What Happens When There's No Public School Choice?

by Wiborg

What Happens When There's No Public School Choice?

Article by Stuart Nachbar

I marveled at the size of Trenton Central High School when I toured the facility on a public tour.

It is 380,000 square feet; to put that in perspective, imagine three anchor stores in a suburban shopping center stacked one atop the other. Trenton Central High is the seventh most populous secondary school in the Garden State. With nearly 2,800 students, it has the fourth largest enrollment among urban high schools; among New Jersey's high schools, only Elizabeth High, Dickinson High (Jersey City) and Eastside (Paterson) enroll more students.

The 75 year-old building has character, as well as a theatre that might have been envied on Broadway half a century ago and a swimming pool that was probably state of the art in its day, but there are the problems that you might expect to find in a structure that's lasted so long.

The problems do not stop there; the building is just the tip of the iceberg for this troubled school.

The Trenton public school system is "in need of improvement" district-wide under No Child Left Behind, and has entered the later years where the school board and administrators must consider options for restructuring elementary, middle school and secondary education. Trenton Central High School has failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under this federal act for the past five years. The Daylight-Twilight High School, also a Trenton public school, is in similar straits.

Under No Child Left Behind, AYP is based on scores from standardized mathematics and English-language arts examinations. In New Jersey, the bar, or pass rate, is raised each year, with a goal towards 100% proficiency, regardless of race, special education or economic circumstances.

When a school fails to meet AYP, No Child Left Behind implies several possible remedies: restructure the school, change the management, privatize the school or convert it into a charter school. Parents must also be offered the option to transfer their children to another public school within the same district that has made AYP, or to arrange for tutoring for their children at the district's expense.

That leads me to one major concern: what happens when students and their parents have no options - because their local public high school is the only one in town, or they have none that consistently met AYP?

I do not have to look far beyond the Trenton suburbs to find communities in a similar predicament. Three communities that surround Trenton: Ewing, Hamilton and Lawrence Township face the same dilemma. I am not na

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