Let’s take a closer look at what consolidation of school districts would mean for students and families. Here’s a couple of points to keep in mind:

1) Some members of the State Senate (Bob Smith, John Wisniewski, Robert Gordon, Ellen Karcher, Joseph Kyrillos, Joseph Malone, to name a few) have been pushing for county-wide districts – in other words, taking our 600 or so school districts and reducing them to 21 county districts. Corzine has, for now, instructed the new Executive County Superintendents to merge only those districts that don’t cover the full kindergarten through 12th grade spectrum. ( In other words, we’re going for the low-hanging fruit, which is a defensible first step.) A classic example is Pemberton (see this post), where the kids in the Borough school already attend the Township school, although technically they are in different districts.

2) The No Child Left Behind legislation (stay with me here) requires that if a Title I school (i.e., a school with a low socio-economic profile) has not made adequate yearly progress (yes, AYP) for two consecutive years, then the child attending that school must be offered the opportunity to transfer to another public school within that district.

Now let’s examine two high schools in the same county. A shot at the dartboard chose Burlington County and, to augment the theatrics, we’ll look at Moorestown High and Willingboro High. Stats are courtesy of the DOE.

First Moorestown High, which was just ranked 47th of all state high schools (300+) by New Jersey Monthly. This school houses 1,363 kids, of whom 95.3% are native English speakers. The school “mobility rate,” i.e., the number of kids who move in and during the year, is 3.3% and the average class size is 19.5 kids. There are 2.8 kids per computer (just to give us an idea of the resources). On the math HSPA, the state-wide test given to 11th graders, 9.3% scored “Partially Proficient,” which is the euphemism for failing. So 90.7% of the students at Moorestown scored either Proficient or Advanced Proficient.

Now let’s ramble 9 miles down the road to Willingboro High, which should take us 14 minutes, according to Mapquest. Willingboro, which was ranked 247th of New Jersey’s high schools, has 1,122 kids, with a mobility rate of 34.4% (the state average, by the way, is 10.1%). The average class size is 15 and there are 3.8 kids per computer. Here’s the kicker: on the math HSPA 63.6% of the kids failed. Only 36.4% of the kids at Willingboro passed the HSPA.

According to No Child Left Behind, the kids at Willingboro High are eligible for school choice; actually, the school is labeled in the 5th year of SINI (School In Need of Improvement – who can make this stuff up?) so the kids have been eligible for 3 years. But they don’t have anywhere to go because there’s nowhere to move to within their district. While we can expend much ink griping about NCLB, it seems child-friendly and sensible to set it up so that kids can get out of a bad school and into a good one. But one of the artifacts of our municipal madness is that there’s nowhere to go because our little districts are so limited.

Here’s an idea: what if we allowed kids who attended a SINI to opt for another school within their county?

This would mean that the parents of the kids in Willingboro could choose to have them move to a high-performing school like Moorestown.

Here’s another statistic from the DOE charts. 88% of the kids at Willingboro are Black, 7% are Hispanic, 2% are Asian, and 3% are White. Moorestown is almost all White. Our current system of local governance has rendered a de facto segregation, which is replicated in many other counties in New Jersey.

Now, there are all sorts of obstacles to allowing kids in failing schools to move to a better school within their county. Shall we count them all? Transportation, varying tax levies per child, limited facilities, community resistance, potential panic, paranoia, and tomfoolery from NJEA and NJSBA. But what if we tried? How about a pilot program in one county?

Can we reach a little higher than the lowest hanging fruit?