Hearing on Gun-Free School Zones Law Repeal Bill Set for Next Wednesday

May 25, 2017National Issue, State Issue, WASBCarrying Concealed Weapon (CCW) Licenses, Gun-Free School Zones, Guns on School Grounds, Safe Schools, WASB Resolutionsdrossmiller

The Senate Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety will hold a public hearing on Senate Bill 169, authored by Sen. Dave Craig (R-Town of Vernon, pictured), which would repeal the state’s gun free school zones law, among other provisions, on:

Wednesday May 31st
9:30 AM
Room 411 South, State Capitol, Madison

As mentioned, this bill would repeal the state’s gun free school zones law; allow individuals to obtain a “basic” concealed carry licenses without completing firearms training; require school boards to post school buildings and grounds to prohibit possession of firearms by carrying concealed weapon (CCW) license holders in those places; and reduce penalties for persons who possess firearms in school buildings and on school grounds in violation of such postings.

The WASB opposes this bill.   The bill would broaden the ability of persons to possess firearms on school grounds and school zones and would reduce the penalties for bringing firearms into school settings.

The WASB’s current resolution on weapons possession and schools reads as follows:

Resolution 6.11 (b) Weapons Possession

 (b) The WASB supports safe learning environments for all children, free of guns and other weapons. Further, the WASB opposes any initiatives at the state or federal level that would legalize any further ability for anyone, with the exception of sworn law enforcement officers, to bring a weapon or possess a weapon, including a facsimile or “look-alike” weapon, concealed or otherwise, in school zones or lessen the consequences for violation of existing safe school policies relating to guns and other weapons. Decisions about whether CCW licensees may possess weapons in school buildings must remain exclusively in the hands of the locally elected school board which governs the school. (emphasis added)

NPR report on school vouchers in light of Trump/DeVos attempt to destroy public education

The following links take you to the NPR reports. To listen to the radio interview go to the “listen” link at the top of the written NPR report. The first report (Link 1)  includes an interview with Howard Fuller and Wendell Harris. Fuller chooses to berate the NAACP. This is the same Howard Fuller that endorsed Betsy DeVos (Hear Fuller’s endorsement at: http://tinyurl.com/kusedpt)

Link 1:  http://tinyurl.com/kdxqztl

Link 2: http://tinyurl.com/ly5nc3u

Lessons On Race And Vouchers From Milwaukee

May 16, 2017 Claudio Sanchez

Howard Fuller (left) is one of the architects of the voucher program in Milwaukee; Wendell Harris led early opposition to vouchers.  LA Johnson/Getty/NPR

The Trump administration has made school choice, vouchers in particular, a cornerstone of its education agenda. This has generated lots of interest in how school voucher programs across the country work and whom they benefit.

The oldest school voucher program was created in Milwaukee in 1990 with a singular focus on African-American students living in poverty. This school year, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program issued nearly 28,000 vouchers for low-income kids to attend dozens of private and religious schools at public expense.

Over the years, though, most voucher recipients have performed no better academically than their public school peers. In some cases they’ve done worse. So who exactly is benefiting? It’s a question that has raised serious misgivings in Milwaukee’s African-American community. So much so that some of the city’s prominent black leaders today are divided.

Howard Fuller and Wendell J. Harris, in many ways, represent that split.

Harris is currently on the Milwaukee school board. As a member of the NAACP’s education committee in Wisconsin, he was one of the original plaintiffs who sued the state in 1990 in a failed effort to block vouchers.

NPR Ed

The Promise And Peril Of School Vouchers

Fuller, a professor at Marquette University, is one of the architects of the voucher program. He’s also a former superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools and founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, a national pro-voucher and school choice group.

Fuller’s support for vouchers is pretty straight-forward. He says most of Milwaukee’s African-American students are trapped in failing schools. These kids’ parents, says Fuller, should have the right to choose a better school for their children because very little else that the African-American community has fought for has helped rescue poor black children in need of good schools.

“After (Brown vs. Board of Education)”, says Fuller, “people thought that integration was going to lead to equal education for black kids. It didn’t. Since then, there’s a long history in Milwaukee to try and get poor black children educated.”

People back then, Fuller adds, “didn’t know just how far behind black children were, and there were administrators who didn’t want that data to get out. Some said it would give fodder to racists who believed that black children could not learn.”

