Every child left behind
Reason has an article titled No Way Out, subtitled The No Child Left Behind Act provides only the illusion of school choice.
You school choice advocates should read it.
It starts out listing a bunch of horror stories about what kids in the most troubled schools face. Follows with some stories about school districts not trying all that hard to tell folks they can transfer out (though that's a specific spin) And bad parenting…a lot of y'all like those, you'll find them fun to read.
But you better stop there.
In the end, though, the problem is not the parents but the law itself. Under NCLB, Title I federal funding -- money used to provide extra educational services to disadvantaged students in high-poverty schools -- does not follow children to better-performing, non-Title I schools. The result is that better-performing schools have no financial incentive to admit low-performing children.
In practice, children are offered transfers only to other Title I schools. Since most Title I schools are mediocre performers at best, parents have a choice of schools that are only marginally better. Furthermore, the school districts decide which schools parents will be allowed to "choose"; often they offer only one or two alternatives.
Many parents are offered "choice" schools that are just as low-performing as the failing school they are trying to break away from. In the words of school choice advocate Angel Cordero of the New Jersey-based Education Excellence for Everyone, "Camden children are transferred from one bad school to another bad school."
In Chicago students in only 50 of the 179 federally identified failing elementary schools would be allowed to move into higher-performing schools. Parents could choose from a list of 90 schools and could not pick a school more than three miles away from home. In 70 of the 90 schools open to transfers, most pupils failed state tests last year.
