BlogWood: MT Archives

School choice separate but equal

Hillsborough County has succeeded in weeding out undesirable students from desirable schools. Gee, do ya think the FCAT has anything to do with this, or is it simply pure racism?

The county’s new school choice plan has sputtered to life, much to the benefit of wealthier county residents. Either by design, or through flaws in execution, the plan has resulted in pushing poor and minority students out of desirable schools and into undesirable ones. Meanwhile, the flawed process allowed the slots that had been taken by poor and minority kids to go to others, so now there is no going back.

November 2003 marked the debut of the school choice program. Signs of impending problems were already apparent.
(Click the link below to continue reading this long post)

Today marks the official, and historic, beginning of the controlled choice application period for Hillsborough County public school students.

The choice plan, an alternative to assigning children to neighborhood schools, will eventually end three decades of busing for desegregation. It begins next fall, in the 2004-2005 school year, but families must make their choices in the next two months if they want to participate.

Its main purpose? To keep schools racially diverse without busing.

"This is indeed an important date because it signifies the opportunity for parents to choose where their son or daughter will go to school," said superintendent Earl Lennard. "It puts choice into the hands of the community."

Despite the historic significance of the choice application period, it's starting with more of a fizzle than a bang. Parents can do little until they have applications in hand.

That won't be for a few days.

Applications and 11-page booklets will be mailed next week to the 50,000 students eligible to participate in the choice plan's inaugural year, about one-third of the county's 180,000 enrollment.

Though most students don't have to choose, thousands are eligible.

Most students can stay at their current schools without filling out an application. The only ones who must indicate whether they are staying or going elsewhere are the 14,000 who are bused for desegregation. If they don't, school officials will pick one for them.
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Eligible students have until Jan. 9 to return choice applications ranking their top three schools within their geographic region.

Students are not guaranteed their first choice, but will be assigned by a computerized lottery based on where they live and space available in their chosen schools.

Race will not be a consideration, but preference will be given to students who live in regions who apply to zone schools and zone students who apply to region schools.
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Bus transportation will be provided to at least three schools in each region.
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The board's only black member, Doris Ross Reddick, voted against the plan, saying its expectations are unrealistic.
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Despite the choice plan's sweeping nature, interest in it has been less than overwhelming.

At seven school showcases held around the county last month, only 1,375 families attended, less than 3 percent of those eligible. There have also been few visitors to the seven Parent Resource Centers.
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The most popular question? If I'm happy with my school, do I have to choose?

The answer is no for most students. But the bused students and the 17,000 students on special assignment will be asked to take home a separate "intent to return" form next week, which could be confused with the choice applications.

On the forms, they are asked whether their child will return to his school next year. The forms must be returned by Dec. 12 if parents want their children "grandfathered" into their existing schools. Otherwise, they forfeit their spots.

Some parents already have decided to get a jump on the process. About 300 applications have been turned in early.

Let’s review: we have done away with busing as a tool to desegregate our schools. In its place is a “choice” plan. This particular choice plan lets kids stay in their current schools without having to actually indicate their choice. Sounds good. Uh, except that some kids do have to make a choice if they want to stay in their current schools. These would be the poor and minority kids that were being bused to desirable schools.

These are the kids with parents who lack the wherewithal to follow through on a complex and confusing application process, yet this is the only group that was forced en masse to either make a choice or be assigned to whatever was left over.

And an interesting aside: the article infers that some parents were allowed to turn in applications early, even though November 15 marked the official first day. Who was allowed to turn in early apps, and did those people get coveted spots in full and desirable schools?

Anyway, the seeds of failure seem to have been sown early on in the process, but let’s hope for the best and jump ahead to this year. The January deadline came and went with little fanfare.

Then in February, word got out that some computer glitches may be causing some minor problems:

Blaming a computer glitch, Hillsborough school officials said Tuesday that dozens of students were wrongly assigned to crowded schools through the new controlled choice process.

The computer incorrectly enrolled students in schools in which there is no available space, officials said.

The error means these students will not be able to attend their chosen schools next fall despite being notified by mail last week that they could.

"We need to go back and apologize to some parents," said Hillsborough's chief academic officer Donnie Evans.

School officials said it wasn't known Tuesday how many students or which schools were affected by the problem, which was detailed during a School Board workshop. Officials do know that the mishap involves crowded schools. This year, 61 of the district's 183 schools are at or above 100 percent of capacity.

