GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The number of schools considered to be failing state standards dropped to an all-time low this year, both among city schools and schools across New York state, according to a new list released by the state education department today.

The state has been using student test scores to make the list of schools placed “under registration review” since 1989. Every year, the state makes avoiding the list slightly harder, by raising the bar for how many students need to pass exams. Schools placed on the list risk being shut down; of the more than 300 schools placed on the list since 1989, 228 have been removed. Today’s list, which includes 43 schools statewide, takes into account test scores from last school year, which skyrocketed across the state in reading and math for students between grades 3 and 8.

Thirteen New York City schools improved their test scores enough to climb off the list of schools categorized as being “under registration review,” while four city schools joined the list. Another three city schools would have joined the list, but are being shut down by the city.

As Elissa Gootman reports at CityRoom, the Times metro blog, two of the four city schools joining the list — West Bronx Academy and New Explorers High School — are among the recent new small schools created by Mayor Bloomberg as part of his effort to improve the school system. The other schools are Boys and Girls High School and PS 230 in the Bronx. Three schools, Samuel Tilden High School, a large high school in Brooklyn, Business School For Entrepreneurial Studies in the Bronx, and South Shore High School in Brooklyn, would have been put on the state failing list but are being shut down by the city. (more…)

There’s actually a fair amount of news today, but I want to make sure that this doesn’t slip through the cracks: New York Magazine reported yesterday on a new friendship between Joel Klein, the chancellor, and the actress Julia Stiles.

Apparently Stiles met Klein by interrupting him at a recent party where he was reacting to an Obama speech. Stiles stopped him in order to describe her own issues with the city’s public schools. Then she got embarrassed for getting so excited about the education issue:

Afterward, Stiles, mortified (“I have a lot to say and I was wildly inarticulate”), apologized and awkwardly asked for Klein’s e-mail. He took hers instead, saying “I’ll be in touch.” “I’d seen a couple of her movies, but I couldn’t remember her name,” Klein admitted, but he e-mailed her to follow up. “We’re now e-mail pals. She likes what we’re doing on charters.”

A Brooklyn road this morning.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein made the official decision to close the New York City schools this morning, at 20 minutes before 6 o’clock. That was in time for TV news stations to declare the news by 5:50 a.m., but too late for some teachers to sleep in — especially those who’d already begun their morning commutes.

Here’s some of the testimonials NYC Educator collected after asking where his readers were when they heard the snow day news:

“I was freezing my ass off at a bus stop waiting for a 36 bus to take me to school.”

“I was already on the road from LI when the wife called. I was certain she misheard – so I didn’t turn around until 1010 said the same a minute or two later.”

“I was just about to leave for school and got about 3 text messages at once. A whole morning of checking the news and I got the most important news via text message… go figure.”

NYC Educator points out that his children’s school district, in a suburb outside the city, alerted his family to the news the night before, via a phone message. “There was nothing that changed, or was going to change, so dramatically between 4:00 and 6:00 that warranted such a long wait,” one of his readers writes. “I’m not saying he needed to announce it last night, but 4 or 5 in the morning would’ve been considerate.”

Department of Education spokeswoman Melody Meyer, who had the privilege of delivering the good news to reporters (I got my e-mail at 6:35 a.m.), says the system made the decision in the morning deliberately, after spending the night consulting with sanitation workers and bus companies to scope out the situation. “We need to take input into the morning driving conditions, and we can’t do that until the morning,” Meyer told me.

The timing does not seem to be unique to Klein. Eric Nadelstern, the city’s chief schools officer and a longtime DOE employee, said he’s never heard of a snow day being announced before 6 a.m. in the city. And he’s been in the system for 37 years.

Governor David Paterson. (Via Flickr Creative Commons)

An important story slipped by our watch late last week: Governor Paterson waded into the debate on how to evaluate teachers. In an interview with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, Paterson said that efforts to judge teachers based on their student test scores concern him:

“How would you assess a teacher who could go into a very difficult school and does a good job bringing a class up to, say, state average on standardized tests and then a teacher that’s a little lazy in an affluent community, where all the other teachers are doing well, [and] benefits from the location?”

Beth Fertig, WNYC’s education reporter, points out that Paterson’s remarks come in the context of a heated debate between teachers unions and those who advocate for test-based accountability, including the Bloomberg administration and, now, some in the federal government. While the local union partnered with the mayor on a merit-based pay initiative for teachers, it has quarreled with him on efforts to measure individual teachers.

Exactly where Paterson stands on education issues has been a subject of debate since he took office. Though his father is a close adviser to Randi Weingarten, the union president, Paterson himself has become a vocal supporter of school choice. With the governor taking few steps to get involved in education policy, the mystery has been a kind of moot point so far. There’s also the small problem of how long Paterson will hold onto his seat. But even if this term becomes his last, Paterson will be an important player in the mayoral control debate this year. The fate of the 2002 law lies in the hands of already-vocal legislators — but just as much in the hands of Paterson.

At 7:15 a.m., my Facebook “news” feed was filled with status updates from teacher friends:

• Snow has closed the city’s schools today, for the first time in more than five years. (NY1)
• Thousands of parents turned out for a Harlem fair to publicize school choices. (Post, Daily News)
• Some are concerned that charter schools are hurting traditional public schools. (Times)
• Forty-two new schools are opening this fall, the mayor announced yesterday. (Daily News, NY1)
• The nearly 250-year-old original Erasmus Hall building is falling down, and no one is fixing it. (Times)
• Parents are debating whether the high cost of private school is worth it in this economy. (Times)
• New York City kids participated in a national science fair this weekend. (Post)
• Parents and teachers weigh in on class size in letters to the Times.
• Jay Mathews says better teachers, not smaller classes, are worth the expense. (Washington Post)
• Across the country, schools are reporting more homeless students. (MSNBC)
• Some say that Black History Month, which just ended for this year, is obsolete. (Newsweek)
• Remember the Harlem teacher who went missing last fall? She had dissociative fugue. (Times)

Thursday’s Wall Street Journal has an impassioned editorial imploring President Barack Obama to block Congressional Democrats from killing the DC Opportunity Scholarship program, the nation’s only federally-funded program providing vouchers to enable poor children to attend private schools.  Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings–gosh, skoolboy loves that phrase–took to the pages of the Washington Post last summer to champion the program, shortly after the release of a Congressionally-mandated evaluation sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education.  I called out Madame Secretary for distorting the results of the evaluation in a post here.

Lies, misstatements, and distortions can take on lives of their own, especially when people have strong opinions about what is at stake–which is certainly true of the DC Opportunity Scholarship program.  But that’s no excuse for the WSJ to get the basic facts wrong.  Here’s what they wrote in their editorial:  “A 2008 Department of Education evaluation found that participants had higher reading scores than their peers who didn’t receive a scholarship, and there are four applicants for each voucher.”  Here’s some text from the executive summary of that evaluation:  “Across the full sample, there were no statistically significant impacts on reading achievement (effect size (ES) = .09) or math achievement (ES = .01) from the offer of a scholarship (table 3) nor from the use of a scholarship.”

But the real fun comes in the wordplay.  “Without the vouchers, more than 80% of the 1,700 kids would have to attend public schools that haven’t made ‘adequate yearly progress’ under No Child Left Behind,” intones the WSJ editorial.  Well, that’s certainly disturbing.  How about this? (more…)