s not like DC, where PTA fundraising supports things like music teachers.  But I do think the lack of a core group of involved parents makes a difference, in things from the availability of volunteers to pull events together, to the amount of energy that teachers need to spend on maintaining order in the classroom.

I don’t know what can be done to reverse this pattern — just raising the test scores won’t do it.  The district for the school is so spread out — some say gerrymandered — that very few people see it as their neighborhood school.

****

On a related note, we just registered D for his new school.  As proof of address, they wouldn’t take utility bills — they want to see the deed to your house, your rental agreement, or a notarized letter from the owner or leaseholder that you live there.  I’d never heard of such a policy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.