The majority of the affected students appear to be in middle and high schools.

Evans said he hopes to work through the problem and notify parents of children who were not assigned to the right schools by phone within two weeks.

Students will be enrolled in other schools in their area, preferably those they listed as their second or third choices - as long as those schools have room.

"We're checking name by name, school by school," said deputy superintendent Randy Poindexter. "This has to be corrected."

The problem is the biggest one so far for the choice plan, a new method of assigning students to schools that replaces busing for desegregation. About 47,000 students were eligible to fill out their top three choices of schools in seven geographic regions.

Less than two weeks ago, administrators said 84 percent of the 6,488 students who participated in the choice plan received their first pick of schools.

But as the numbers of students assigned to specific schools began trickling out last week, parents at crowded campuses, including Wilson Middle and Mitchell Elementary, wanted to know why more children were being packed into their already-burgeoning classrooms.

Wilson parent Leigh Joyner complained in an e-mail to School Board members.

"I understand that with Wilson's outstanding performance it is one of the more desirable middle schools to attend - but at what cost?" she wrote. "Giving someone outside the boundaries the choice to attend an already overcrowded school does not make the school choice program successful."

Wilson and Plant High parent Jeanne Tate said she has no problem with additional students assigned to her children's schools if there's room. But since the schools are packed, she said she believes more crowded conditions would take away from the learning process there.

"We're very fortunate we have the quality education those schools provide in a public school setting," she said. "We certainly don't want to detract from that."

So, thanks to emails from the alert parents from elite South Tampa schools, the school board caught this error. See, desirable schools are already full of wealthy white children from within their own district. Kids who get have to make a choice, kids that used to be bused to these schools, don’t actually get to choose a school that’s full.

The school district has a general policy of closing enrollment at schools at 100 percent of capacity. Through the choice program, students were only supposed to be assigned to schools where space was available.

Poindexter said a random review of student assignments showed many anomalies. One was that several Burns Middle School students who are currently bused for desegregation are now assigned through the choice program to Wilson, which is over capacity.

The students should have been assigned to either Coleman, Madison or Monroe middle schools, all of which have space. Wilson, with 637 students, is built to hold 554.

In other cases, parents whose children now attend private schools were enrolled in crowded schools.

"It should not have happened," Poindexter said.

Notice that Poindexter (who wins the “Best Name for a School Superintendent” prize) is concerned that private school students were getting caught up in this error. Telling?

Schools were notified Tuesday of the error and advised that some of their choice enrollments may be invalid.

Poindexter said once the errors have been corrected, an evaluation of the choice process will be done. Changes will be instituted next year, including delaying the notification of parents until the numbers are checked and rechecked numerous times, Poindexter said.

Despite the mishap with student assignments, school board member Candy Olson said she believes the inaugural year of the choice plan has turned out well.

"This is our first time," she said. "We have to expect there to be some mistakes."

Oh. Candy sez everything’s peachy. No worries then.

Wait. There’s more, but you knew that, right?

Parents had actually been notified that their kids were accepted into these much coveted spots at Tampa’s elite schools. Now, those notifications were being voided by the school board.

Sit tight and wait.

That's what hundreds of parents are being told one day after school administrators detailed a problem with the new controlled choice student assignment plan. An apparent computer glitch wrongly assigned students to 18 schools at which there is no space.

Students' enrollment in these schools for next year is now invalid despite recent postcards telling them they got into their chosen campuses.
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The exact cause of the computer error is still unknown.

The glitch was discovered after parents at several South Tampa schools learned that children living outside their neighborhoods were being enrolled in their schools, which are already bursting with students.
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Most students chose to remain at their existing neighborhood schools without participating in choice.

Remember: the only students who had the burden of making a choice to stay in their current school were the bused students.

An editorial in the St. Pete. Times a few days later said:

The foulup last week with Hillsborough County's new school choice plan highlights a problem choice was supposed to fix. Hundreds of families - the number won't be known for days - were incorrectly told their child could get into their desired school. Now the school district is calling parents with the news their children will be going someplace else.

The whole idea of choice was to level the playing field, to give students a fair chance at the best education the public schools could offer. As it replaced busing for desegregation, choice was also a covenant with the black community, which fought in court for 40 years to equalize academic opportunities for blacks and whites.
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Still, for as many as one in four students, choice has been a mixed bag. It also is unclear what the racial breakdown is of those students who were wrongly assigned, and who now have seen their school options dwindle. Disappointing such a large number of people, in the year choice debuts in Hillsborough, could damage confidence in the plan. Imagine what could have happened had more than 6,488 of the 47,000 students eligible for choice taken up the district's offer to move. As parents become more comfortable with the choice plan, the district may face added pressure to place more students closer to home.

