Teacher Defends Small Schools and Others Respond

A teacher emailed GEM asking for a correction to a leaflet that he felt equated small schools with charters. Here is the original and some reactions:

I received an email from GEMnyc supporting a protest of school closures. I agree with everything in the email, except for the inclusion of small schools in the statement below:

"The little known secret behind charter schools and small schools is that they steal the highest achieving students from district schools, and turn away ELL, Special Education, and struggling students."

I work at a small school. Our incoming class of students were all level 1 and 2. We are just as frustrated as other schools regarding the siphoning away of higher level students by selective schools, whether they be charters or others. The issue is not with the size of the school, but the selectivity of the school. Why should some schools be able to select their students and others not?

Please correct this error. It is hard enough to defend the existence of our school without misinformation being propagated by the "good guys."

Responses:

I disagree w/ this.
I understand that there are dedicated teachers at small schools, who are doing a great job and are equally frustrated. However, the 'attack' or criticism is not on individual small schools, but the strategy of using small schools to dismantle and undermine public education. Small schools, in the larger context, are a piece in the privatization puzzle.
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I do think there is a context here for that statement in that the small schools movement has been as much a political one as educational if not more. If the charter school cap gets lifted many of them will be swept away too. I think we need to figure out ways to create small school environments within larger structures. That will not happen unless more power resides in the hands of teachers.
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I tend to agree. The small schools are not the same as charters. More nuanced wording is needed by us. Since there are ways in which the small school movement is supporting privatization and union busting, but, like he says they are also suffering much the same fate as other schools at the hands of charters etc.
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I think an important point is that breaking up a big school into smaller schools doesn't fix it. I started at my school while it was a [large high school] during the time it was being phased out for being a "dangerous" and "failing" school. The folks in the [wehite upscale] neighborhood couldn't wait to get their hands on the school (there is a racist element to this which I won't get into now). Once it was restructured. Long story short - [the old school] hasn't been in the school for at least 4 or 5 years and if you ask the folks who have been there for 20-30 years, things were BETTER under [the old school]. More discipline, more classes being offered, tech classes (auto shop, for example), a bilingual program. And now my school, I fear, could be on Bloomberg's chopping-block. We suffer from the same "failings" as many of the other schools that are being closed - declining enrollment, F's on Student performance, C's and D's on our report card, etc. Making a big school small doesn't fix the problems. What breaking up a big school does is divide an conquer the teachers in a building, weaken the chapters, and if Bloomberg gets his way, gets rid of senior excessed teachers.