Way before vouchers, Fuller says, black leaders in Milwaukee even proposed an all-black school district to address the specific needs of African-American children.

“People accused us of being racists, segregationists and on and on,” says Fuller.

After that idea was shot down, a proposal to give vouchers to black families took root. Fuller joined Polly Williams, an African-American state legislator from Milwaukee and a Democrat, to push a school choice bill through the Wisconsin Legislature.

Fuller and Williams envisioned a small program that would encourage the community to create more private schools for black children. But in 1995, when the Wisconsin Legislature allowed religious schools to come into the voucher program, some leaders, including Williams, felt that white people who ran the city’s private Catholic and Christian schools would take over the program.

“Which is exactly what happened,” says Wendell Harris, who had led the opposition to vouchers in Milwaukee.

“My argument with Howard Fuller is that Catholic and Christian schools used this opening to, in essence, save their schools,” says Harris. “If you set up a Christian academy and your main interest is to get a few hundred children to improve your [school finances] and you use Christianity as the draw, these schools have exploited persons’ beliefs for their own private gain,” Harris argues.

“In our community,” adds Harris, “a lot of people believe that if they can get their kids into a safe place so they can pray every day, they may be able to save their child’s life. Education is secondary.”

Howard Fuller disagrees that voucher proponents “exploit” black families.

“I’m in this to empower parents,” he says, “not to empower private or religious schools. I also didn’t get in this for people who already have money to get more money to pay private school tuition.”

But critics of vouchers say it’s only a matter of time before conservative lawmakers seek to lift the income restrictions on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.

Vouchers, Fuller insists, absolutely need to target poor black children, period. He says that’s why he was so puzzled when the NAACP late last year called for a moratorium on charter school expansion.

“There’s thousands of black parents who are going to exercise the best option for their children and they don’t care what the NAACP says,” Fuller argues. “The hypocrisy in America is that so many of the black leaders and policymakers who are adamantly opposed to choice, use it for their own children.”

But Harris, a prominent member of the NAACP in Milwaukee, says it’s the political agenda of the school choice movement that many black leaders oppose.

“You’ve had this marketing effort to demonize public school teachers and public schools for the last 25 to 30 years,” Harris says. “So black parents are convinced that public education is the problem.”

I ask Harris, “What do you say to the grandmother who’s raising five grandchildren and who says ‘I don’t want kids in Milwaukee public schools to fail, but I don’t want my grandkids to fail either?’ ”

“I feel that lady’s pain,” Harris responds. “She wants a safe place for her children where they can get the education they need. But private and public schools don’t play by the same rules.”

Harris argues that public schools have to take all children, including those with learning disabilities and behavior problems. Private and religious schools aren’t required to accept or retain them. And if they do, they’re not required to disclose their expulsion and suspension rates.

“The issue of public money with no oversight, I have a problem with that,” he says.

Fuller argues that the real issue here is parental choice, and in Milwaukee he says it’s working for black families. I remind him that the data from Milwaukee’s voucher program doesn’t support his assertion that vouchers are benefiting students in terms of their academic performance.

Fuller doesn’t dispute this but says test scores shouldn’t be the only metric with which to gauge the success of vouchers.

“What I’m saying to you is that there are thousands of black children whose lives are much better today because of the Milwaukee parental choice program,” he says. “They were able to access better schools than they would have without a voucher.”

Wendell Harris isn’t convinced, but concedes that vouchers are here to stay.

“We fought with everything we had” to stop vouchers, he says. “That battle is lost. What we have to do now is try and make this thing the best it can be to support our children.”

 

President 45 declares war on our children: education budget summary

The Federal Budget for FY2018 Released by White House

Summary:

In General

Earlier today, the Trump Administration released their full budget proposal for federal FY 2018, which will fund education programs in school year 2018-19. The president’s proposal requests $9 billion in cuts to federal education programs, reducing the budget of the U.S. Department of Education by approximately 13%.  Overall, the Trump Budget proposal seeks to balance the federal budget in ten years by substantially cutting both discretionary appropriations and entitlement/mandatory spending by $3.6 trillion, while increasing defense and security spending and assuming 3% annual economic growth.  Cuts to social safety-net entitlement programs [like TANF (welfare), SNAP (food stamps), SSDI (social security disability payments), and further cuts to the Medicaid program of another $610 billion on top of the more than $800 billion in Medicaid cuts in House health care legislation (H.R. 1628)] will have both direct and indirect consequences for low-income students and their families, as well as the public schools serving them.

