Joe Williams has been blogging at the Chalkboard about this school space smackdown between a NYC school district school, the elite New Explorations in Science, Technology and Math, and the Ross Global Academy Charter School, which the NYC Department of Education wants to co-locate in NEST's building. That this debate is getting ugly is nothing surprising.
But here's what I don't get: NEST is subject to possible co-location because it is underenrolled and has extra space. Yet there are thousands of kids in New York City, in the grades NEST serves, who are entitled under NCLB to transfer out of their low-performing schools but can't because there aren't enough spaces available in higher-performing ones. NEST doesn't have an AYP rating under NCLB because it doesn't receive Title I funds, but it is rated "in good standing" under New York's state accountability system, and has higher-test scores than the average NYC public school. So, if NEST's principal is really that opposed to charter co-location, why doesn't she offer to solve the excess space problem by opening up all the excess space in the school to students who want to transfer out of low-performing schools under NCLB? If NEST's parents and educators don't want to do that, then it's pretty obvious that the excess space would be better allocated to people who ARE trying to expand the number of high-performing school spaces for underserved kids in NYC.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment