Guest blogger Mandy Hass is the parent of a Manhattan 4th-grader and the director of business development and marketing for Advocates for Children, the parent organization of Insideschools.org.
Charter school supporters are crowing over a new apples-to-apples study -- conducted right here in the Big Apple -- showing that charter students outperformed their peers whose parents tried but failed to get their kids into charter schools.
Charter cheerleaders are chastising skeptics who've dismissed any data showing that charter students do better on standardized tests on the assumption that charters cream the kids most likely to succeed (because their parents or guardians cared enough to apply).
In New York, charter school admissions are by lottery. Each year, thousands of kids file into auditoriums with their grownups -- parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, foster parents, and advocates -- desperate to help them escape dysfunctional and often unsafe schools. Hearts soar each time a child's name is drawn. But most go home unlucky, and though they're too young to fully understand why their grownups are so grumpy, they get the message: I'm not going to the good school. Loser.
That crushing sense of defeat -- that you went all out to try to get your kid into a better school but failed -- is a feeling shared by all grownups who did their homework, tried their best, but got shut out. That's true whether they tried to snag seats at charter schools, other choice public schools, gifted and talented programs, or private or parochial schools.
How can we possibly measure the impact of that early blow? And what can we, the grownups, do to help our children succeed even if they end up at schools we didn't want them to attend?
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