Education Department Budget

As expected, any new K-12 funding in the budget proposal is directed to choice initiatives. The president’s request includes a new $1 billion public school choice proposal called FOCUS, and is described as a Title I open enrollment weighted student funding pilot program. It is important to note, however, that the budget request cuts traditional Title I formula grants to school districts by more than $575 million in order to help offset this new proposal. The budget request also includes $250 million for a new private school choice pilot program, and a $167 million increase for charter schools.

The significant K-12 education cuts in the budget proposal include the elimination of the 21^st Century Afterschool program (-$1.2 billion) and the elimination of the Title II-A program for Effective Instruction (-$2.1 billion). The budget proposal also eliminates the new Title IV Academic Enrichment block grants (-$400 million) and the Striving Readers programs (-$190 million), which had been renamed Comprehensive Literacy Development Grants under ESSA.

Funding for students with disabilities under IDEA and English learners under Title III would remain essentially level, while Perkins CTE funding and Adult Education funding would absorb 13% and 16% cuts respectively.

Major Cuts in President Trump’s Education Budget Proposal

• Title I Formula Grants to LEAs: -$578 million
• Title II-A: -$2.1 billion (eliminated)
• 21^st Century Afterschools: -$1.2 billion (eliminated)
• Title IV Academic Enrichment Grants: -$400 million (eliminated)
• Striving Readers/ Comprehensive Literacy Development Grants: -$190 million (eliminated)

Major Increases in President Trump’s Education Budget Proposal

• Title I FOCUS Choice Program: +1 billion (new and requiring a congressional authorization)
• Private School Voucher Pilot: +$250 million (new under the Title IV Innovation Program)
• Charter Schools: +$167 million (50% increase)

Proposed Infrastructure Plan

The FY 2018 Budget provides few details on the Administration’s national infrastructure planning.  The proposal retains the $1 trillion “target” that would be met with a combination of new Federal funding, incentivized non-Federal funding, and policies to expedite new projects (e.g., authorizing the start-up of the Keystone Pipeline).  Actual Federal funding would be $200 billion for a “suite of direct federal programs that will also help leverage the additional non-Federal investments.

Outlook

The massive cuts proposed in so many federal programs from medical research to the environment are receiving little support from many Republicans or Democrats.  Nonetheless, the FY 2018 Budget request along with the tax proposal and health care legislative represents a massive shift in federal priorities that will need to be actively and aggressively if we are to prevent them from happening.

 

 

The Promise And Peril Of School Vouchers in Indiana

May 12, 2017 Heard on Morning Edition Eric Weddle Peter Balonon-Rosen Cory Turner

 

Teachers rallied at the Statehouse in Indianapolis in 2011 to protest Gov. Mitch Daniels’ attempts to curb collective bargaining, implement merit pay and create a voucher system that would send taxpayer money to private schools. Darron Cummings/AP Wendy Robinson wants to make one thing very clear. As the long-serving superintendent of Fort Wayne public schools, Indiana’s largest district, she is not afraid of competition from private schools. “We’ve been talking choice in this community and in this school system for almost 40 years,” Robinson says. Her downtown office sits in the shadow of the city’s grand, Civil War-era Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. In Fort Wayne, a parking lot is the only thing that separates the beating heart of Catholic life from the brains of the city’s public schools. In fact, steeples dominate the skyline of the so-called City of Churches. Fort Wayne has long been a vibrant religious hub, home to more than 350 churches, many of which also run their own schools. Fort Wayne’s superintendent of public schools, Wendy Robinson, is not afraid of competition from private schools. While the city’s public and private schools managed, for decades, to co-exist amicably, that changed in 2011, Robinson says. That’s when state lawmakers began the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program, a plan to allow low-income students to use vouchers, paid for with public school dollars, to attend private, generally religious schools. Six years later, Indiana’s statewide voucher program is now the largest of its kind in the country and, with President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos openly encouraging states to embrace private school choice, the story of the Choice Scholarship — how it came to be, how it works and whom it serves — has become a national story of freedom, faith, poverty and politics.

