Students who attend Edison High School should consider themselves lucky, even though their school is in its second year of a School In Need of Improvement (SINI) and subject to federal sanctions, along with 29% of high schools in N.J. Edison Public School District is big enough – 14,000 kids – to support two separate high schools, so kids at Edison High have the option of transferring to the other high school, J.P. Stevens, which is located in the more affluent side of town.. It’s how NCLB is supposed to work but rarely does in Jersey: provide choice for kids stuck in failing schools. In most cases it’s meaningless here because we have almost exclusively small districts with one high school (or we have urban cities where all the schools are SINI’s). But in Edison it works.
Now, one could argue that Edison High School is unfairly maligned. It missed only 1 of 41 indicators – special ed students scored inadequately on language arts assessments – and anyone in the world of special education knows that it’s ludicrous to expect children with developmental disabilities to test at the level of non-disabled peers. Regardless, more and more children are transferring over to Stevens since school district officials informed parents of that option. Two dozen applied the first week, reports the Star Ledger, and now the number is up to 50 students.
It’s unclear whether racial and class divisions are a dynamic in this march over to whiter, richer J.P. Stevens. Both schools perform pretty well though, curiously, Edison High, has 13.3% of kids eligible for special education services, and at J.P. Stevens, the percentage is only 7.4%. Something in the water on the north side of town? (Actually, 7.4% of kids with I.E.P.’s is extremely low for N.J., where the state average of children classified as eligible for special education services is 18%. But that’s another story. See this piece by Jay P. Greene for the other story.)
Maybe Edison School District is locating self-contained special ed classes on the south side of town. More likely it’s the perennial problem of overclassifying poor and and minority kids. Anyway, none of the prospective transfers are kids with disabilities.
Meanwhile, Edison’s Superintendent is asking Congressman Frank Pallone to push Congress to eliminate the transfer option imbedded in No Child Left Behind and instead let Edison High do what other sanctioned high schools do in Jersey when there’s nowhere else to go: get extra money to provide tutoring and let it be. It’s not so much a problem in Edison where test scores are largely commendable and students can move to a slightly higher-performing high school (though J.P. Stevens is struggling to arrange schedules and find space). But it points to the lack of choice and mobility in most of New Jersey.