I gotta wonder why a paper with the resources of the SP Times has not bothered to find out exactly what the racial breakdown is here. Economic breakdowns might also be revealing, but I think it’s safe to say that a lot of the affected students were from poor and minority households.

A week later, the school board was starting to get things straightened out.

Now, after checking the numbers and looking at students' second and third choices, most of the 1,501 affected students will have seats in the fall.

Where they will go:

576 students will receive their second- or third-choice schools (486 received their second choice; 90, their third) because the schools they selected are not crowded.

296 students could not receive any of their choice schools because they all were crowded. These students will be assigned to schools in their neighborhoods.

277 students selected crowded schools and have no identified neighborhood schools, so they will be assigned schools by district officials.

196 students will be assigned to their neighborhood schools because they chose it as their second or third option on their choice applications.

156 students were excluded from the choice process because they were exceptional education, magnet school or kindergarten students who will be assigned to the school in their neighborhood.

Also, 549 students were assigned to crowded schools that are their neighborhood schools.

Because those students live in their schools' attendance zones, they still will be allowed to go there.

"These are youngsters that really did not have to complete a choice application," chief academic officer Donnie Evans said. "We have guaranteed any youngster who resides in a school's attendance area a seat in that school. Capacity is not a limiting factor if they live in that area."
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About 47,000 students were eligible to apply for the choice program, of which about 6,500 students did.

More confirmation that those who can afford to live near a desirable school will not have to worry. The last sentence is also very revealing. Less than ten percent of eligible students actually took part in the choice process. It’s almost as if the process were designed to deter participation. Actually, the real numbers are even lower:

Hillsborough School District officials rolled out final numbers for the controlled choice plan Thursday and deemed the application process a success, even though a small fraction of students chose new schools. ......

The school district has 181,469 students currently enrolled. Of those, 47,218 were eligible to participate in the choice plan. That included all students who live in urban zones, and students from suburban regions entering kindergarten, sixth and ninth grades.

When the application deadline came in January, 6,033 students selected schools other than their neighborhood schools. But another 5,198 students living in urban zones opted to continue taking long bus rides to attend their satellite schools, which are largely in the suburbs.

And the number of students actually assigned to schools other than their neighborhood school is even lower. Among the district's 196 elementary, middle and high schools, 2,217 students were assigned under the choice plan. Another 3,371 students went through the application process unnecessarily and were assigned to schools they would have gone to anyway because they live in that school's attendance area.

Hillsborough's choice plan, unlike the one in Pinellas County, does not ask students to apply to attend the school near where they live.

The school district received a five-year, $10-million federal grant to implement the plan, and a $450,000 state grant to help other districts put similar plans in place.

Those are some pretty pricey choices: over $1,100 per student. But I digress. Let’s look at a summary of this year’s fiasco:

Assigning schools under Hillsborough County's new parental choice plan was supposed to be based on getting the application in on time and a random computer selection.

As it turns out, assignments to crowded schools, double assignments and lack of participation changed all that.

Some persistent parents and some who missed deadlines got the schools they wanted anyway, a top district official confirmed Friday.

At the same time, some who met deadlines lost out on their first choices as errors were being sorted out and other students filled those slots, Chief Academic Officer Donnie Evans said.

``If they called in with a problem, we worked with them one-on-one,'' Evans said. ``I put a dozen of those in myself.''

In fact, most families from the urban core, offered a chance to stay in suburban schools, missed the deadline to submit ``intent to return'' forms. But they are being allowed to return if there is room at the school, Evans said.

Oh my: parents who have the resources and the time and the education to go one on one with the school board may have been given preferential treatment. (I wonder: could these have been the private school parents alluded to by Sup. Poindexter?) In the meantime, some who jumped through all the right hoops but did not follow up verbally on their apps may have been bumped. (By the private schoolers?)

And, in fact, since the process was designed to be a burden on students “from the urban core,” many (most?) of those students will never be able to return to their old schools. Oh, unless there is room at the school, in which case it’s an undesirable school. (back to the Trib article):

Estella Gallegos was turned down Tuesday when she asked that her 13-year-old daughter, Maria Hernandez, be allowed to return to Mann Middle School in Brandon in August. Children from her neighborhood have been bused there to desegregate schools in the suburbs. The choice plan is ending forced busing, but Maria wants to go back.

