Look who’s defending small schools

[Joanne98]

Traditionalist Diane Ravitch’s slams on small schools have only encouraged Chancellor Joel Klein who becomes the great small-schools defender in this Forbes opinion piece. This is just how the conservatives, union-busters, and privatizers have been able to, at least for the time being, capture of mantle of change agency, while progressives are still being painted as defenders of the status quo.

Klein talks a good game here, but his practice doesn’t match his theory. In the end, he just another self-aggrandizing power player, using the small schools idea to promote himself for the ed secretary’s job.

New York’s early small schools movement once offered educators, parents and kids, the best hope for transforming that city’s large, over-crowded and racially divided high schools. But Klein’s version of small schools has only sharpened the inequities through discriminatory enrollment policies, unwarranted school closures replacing school improvement, and privatization of charter school management.


http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2008/12/look-whos-defending-small-schools.html

[Coyote_Bandit]

1. Let me be the first to

defend small rural schools. School consolidation can be a terrible burden for some of these kids and their families - and can still fail to afford better educational opportunities.

[SheilaT]

2. I have heard or read somewhere that

once a high school has more than 400 students, the ONLY thing that goes up is achievement in sports.

There's a reason why private schools tend to be small and have small classes. And have strong academic accomplishments by their students. We should be funding our public schools so that they can behave and teach like the private schools, including the fact that they must take everyone.

I was able to send my two children to a good secular private school, and I was very unpopular with other parents every time the subject came up and I said that I should not be exempt from penny one of taxes to support the public schools. I clearly understood how fortunate we were, and I'm still outraged that the schools do not get the financial support they should.