You’re in the purple box
Nothing like a bureaucrat-controlled computer program deciding where your child should go to school, right?
So the other night I was talking to a representative of the local public school district. (And yes, I refrained from my normal debates about school choice and education reforms.) Anyways, so I wanted to confirm to what school my children would be assigned based on my address. Conveniently, she has with her a lovely color-coded map of the city- showing the often-confusing and seemingly-random boundaries drawn up for each school.
My house was located in a nice little purple “box.” (I use “box” loosely as the shape looked more like a rough approximation of a square with a funny shaped diamond attached arbitrarily to the side of it.)
Now I know they have a “reason” for all these crazy shapes they draw up on their maps- they want to create nice diverse student populations so they have to get rather creative with their line drawing.
So, even though you may have not one, but two schools located just blocks away, no, you may be assigned to another school even further away. And even if you wanted your child to attend one of those closer schools (because, well, they are closer and their students perform better), no, because the computer says so, you go to school X.
Make sense to you?
See, in their system, it isn’t about what you, as a parent want. It isn’t about what is best for your child even (though that part still gets me since I really thought education was supposed to be about students). It is about what works for a bunch of adults who have never even met the children they are randomly assigning to schools.
So what’s my point? Well, simply that I don’t think we’ll ever truly improve education in this country until we break out of the box. Until we put educational decisions back in the hands of parents (who, one would assume after knowing their own child for 5 years would know a bit more about them than a computer operated by a central-office bureaucrat). Until we reject a status-quo system that isn’t working for our children.
Boxing our kids in is not the solution.
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