The mother and daughter were attending a hastily called meeting of parents from Tampa's urban core. The students are being assigned by the district to two schools in their neighborhood - James and Washington - that will re- open in August as kindergarten through eighth-grade schools to provide necessary space.

About 2,000 urban core families did not apply for the program and were assigned to mostly urban schools, the district said.

Gallegos, who speaks little English, said through her daughter that she never knew she could apply to have Maria return to the Brandon school or she would have.

Maria says, ``I don't mind the bus ride'' from her home near Ybor City.

Under choice, the district is divided into seven regions, and families eligible for choice were supposed to be able to choose from schools within their region. The district would provide transportation to some of those schools.

Families eligible for choice this year were those with children entering kindergarten, sixth and ninth grades and all those living in the county's urban core. About 45,000 students districtwide were eligible.

As of Tuesday's sparsely attended meeting, letters had not been sent to all the affected families notifying them of their assignments, district officials said. Families that attended were confused, and some did not like their options.

Left Feeling Deflated

Derwin and Loretha Bozeman applied for choice by the Jan. 9 deadline. They showed up with a worn notification card saying they got their first choice of Tampa's Wilson Middle School for their daughter, Bianqa, who has been attending Pierce Middle School. They then got a letter saying they failed to participate in choice and needed to come to Tuesday's meeting, they said.

``We were told we can go to either Booker T. Washington or back to Pierce,'' Derwin Bozeman said. ``We want Wilson. It's the only blue-ribbon school in the area, and we live closer to Wilson than Pierce.''

As of Friday, the family had made no decision. ``This is like a big evacuation of air from the balloon. We don't know what we're going to do.''

The Bozeman family is among a group of 1,500 families the district erroneously assigned to already-crowded schools. They were all supposed to be called, but the Bozemans said they never were.

Choose One Or The Other

Other families said they had applied for choice and magnet programs and were confused about assignments.

That was another problem for the district, Evans said. Families were encouraged to apply for choice and magnet schools, and computers were supposed to sort them out. Instead, they were assigned to both, snapping up spots that others could have had.

(Is this a new computer reservation system designed to hold slots for the right people er, problem that has not been reported yet? It sure sounds like it.)

Now families dissatisfied with their assignments are being encouraged to apply for special assignments to any district school they want as long as it has room and they provide their own transportation. The deadline is June 30.

This seems fair, since transportation is so cheap and easy to come by in this area. I’m sure that the working poor from the urban core can easily afford to arrange transportation for their kids.

Alright - it seems clear that this school choice sham is a thinly disguised return to the days of separate and equal. So, where is the NAACP? Their voice has hardly been heard during this whole affair. Remember the SP TImes editorial (back):

As it replaced busing for desegregation, choice was also a covenant with the black community, which fought in court for 40 years to equalize academic opportunities for blacks and whites.”

Well, during a press conference in March, school choice seemed little more than an afterthought, despite the fact that the NAACP had called the press in to trumpet the need to improve educational opportunities for minorities.

After decades of watching black, Hispanic and poor students lag behind white students in education achievement, Hillsborough NAACP officials said the time has come to find a way to narrow the gap.

"The need has been there all that time," said branch president Sam Horton, who saw the gap up close when he was principal of Jefferson High School in 1977. "But the mobilization hasn't been there until now."
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Horton cited statistics from the federal government's Adequate Yearly Progress Report that show:

65 percent of white students last year read at or above their grade level, compared to 32 percent of black students, 41 percent of Hispanic students and 37 percent of poor students.

71 percent of white students scored at or above their grade level in math, compared to 35 percent of black students, 49 precent of Hispanic students and 42 percent of poor students.

"This clearly points out the gap ethnically, but it also points out the gap in terms of economics," Horton said. "The gap exists. The question is how do we close that gap? . . . It's time for us to be successful. It's time for action, action, action. Collectively, we are responsible."
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Marilyn Williams, an NAACP member who served on the education committee that studied the gap, said black students represent the leading edge of a much greater problem. "Black and brown children are like the canary in the coal mine," Williams said. "All children in Hillsborough County are being cheated from a good education. While we're here struggling to improve the education of black and brown children, we're trying to improve education for all children."

