It’s not often that I find anything to agree with over at Minnesota “Progressive” Project, Joe Bodell and Eric Pusey’s make-work project for bloggers with, let’s just say, opportunities for improvement.

But every so often, one sees the faintest glimmer of recognition; the idea that someone over there has a working pilot light.

First, it was Grace Kelly joining with pro-Second Amendment conservatives in supporting Bostrom for Ramsey County Sheriff.

And now, “Blue Collar Daughter” (who I don’t know, but judging by her handle would seem to be the style reporter) attacks the same Saint Paul School District “reorganization” proposal that, if you recall, I attacked last month.

When St. Paul Public Schools Superintendent Valeria Silva posted the district’s new Strong Schools, Strong Communities plan on the SPPS website February 1st, the immediate reaction was strong parental and public outcry. While Silva defends the proposal as a pro-student, community-building endeavor:

We believe, the changes we are making will reconnect many students to the communities where they live – truly making the schools the heart of our community.

~Silva

in reality it is a budget-trimming maneuver that ends access to or slates closure of many district magnate and charter schools for students city-wide, as well as effectively ends true open enrollment options in St. Paul, particularly for students in low-income neighborhoods of the city (where “neighborhood school” performances tend to be low and choices limited).

BCD is correct.  While I’ve long held that “Neighborhood Schools” are a key part of reviving public education (because the evidence shows that, while class sizes matter little to student performance, school size has a big effect), Silva’s plan doesn’t really create them.   Rather, it does less busing of kids across the city to big-box schools, making them go to big-box schools closer to their home.

And it’s the big-box schools that are a huge part of the problem for urban school districts from coast to coast, especially Saint Paul.

BCD:

A top priority of the plan is to cut transportation outside narrowly-defined “neighborhood school zones,” leaving an island of poor students trapped at less-desirable schools near their housing. Silva and SPPS also hope to transplant quality schools from their current locations to alternative facilities where the highest percentage of enrolled students live-this often means pulling a high-quality charter or magnet school from the transportation zone of a low-income neighborhood thus making it inaccessible to students who tend to have less options for mobility.

BCD is partly wrong: the Saint Paul School Board doesn’t get to tell Charter schools where to go.  They have their own boards and superintendants.  It’s one of the reasons charter school parents love them; they are insulated from the madness and myopia of the Saint Paul district’s out-of-touch, DFL-and-union-controlled board.

But as to the school the SPPS does control?  BCD is correct; last Saturday on the Northern Alliance, we talked with Krysia Weidel, a Saint Paul parent from the East Side who’s looking at having to haul her kid all the way to Highland Park if they want to stay in “L’Etoil Du Nord”, the city’s very effective, successful French-immersion school.  One of the district’s precious few success stories, the school is currently located in the East Side’s Phalen neighborhood, but is largely attended by kids from Highland Park,  Merriam Park, and other, tonier parts of town where parents have the time and bandwidth to bone up on the latest educational theories.  (Disclosure:  I am a huge proponent of language-immersion education.  It works, and works well, across class and racial divides, not “merely” as a tony humanity, but at helping kids wire their brains, ironically, for science and math).

It makes sense, in a sense; it will save the district’s transportation office all kinds of money, putting the school in the heart of its prime attendance area.

MPR news put this question to its online readers today: Should cash-strapped schools end mandatory busing?, citing Chuck Marohn’s Strong Towns Blog, in which Marohn calls for the abolition of Minnesota’s mandatory busing statute. What Marohn doesn’t address is that public school busing is about much more than, as he calls it, “door to door” service and provisions for isolated rural farm kids. It’s also about providing equal opportunity to students across the educational spectrum, and granting true access to the pioneering Open Enrollment program that Minnesota schools trail-blazed.

And let’s be clear on this: the schools, as I understand, will still be open-enrollment.  Any parent can still enroll the kids in any of ’em; they’ll just have to transport them themselves.  Parents do it all the time; hundreds of Saint Paul parents have pulled their kids out of their assigned schools and bundle them off to charter schools (which don’t provide transportation) or even schools in other districts; many Saint Paul parents haul their kids to Roseville, Woodbury and Eagan.  And in turn, there are parents in Forest Lake, Elko and Prior Lake that haul their kids to charter schools and even a few of Saint Paul’s more successful district programs.

Which is not, in and of itself, unreasonable – unless you’re a parent who has to be at work early, or has kids going to schools all over town, or you don’t have a car, or one that’ll support that kind of commitment to transportation.

Which means, currently, that your only option is to go to the school that the District – and its sclerotic, terminally-irritating Placement Office – assigns your kids to.  And if you live in Frogtown, the lower East Side or the North End, it means a huge, crime-ridden warehouse school.

And here, at last, we get to the part where BCD and I part ways:

And if the heated debate at St. Paul school board meetings, the parental protest at work on local Facebook pages and community groups, or the crummy precedent of other U.S. school districts attempting the same sort of penny-pinching school shuffle are indicators, the answer is: No. We should not end mandatory busing. Find the cash to fund quality public education for everyone-in the classroom and on the bus.

There is absolutely nothing to prevent a school district from providing a quality education, and one at an affordable price.  And when I say “absolutely nothing”, I mean nothing but…:

1. …school districts’ mania for building huge factory schools,
2. the idiotic fixation with requiring kids to be kept in school until age 16, whatever the cost – not only in terms of education, but in perverting “special education” into a form of shadow juvenile justice system
3. Administrations – driven by the Teachers Union, via the DFL – and their hatred for charter schools, which largely already achieve the ideal of the neighborhood school – and do it on a budget, and
4. those same Administrators, and the Educational Academy and the other metastasizations of the Educational/Industrial complex – and their fixation with creating “equality” by jiggering the numbers of students in schools so that the headcounts by race all even up, rather than by addressing how to actually teach kids.

That the big, overpopulated factory school is a failure is obvious to anyone that’s not on the Saint Paul School Board; parents are voting with their feet.

The answer isn’t in where you bus kids.  It’s in what kind of school they walk into when they get there.