More on Christie's Favorite Charter School

"Hollywood" Chris Christie and Geoffrey Canada, star of Waiting for Superman, visited Elysian Chrter School last week in Hoboken. Both praised the school as a role model for reform; I impolitely pointed out that Elysian has far, FAR fewer Hispanic kids and poor (free lunch) kids than the rest of Hoboken's schools, and is, in fact, practicing a form of economic segregation that will obviously affect test scores.

Bruce Baker has done outstanding work on this topic, but the map he has here made it difficult to see how, exactly, Elysian compares with the other Hoboken schools. Fortunately, Bruce found time to make another map zeroing in on Hoboken.

See how small and pale the circles are for the charters? That tells you there are fewer "free lunch" kids (the best way we have to measure student poverty) than there are at the other schools.

I guess walling off the poor from everyone else is one way to "reform" our schools...