A Beating for Good Schools

The No Child Left Behind Act was meant to close the gap between failing students and academic achievers. But it was supposed to accomplish that by improving badly run schools, not by harming successful ones.

The Education Department flabbergasted school officials recently with a directive on parental choice, one aspect of the school reform law: Students at the lowest-performing schools can transfer to a better school in the same district even if it’s full. Even if that means filling the schoolyard with portables or increasing class sizes. The only exception is if the crowding would violate safety codes.

The main purpose of the rule is to give parents more clout. It’s true that the balance of power between schools and parents tilts almost totally toward the schools and needs to shift. Educators cannot moan about the lack of parent involvement and then give parents no voice -- or choice. It’s unfair to keep ambitious students stuck in dysfunctional schools by allowing districts to hang a “Sorry, No Vacancy” sign on every campus the kids might want to attend. Many supposedly full campuses could and would take extra students who moved within their boundaries, yet somehow cannot find a seat for a student from across town.

Still, think of what this rule could do to the high-wire act of running a crowded urban district such as Los Angeles Unified, where about 150,000 students would probably qualify for transfer. It’s hard to see the benefit in turning good campuses into cramped encampments and in rewarding a successful principal and fine faculty by dumping more work and bigger class sizes on them.

The architects of this strange approach to improving education point out that most parents want their children to attend a nearby school. It’s unlikely, they say, that many parents will put in for transfers, especially if their preferred school already is jammed with transfer students and running bigger classes.

What a concept: Make a good school so unattractive that no one will want to send children to it. Indeed, few parents now apply for student transfers. But the new law has gone into operation and there’s no knowing how parents will react over time to the news that they have a right to demand a transfer.

The rule’s backers also argue that it will force districts into shoring up their weakest schools. Fix ‘em or face mass transfers, the message would go. There are more effective and less destructive ways to make changes, and the reform law contains some of those. Consistently failing schools might see a change in personnel or be forced to spend some of their federal money on private tutoring services.

Education Secretary Rod Paige is fond of saying the law aims to aid educators, not be at odds with them. This helping hand is hard to see in mandates that could end up punishing well-run schools.