 

Our story begins in Fort Wayne, where the state now spends $20 million a year on voucher students, more than in any other district. This year, $1.1 million of that $20 million went to one private, K-8 school: St. Jude Catholic School. The story of St. Jude St. Jude opened its school doors in March of 1929. By 2011, when the state unveiled its voucher program, the school enrolled 479 students. That first year, a small number received vouchers: just 28. Then something happened to the program that began a remarkable shift, not only at St. Jude but across the state. Father Jake Runyon saw it happening and told his parishioners. “We’ve been seeing some financial troubles here at St. Jude Parish,” Runyon said in a formal presentation that was recorded in 2014 and posted on the church’s website. The parish was in its third straight year of financial losses.
2
One big reason for the losses: The church was pouring money from its offertory into the school and neglecting repairs to its steeple and cooling system. Then, Runyon shared the good news: After an attempt by the state teachers union to kill the young voucher program, Indiana’s Supreme Court had found it constitutional, allowing families to spend public school dollars in private, religious schools. Not long after, the program was expanded dramatically to include children who had never attended a public school. Suddenly, many St. Jude students qualified. All they had to do was apply. “The effect on that this year,” Runyon told parishioners in 2014, “it would have been $118,000 of money we just left there, that the state of Indiana wanted to give me, and we weren’t able to take advantage of it.” Runyon’s presentation — since taken down from the church’s website — was a pitch for a new way of distributing financial aid to St. Jude students, one that would maximize the money coming in through vouchers and allow the parish to use more of its offertory elsewhere. When word of the plan reached beyond St. Jude, though, it appeared to confirm the greatest fears of public school advocates: that vouchers were a giveaway to the state’s cash-strapped religious schools at the expense of struggling public schools. This year, according to state data, nearly two-thirds of St. Jude’s students now receive public dollars to help pay for their private school tuition. Runyon, who is still Pastor at St. Jude, declined repeated interview requests. In the beginning School Vouchers 101 “Social justice has come to Indiana education,” Gov. Mitch Daniels said in 2011 after the state made several big changes to its education system. Among those changes was the new voucher program, capped at 7,500 children, to allow low-income students to use state education dollars to attend private schools. “The ability to choose a school that a parent believes is best for their child’s future is no longer limited to the wealthy.” Of the children in that first voucher class, 2011-2012, most had two things in common: They were low-income and had attended public school. “Public schools will get first shot at every child,” Daniels said back then in a speech to the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “If the public school delivers and succeeds, no one will seek to exercise this choice.” Daniels, who is now the president of Purdue University, predicted that the voucher program was “not likely to be a very large phenomenon in Indiana.” He was wrong. In 2013, Mike Pence succeeded Daniels as Indiana’s governor, and, within months, the now-vice president oversaw a dramatic expansion of the program. Lawmakers added new pathways for students to qualify, making the voucher more accessible to children who had never attended a public school. They also expanded the program’s reach to include some middle-class families.
3
Voucher enrollment doubled in one year. “It’s actually grown almost exponentially as you look at the numbers,” says the law’s proud architect, state Rep. Robert Behning, a Republican. It’s also popular, according to a 2016 survey conducted by EdChoice, a group that advocates for vouchers and other forms of school choice. Today, more than 34,000 students are enrolled in Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Program — 3 percent of students statewide. To qualify, parents have to meet certain income limits. For a full voucher, worth 90 percent of what a state would spend in a public school, a family of four can earn no more than $45,000 annually, but students whose parents earn up to $67,000 can still qualify for a half-voucher. And for children already in the program, their family income can rise to nearly $90,000 annually. The biggest headline from the program’s growth is this: Today, more than half of all voucher students in the state have no record of attending a public school. Exhibit A: Fort Wayne. “We’re not losing kids from our schools [to vouchers],” says Superintendent Wendy Robinson. “We’re now just having the state pay for kids who were never going to come here anyway.” In fact, Father Jake Runyon alluded to this in his 2014 presentation: “The vast majority of the people who qualify for the Choice Scholarships were already here,” he assured his Fort Wayne parishioners after the voucher program expanded. “So it’s not necessarily the case that we’re getting tons of new students. But it’s that a lot of the students are here.” Fort Wayne is a microcosm of what’s happening statewide, with tens of millions of state taxpayer dollars paying for children to attend private schools without, as then-Gov. Daniels had suggested, giving public schools “first shot.” Behning, the law’s tireless defender, argues that all parents deserve to choose their child’s school, even those who have traditionally opted out of the public system. “The intent of the program was to give parents choice,” says Behning. The parents of children in private schools, he says, “are taxpayers just like the parents in a traditional public school.” This shift in the program’s rules, begun by Pence in 2013, has led to a shift in student demographics as well. White voucher students are up from 46 percent that first year to 60 percent today, and the share of black students has dropped from 24 percent to 12 percent. Recipients are also increasingly suburban and middle class. A third of students do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals. While the program was once premised on giving low-income, public school families access to better schools, this year fewer than 1 percent of voucher students used a pathway, written into the law, that’s meant specifically for students leaving failing schools. “When you look at that trend data, it is alarming,” says Jennifer McCormick, the state’s new Republican superintendent of public instruction, and a former public school teacher. She says of the old narrative that vouchers were largely meant to help low-income students escape underperforming public schools: “That’s not necessarily the case” today.

