Reply to Explain how lottery changes would make Ward 3 Schools WORSE

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In short:

Each school gets the same $ per student; so it's the parents and community and caliber of the students that make a school great.  Without predictability the those types of parents/students will leave.  No question.  Deal and Wilson are great because the parents (IB an OOB) and Kids (IB and OOB) are generally more motivated and come from good elementary schools.  The OOB families that are in the feeders took the extra step to get their kids in and schlepp them across town, that says something about them, regardless of their SES or race.  The resources those schools spend on struggling kids pales in comparison to the resources schools EOTP spend.  Inject more struggling and less motivated kids (and less active parents) into those schools and in a few years they will be in the same state as most of the schools EOTP.

So if take a school like Deal or Wilson, remove a substantial portion of the motivated, high achieving and committed families (whether IB or OBB) and then inject a substantial portion of kids who are testing seriously below proficient from families that aren't active in improving the schools, you are just giving Deal and Wilson the same problems the schools EOTP have.  The new Deal and Wilson  will have to divert $$ to address those issues, at the cost of the programs for the more advanced or even proficient kids leading to more abandonment to private and suburban schools.  It's just a domino effect.

[/quote]

Absolutely, but if you don't believe that then common sense and reasoning doesn't make any difference.  There's no evidence that a school building and teachers alone can make a school "high performing" and plenty of evidence the the preparedness of the kids and the support and SES of the families have a huge positive effect.  But if despite all that, School leadership insists that "all it takes is a great teacher..." and that "low-performing schools" should be closed, then the system will continue to be dysfunctional.[/quote]

School leadership knows very well that the kids and families have a huge effect, and this is why the proposal of citywide lottery was made, to "redistribute" high SES and highly motivated kids to all schools. if the school leadership tought that all it takes is a great teacher, then all they would have to do is just hire great teachers for bad schools and we would not be here discussing about sending Oyster kids to Cardozo or having Wilson as citywide lottery HS[/quote]

OK -- school leadership SAYS that all that is needed is great teaching -- and they say that now there is great teaching all over town, thanks to their IMPACT system that has weeded out the bad apples.   But, you're correct, that at some level, they know that isn't right because it hasn't worked.  So now the only way they see to get the scores up (which is apparently all they care about) is to move the high scorers around to up the scores a bit (or a lot) wherever they do.  Of course, the scores will go down in they places they leave, but have they thought that far?  Doesn't seem like it.[/quote]

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