Parents, You're Not Smart Enough for School Choice

In this NE Loves PS video clip, UNO Adjunct Professor Ron Azoulay explains what happens when a charter school arrives in a community. 

In case you missed it, here's what Ron Azoulay said:

"And what happens is that the community itself doesn’t know how to talk about the new thing that is coming into their neighborhood. It doesn’t know how to ask questions about it. It doesn’t even know how to, um, comprehend the amount of marketing that is bombarded to that community and through the private contractor. Um, they are told. They are told what to do, and they are told that if they don’t take advantage of it, they deserve what it is that they have in their public education."

Let's deconstruct this a little bit.

First off, Azoulay and NE Loves PS think that parents aren't smart enough to understand "the new thing" (the charter school, presumably) that is coming to our neighborhood. In fact, we don't even know how to ask questions about this new thing.

He says "They are told." This is interesting coming from an organization whose very name (NElovesPS) tells Nebraskans what to think about public schools. When Azoulay says that the community cannot "comprehend the amount of marketing that is bombarded to that community," it may be because he just found out how much the Sherwood Foundation is spending on this campaign to convince people that school choice is bad.

I don't know if Ron Azoulay has lived in a community where a new charter school has come in, but I have. Before moving to Nebraska, our family lived in an area of Colorado where a new charter school was built at a rate of about one per year. Here's how it went:

Parents usually found out about the new charter school from the newspaper. Then they'd go to the new school's website or call the new school and ask questions like the following:

• What grade levels will the school offer?
• What will the class sizes be like?
• Will students wear uniforms?
• What curricula will be used?
• What foreign languages will be offered?
• Will sports be offered?
• What are the school hours?
• Does the school have a focus (languages, STEM, fine arts, college prep, etc.)?
• How long is the waiting list?

And this last question (how long is the waiting list?) is the question we all dreaded because we had already gotten excited about the answers to the previous questions. But by the time we read about the new school in the newspaper and searched the Internet for a website or phone number, the waiting list was usually about 1,000 kids long for 400 slots. Ugh. Maybe next year.

Of course, with vouchers available, maybe the waiting lists can shorten considerably (read Michelle Rhee's article here).