Submitted by Bob Nardo
on 10/12/04 7:08 AM
While there are certainly some incentive problems involved in getting districts to facilitate transfer of students to better performing schools, there are other simpler obstacles which we can do something about; notably, recalcitrant school districts.
Working with the enrollment and transfer functions for our school, I've seen how uncooperative and uncommunicative our school district can be. (My public charter school is the top performing in our district - which is one of the largest districts in New Jersey - by a very wide margin. I realize that charter schools are not in the scope of "traditional" choices covered by today's discussion, but the examples I'm about to give (1) apply across the boundaries and (2) are concrete problems which we can act on.)
Just to give a couple of examples of our district's unhelpful (in)actions:
--At a major public event I attended last month, the district distributed a list of information about charter school choices - with two year old data for our school! Since we've added two grades in the meantime, many people would overlook us as a choice for their child.
--The district, and some of the traditional public schools within it from which we draw many of our students, are either slow or totally unresponsive to our requests to process student transfer paperwork. Nearly one-fourth of our students still don't have all their paperwork here, two months into the school year. Without the transfer paperwork, we can't get the funds. This cost us thousands of dollars last school year.