Diane Ravitch on Los Angeles School board Election

Will the Trump-DeVos Alliance Win Control of Los Angeles Public Schools?

“In the Public Interest,” an organization that keeps track of privatization of the public sector, points out that Trump and DeVos have a lot riding on the outcome of the school board election in Los Angeles on May 16.

Their allies have invested millions of dollars in gaining control of the school board so they can turn students and schools over to private hands.

If they can defeat Steve Zimmer and Irma Padilla in run-offs, they will be able to divert public funding to charter entrepreneurs and corporate charter chains. They will squash democratic control of public schools. They will send tax dollars to corporate entities that are neither accountable nor transparent. They will widen the reach of an unregulated industry that has been marred by scandal, theft, fraud, misappropriation of funds, and self-dealing.

Citizens of Los Angeles. Stand up for democracy and public education! Vote for Steve Zimmer and Imelda Padilla!

Peter Dreier: Who Are the Corporate Plutocrats Trying to Defeat Steve Zimmer in Los Angeles?

Peter Dreier, professor of political science at Occidental College in Los Angeles, warns that a cabal of billionaires are trying to defeat Steve Zimmer in order to take control of the public schools and privatize them. The vote on May 16 is in the national spotlight.

Can a handful of billionaires buy control of the nation’s second largest school district?

Before naming names, Dreier writes:

Some of America’s most powerful corporate plutocrats want to take over the Los Angeles school system but Steve Zimmer, a former teacher and feisty school board member, is in their way. So they’ve hired Nick Melvoin to get rid of him. No, he’s not a hired assassin like the kind on “The Sopranos.” He’s a lawyer who the billionaires picked to defeat Zimmer.

The so-called “Independent” campaign for Melvoin — funded by big oil, big tobacco, Walmart, Enron, and other out-of-town corporations and billionaires — has included astonishingly ugly, deceptive, and false attack ads against Zimmer.

This morning (Friday) the Los Angeles Times reported that “Outside spending for Melvoin (and against Zimmer) has surpassed $4.65 million.” Why? Because he doesn’t agree with the corporatization of our public schools. Some of their donations have gone directly to Melvoin’s campaign, but much of it has been funneled through a corporate front group called the California Charter School Association.

To try to hoodwink voters, the billionaires invented another front group with the same initials as the well-respected Parent Teacher Association, but they are very different organizations. They called it the “Parent Teacher Alliance.” Pretty clever, huh? But this is not the real PTA, which does not get involved with elections. In fact, the real PTA has demanded that this special interest PAC change their name and called the billionaires’ campaign Zimmer “misleading,” “deceptive practices,” and “false advertising.”

These out-of-town billionaire-funded groups can pay for everything from phone-banks, to mailers, to television ads. Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez described the billionaires’ campaign to defeat Zimmer, which includes sending mails filled with outrageous lies about Zimmer, as “gutter politics.”

