How we can get students to stop switching schools so often

Editor’s note: Erin Richard’s “Lessons Lost” series is ongoing and will be exploring potential solutions to chronic school switching in stories to come before the end of the year. If a family or a teacher has dealt creatively with this challenge or has a story to share, please email: erin.richards@jrn.com

The current Journal Sentinel series on “Lessons Lost” is excellent. This series is making us aware of how schoolto-school mobility can be hurt children, especially for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.

But what should we do? Mobility is rooted in the poverty that too many of our families experience. But it’s also simply the result of how we have come to do business.

What are the solutions?

First, we should forbid parents to switch schools mid-year unless their families have moved. In theory we do this now; in reality, it often doesn’t work. Enforcing this would require a serious commitment on the part of the School Board and the Milwaukee Public Schools administration.

As the series noted, many families must move during the school year. So let’s offer these families a “bus-back” guarantee. When a family has to move, offer to bus the students back to their original school. And, let’s do this not just for the rest of the school year but until the students graduate. This idea has been tossed around in the past, but it has been viewed as too costly — which is ironic given how we spend tens of millions busing around other kids.

Another problem is parents often enroll at schools without visiting, then switch when they find they don’t like the school. So let’s require that parents must enroll for a school at the school itself, which in the process would ensure they visit the school. “But that would require parents to travel all over town to visit these schools,” you might say. Yes, but if parents have not even visited the school, how can they make the decision to send their children there? Can’t we ask parents to make a quick visit to a school their child may then be attending for possibly the next 10 years? The family would still have the option to choose not to visit any schools and simply enroll at their neighborhood school.

We should also take the stress out of the spring enrollment process by sending the message that we assume most students will simply continue at their current schools, rather than encouraging parents to use this as an opportunity to switch.

Milwaukee is the capital of charter and choice schools. Between options within MPS, the choice program, charter schools and open enrollment at suburban districts, parents and kids have more options than anywhere else in the U.S. Yet having all these options can be harmful if it encourages excess mobility. MPS staff has expressed concern that other school providers are too quick to bounce problem children back to them, even in mid-year.

Of course, we’re locked in a multidecade battle between MPS and the alternative providers. The stance of MPS and the teachers union is that we should do away with these other options and somehow return all these kids to MPS. But that’s not going to happen soon, if for no other reason than that MPS has downsized and lacks the capacity to absorb many additional students.

So assuming we will continue to live in the choice/charter world for now, how about doing something that’s long overdue? How about convening a peace conference between the warring parties, and beginning to work out an agreement of how we can make the system work for kids? The first agenda item would be: How can we agree to work together to diminish destructive mobility?

Another idea: Develop a data system

that would span all the sectors and identify kids who are on the move. For over a decade, MPS has had a sophisticated data warehouse system that would be a good start. Better yet would be a system hosted or at least fed by the state Department of Public Instruction.

Once you have better data, how would you use it? Maybe the most valuable use would be to identify frequent movers and stage interventions with parents, trying to find the reasons children are moving and offering remedies.

But the final thing we must do is maybe the most basic. We have to work to build the “brand” of each school, and in the process give parents more motivation to keep their children at the school they’re already at. We must build up each school as an institution and as a family, so parents and students feel attached to their school and would be reluctant to abandon their beloved school for an unknown.

You can’t take these steps unless you’re willing to make some adults unhappy. We’re still fighting the legacy of the court-ordered desegregation of the 1970s, and the concept that encouraging parents to select from among a choice of schools is beneficial. To some extent it is, but only if they make a good choice and then commit to stay at that school.

As Richards’ series has pointed out, what we have to battle is the way students continually move. The current message of “move whenever you want” seems nice. But the cost of continuing to be “nice” is to continue to produce students unable to thrive in an increasingly challenging world

And what’s nice about that?

Jerry Schulz is an adjunct college instructor living in Milwaukee. He is a retired MPS employee, and earlier in his career, worked as an elementary school teacher for the Chicago Public Schools. He is the author of “Managing the New Tools in K-12 Teaching and Learning: How Technology Can Enable School Improvement.”