SchoolBook Town Hall Explores School Choice

"School choice" is a loaded term. We are gathering on Thursday night to unpack it and explore how the city school system has fared as the number of schools has increased in the last decade.

Brian Lehrer of radio station WNYC will ask the city schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, whether quantity necessarily means quality.
And we'll ask a representative of the charter school movement, Miriam Raccah of Achievement First, if charters have really lived up to the high expectations set for them by their most ardent supporters.

SchoolBook contributors will be on stage too. Rashid Davis, principal of Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-Tech, will share his experiences getting a new small high school on the radar of prospective parents and students. An eighth-grade teacher and blogger, Laura Klein, tells us what it's like for her students as they leaf through the 500-page directory of high school options.

Though New York gets high marks for its high school selection process, many families are in the dark about how to navigate the system. It's not uncommon for eighth graders to choose a high school based on where their friends attend, and pay no attention to the available statistics on graduation rates or class sizes. We will hear from a parent leader, Kelvin Diamond, in Brooklyn's fast-changing District 13 and a mother, Carla Trujillo, who faces language and cultural barriers as a new immigrant in the city.

The New York Times's education editor, Jodi Rudoren, will introduce SchoolBook to audience members as one tool to make the selection process easier, and there will be ushers at the event ready to demonstrate the site on iPads before and after the discussion.

Tickets to the event are free, but you must have one.

Join us at Memorial Hall on the Brooklyn campus of the Pratt Institute in Clinton Hill. The closest subway stop is the G train's Clinton-Washington station. Use the Washington Avenue exit and walk one block north to DeKalb Avenue. Turn right onto DeKalb and proceed one block to Hall Street/Saint James to the corner gate of the Pratt campus.

SchoolBook volunteers will be stationed nearby to guide people to Memorial Hall.

You can also take the B38 bus up Lafayette Avenue to the corner of Saint James Place, which turns into Hall Street. The entrance to the Pratt campus is one block north on Hall Street.

The Town Hall will start at 6 p.m. and end close to 7:30 p.m. Audience members will be encouraged to ask questions of the chancellor and other panelists.

You can do it the low-tech way and write your questions on an index card when you check in for the event, or send them in via Twitter. We'll use the handle #schoolchoice to collect questions and comments during the discussion. So come ready to participate and join the SchoolBook conversation on school choice.