As a result, the race for the District 4 seat — which stretches from the Westside to the West San Fernando Valley — is ground zero in the battle over the corporate take-over of public education. The outcome of next Tuesday’s (May 16) election has national implications in terms of the billionaires’ battle to reconstruct public education in the corporate mold.

The contest between Melvoin and Zimmer is simple. Who should run our schools? Who knows what’s best for students? Out-of-town billionaires or parents, teachers, and community residents?

Bernie Endorses Steve Zimmer and Imelda Padilla

The critical runoff election for school board in Los Angeles is Tuesday May 16.

There are two crucial races. One is Steve Zimmer Vs. Nick Melvoin. Melvoin has received millions from leaders of the charter industry, such as Eli Broad, Alice Walton, Michael Bloomberg, and Reed Hastings. He is the beneficiary of millions from people who do not live in Los Angeles.

The other is Imelda Padilla vs. Kelly Fitzpatrick Nonez. Nonez is a charter school teacher.

Steve Zimmer has been endorsed by Eric Garcetti, the Mayor of Los Angeles, and other current city officials.

He has also received the endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders.

If you live in one of their districts in Los Angeles, please vote on Tuesday. The future of public education in Los Angeles depends on your vote.

 

Bradley Foundation Email Revelations

By Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel May 5, 2017

Long a player on the national stage, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee has been quietly using its vast resources to construct state-by-state networks of activist groups to win support for its conservative agenda from coast to coast.

The Bradley Blueprint

• Did Russians hack Bradley Foundation computers?
• Database: Bradley Foundation Grants 2011 – 2015
• The “Enemy List”

This previously undisclosed effort by the Bradley Foundation was revealed in hundreds of thousands of documents swiped by international hackers from the foundation’s server late last year.

Those internal documents, obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in recent months, show the conservative powerhouse is working to duplicate its success in Wisconsin under Republican Gov. Scott Walker, focusing on such swing states as North Carolina and Colorado.

“You have to take a longer view on some of the things we’re trying to accomplish,” said Bradley Foundation CEO Rick Graber in an interview. “You’re not going to see definitive results every three months. It can take decades.”

The records make clear the Bradley Foundation no longer simply favors groups promoting its signature issues: taxpayer-funded school choice and increased work requirements for welfare recipients. It now regularly funds nonprofits that are, among other things, hostile to labor unions, skeptical of climate change or critical of the loosening of sexual mores in American culture.

More important, the foundation has found success by changing its fundamental approach to putting policies into reality.

 You have to take a longer view on some of the things we’re trying to accomplish. You’re not going to see definitive results every three months. It can take decades.

The Bradley Foundation is paying less attention to Washington, D.C. Instead, it is methodically building a coalition of outside groups aimed at influencing officials in statehouses from Pennsylvania to Arizona.

To see the whole article go to:

https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2017/5/5/hacked-records-show-bradley-foundation-taking-wisconsin-model-national.html

NewYorkTimes: The Broken Promises of Choice in New York City Schools

Ayana Bryant, guidance counselor at Pelham Gardens Middle School in the Bronx, looked on as students headed to class last month.

The city’s high school admissions process was supposed to give every student
a real chance to attend a good school. But 14 years in, it has not delivered.

By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS and FORD FESSENDENMAY 5, 2017

It was a warm Sunday morning, the breeze sweeping aside the last wisps of summer, and 31 students from Pelham Gardens Middle School in the Bronx had signed up to spend the day indoors, at a showcase for New York City’s public high schools.

The annual fair kicks off the city’s high school application season in September, and Jayda Walker, 13, arrived with a plan.

An eager young woman with an easy smile, Jayda wants to be a divorce lawyer, and at the fair, held at Brooklyn Technical High School, she planned to focus on schools with a legal theme, located in Manhattan. She had already looked through the high school directory, an intimidating tome the size of an old-fashioned phone book, and thought Manhattan offered more variety. Besides, she said, she wanted to get out of the Bronx.

She and her classmates arrived early and were at the front of the line, with hundreds of people behind them eager to get inside. But for many of the students from Pelham Gardens, and others like them, it was already too late. The sorting of students to top schools — by race, by class, by opportunity — begins years earlier, and these children were planted at the back of the line.

To read the full article go to:

//www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/nyregion/school-choice-new-york-city-high-school-admissions.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share