Susan Dejarnatt's Community Losses: The Cost Of Education Reform

In Community Losses: The Cost of Education Reform, Susan DeJarnatt (2014), explores the concept of education as public good versus a private good in Philadelphia. She examines the current treeatment of public education as a private good, and opines that the current themes of privitization, school choice, and accountability metrics by standardized high stakes testing, fails to incorporate the “democratic equality” (DeJarnatt, 2014). She paraphrases Diane Ravitch, that the focus on education as private good, “turns students and families from citizens to consumers” (DeJarnatt, 2014). Interestingly, DeJarnatt (2014), examines three pillars supporting this mentality. First, that the provider of education, private or public, does not matter as long …show more content…
The reports references seven elemetary schools that were closed in the North Central region, which in all of the schools, the majority of the students in the catchment area, parents have predominantly chosen the local neighborhood school over charter schools (DeJarnatt, 2014), ironically disenfranchising the choices parents actually made. She counters the argument that these parents failed to make a choice, and were just accepting of the status quo; arguing if that is true, DeJarnatt (2014) asks why we believe these parents would suddently start making wise choices as a result of a school …show more content…
To mitigate the concerns of advocates and stakeholder whom rejected the proposal to close schools, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) created a program in which students of shuttered school were assigned to “welcoming schools’ that had higher educational success (de la Torre, et al., 2015). Most students (66%) enrolled in the assigned welcoming school, possibly because the district added more resources to the receiving schools, which increased new programs, air condition in buildings, school based technology and established “Safe Passage routes” (de la Torre, et al., 2015). Interestingly, while the closing of schools was based on test scores, it would be assumed that students would be sent to higher acheiveing schools, de la Torre, et al. (2015) found that of the receiving schools 13 were low performing, 23 were in the middle tier, and only 12 were in the top tier. De la Torre, et al. (2015) opined that there were not enough vacants seats in the receiveing top tier schools, resulting in a significant portion of student forced to attend similar schools that the school that was