Walter Smith, a former president of historically black Florida A&M University, said the achievement problem has not improved since he first took on the issue in 1982. The chief reason for the continuing disparities, Smith said, is the reliance on standardized tests he described as "culturally biased."

Horton, who called Tuesday's news conference to announce the summit initiative, said he wants to alert the community to the gap and create a groundswell for finding a solution.

"We're trying to be sure we've got the soldiers behind us," said Horton, who plans to open talks with Hillsborough school superintendent Earl Lennard next week.

"We're always interested in what the NAACP has to say," Hart said. "But how to close the achievement gap issue is something that's being addressed on the local, state and federal levels."

Arghhhh. We have a man-made crisis right here right now, as thousands of minority and poor kids were just thrown out of good schools and into decrepit schools “that will re- open in August as kindergarten through eighth-grade schools to provide necessary space.”

So, why isn’t the NAACP doing more?

The voice mail sometimes has a backlog of 80 messages.

Some callers want to file lawsuits against their employers. A few complain about the way their children were treated in school. Others just want information about the group.

But for Clearwater's NAACP branch, returning all of the phone calls is an arduous task. The branch has no office, no secretary and relies on volunteers to check the phone messages.

Such problems are increasingly common locally and nationally as the NAACP deals with an aging, less active membership and a faltering national profile.

Since the organization was founded 95 years ago, it has been in the forefront of issues affecting the black community: lynching, segregation, affirmative action.
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Across the Tampa Bay area, the four NAACP branches are so separate that their collective voice is mute. Hernando County's has no office and no general phone number. Only about a dozen people attend the meetings in Hillsborough County.

"People don't come to the meetings because they have gotten complacent," Hillsborough County NAACP president Sam Horton said. "They don't know the history of segregation in the South and what the NAACP had to do to break it down."
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"If we are lacking anywhere, it's in young adults, people 25 to 40," said civil rights pioneer Julian Bond, chairman of the national NAACP. "That's a population that is starting a family. They are establishing themselves in jobs, and those concerns, unlike those younger and older, are a top priority for them right now."
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Some young people say apathy is not the problem. The problem, they say, is the NAACP doesn't take on issues.

Deveron Gibbons, 31, former board member of the St. Petersburg branch, stopped going to meetings, saying the group seemed too concerned with social events to make a difference.

"All these meetings for planning one dinner, I don't have time for that," Gibbons said. "If you're sitting there having meetings all the time, you ain't helping no one."

William Thomas, 41, sees no direct benefit from paying the $30 yearly dues.

"There's no carrot dangling in front of me," said Thomas of St. Petersburg. "We are successful because of what they have done, but giving back to something that has old leadership and old goals? Nah."

No unifying cause

Part of the problem, some say, is there is no single, unifying cause. The NAACP, they suggest, needs to use focus groups to determine what issues are most vital.

"When we were growing up, everyone knew what the community wanted," said Randy Lightfoot, social studies supervisor for Pinellas County schools. "People probably want some of the same things, but now we're so fragmented that the message is getting lost."

To make that message clearer, Rouson two years ago proposed merging the Clearwater and St. Petersburg branches. The idea was met with resistance, he said.

Under his watch, membership in the St. Petersburg branch has tripled to about 450, while Clearwater's branch has struggled to recruit members - even though it includes all of Pinellas north of St. Petersburg.

Rouson also suggested that the three Tampa Bay branches combine their annual fundraisers into a single Freedom Fund dinner.

That didn't work, either. Roslyn Brock, vice chairwoman of the national NAACP, spoke at the Clearwater branch's dinner last month. And next month, St. Petersburg's branch is bringing her back.

Infighting and malaise. Hillsborough’s neglected population is in sore need of some help. I would think that this school choice fiasco could provide a spark for some good old fashioned activism by the Hillsborough County NAACP, but the press conference they held in March didn’t even touch on school choice. Instead, NAACP leaders called for “summits” and conferences. We need action right now, and the people we count on for assistance are looking to socialize.

Hillsborough County school officials have either taken advantage of the lack of concern on the part of the NAACP, or they have bought the loyalty of their (former?) employee and current Hillsborough County NAACP branch president Sam Horton with promises and trinkets. Either way, minority and poor students have just been sentenced to more sub par educational chances while their pale wealthy neighbors continue to enjoy the benefits of well subsidized schools with active parents and good scholastic reputations.