No more guarantee that a child will get into a high school in their neighborhood. This is from the NY Post:
New York City families are zoned out — of their local high schools.
The city Department of Education has quietly done away with high-school zoning, which for decades guaranteed students a seat in a school near their home.
That leaves 8th-graders facing more uncertainty as they try to navigate an increasingly confusing admission system, and dashes some families’ long-standing plans.
What is the grand plan here?
I guess students going to their neighborhood school is an outdated practice in NYC.
ReplyDeleteIdiocy. Every youngster deserves a good school in the neighborhood and a seat in the building. Our subway/bus system doesn't need to subsidize thousands of kids competing for space on the transit system. No youngster should be spending two or three hours a day commuting. What about clubs and sports and all the other things that make school fun and memorable? Do you know what it is like to try to be on a team, when you end up 90 minutes away from home and it is going past dinnertime and getting dark and you have homework to do? Bloomberg lives on! He wanted no input from the community on their local schools. Families became interchangeable game board pieces shuffled all over the city.
ReplyDeletePlan seems to be drive families to charters or completely out of the city...and distract taxpayers from essential issues such as class size...
@938 pm.... I agree. Community schools can build Community. When students attend elementary middle and high school with people from their community--it can be healthy. However these community schools must be solid. A really strong, challenging curriculum and maybe a vocational component. Any student seeking to go outside of the community should be able to do so.
DeleteEvery child left behind. That is a fact.
ReplyDelete9:38 was dead on.
ReplyDeleteThis will force people out of the city schools and to private schools or simply out of the city.
The plus of this is that schools can become less segregated. Neighborhood and therefore school segregation has been a problem in NYC for awhile.
ReplyDeleteThe negative is that there is no real back up. What if a student doesn't get into any of their choice? Do they take a gap year?
9:04 here. I agree that community schools build community, but schools, at least 10 years ago, were being broken up into "charters" and "specialized" schools. At least in my neighborhood, this exacerbated racial and economic segregation. My old high school is now 3 or 4 high schools and the old middle school is some sort of high school (or maybe a combined high and middle school). This separates everyone. People don't have common memories.
ReplyDelete40 years ago, my hs had clubs, teams, bands- but a lot of kids dropped out, especially their senior year. That's not ok either. I don't know what the answer is.
I agree 9:31 pm. After middle school some of us tested into specialized hs and others attended the big community hs. It was diverse and beautiful. Today our circle continues to include that diversity. Folks became city workers medical professionals lawywrs sanitation etc. We are middle class folks just living our lives. I miss those days. Today there is old timers day in the summer with folks coming back with elementary middle and hs year books. Real new yorkers!
DeleteWait a minute…. White liberals of NYC don’t want their neighborhood schools desegregated? Shocking!
ReplyDelete