Portland schools urged to scrap transfers to boost racial diversity
Source: Reuters
Portland schools urged to scrap transfers to boost racial diversity
By Courtney Sherwood
PORTLAND Ore. Tue Nov 11, 2014 5:11am EST
(Reuters) - A citizen's group in Portland, Oregon, said on Monday the city should drop policies allowing students to transfer public schools, saying it is making the schools less racially diverse and poorer.
"It's mostly white, mostly middle-class families, transferring out of schools that have students of color," said Kali Thorne Ladd, a member of the group which had been asked by educators to evaluate Portland Public Schools transfer policies.
These allow students to switch to schools in different neighborhoods, but they must enter a lottery if spots are limited. There is also a separate lottery system for students hoping to transfer to selective "magnet" schools which offer advanced curriculums.
The programs have drawn criticism as school officials seek to boost diversity in classrooms in the Democratic-leaning city of some 580,000 residents. White children make up nearly 60 percent of students.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/11/us-usa-portland-education-idUSKCN0IV0UX20141111
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)Forbidding transfers altogether would suck hard for many kids & parents.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)a few select schools are allowed to hoard the lion's share of system funding and resources...The gap gets wider and wider...
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)I'm actually not intimately familiar with Pdx school system, as all my children
have been grown-ups for awhile now.
Still I feel the transfer issue is much more complicated than just being about race.
LeftyMom
(49,212 posts)Personal experience:
When I was in school I had a transfer from the closest school to one about a mile away, because the latter had an all-day gifted class and the former only had morning enrichment (aka 45 minutes of extra computer lab.) My younger sister had one because you could automatically get a transfer for a sibling, which was nice because she was able to attend a full-day Spanish immersion class, something the local school didn't offer either. There were only two schools in our district at the time with full-day gifted classes, and neither of them were in particularly wealthy or overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, for what it's worth (the classes were always very diverse, if anybody's wondering.)
Neither of these schools were wealthy or well funded or in particularly desirable neighborhoods. The school we attended might have been slightly less diverse than the neighborhood school but both would have been much more diverse than schools in most other towns and most schools in our district.
Our neighborhood school didn't miss out on much for us not being there- their resources were shifted toward english learners and struggling students, not gifted kids and their hyperactive siblings. My sister did attend that school for one year when I went to junior high and she lost her transfer, and it was a freakin' disaster. We basically had to lie about daycare she wasn't actually attending to get her back into a school that met her needs.
So if our local schools had implemented a policy like they're proposing for Portland schools, it would have really been damaging me as a child, and it wouldn't have improved my neighborhood school at all. Not a fan.
branford
(4,462 posts)and safest school they are able to arrange, regardless of race. To act otherwise, is deficient parenting.
The article also provides scant information to intelligently discuss the appropriateness or fairness of the transfers.