GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The city is closing Community Prep High School, the only program here designed to transition students from juvenile prisons and jails to mainstream high schools.

Launched in 2002, Community Prep works with the most struggling young people in the city, offering support and coursework for a few semesters before routing students into high schools and GED programs. On average, Community Prep students have attended seven different schools when they enter, a former director said.

The program has successfully steered many students back into high school, but it has struggled to reach all its charges. The school’s average monthly attendance this year was less than 50 percent. In the first semester of this school year, students earned only 40 percent of the course credits they attempted.

The disappointing showing is the reason that Department of Education officials have concluded the program doesn’t work, despite praise from juvenile justice advocates.

“We know better options already exist,” said spokeswoman Ann Forte. (more…)

Even more anxious than teachers at schools without students for next year are the parents of students without schools.

We received a letter to Chancellor Joel Klein from Catherine Fleischmann, an Upper West Side mother whose eighth-grader still doesn’t know where she’ll attend high school. Fleischmann’s daughter is one of more than 6,500 eighth-graders who didn’t get into any of the schools they applied to. Unhappy with the second-round school options, Fleischmann filed an appeal earlier this month and will find out the outcome by mid-July.

“I can’t begin to tell you what a nightmare this has been for us,” Fleischmann told me. Here’s her letter to Klein:

Dear Chancellor Klein,

I am writing to seek your help.

My sweet, hardworking, dedicated daughter is an 8^th-grade honor student at Delta middle school, an academically accelerated middle school. She has had almost perfect attendance since kindergarten. Unfortunately, she was not matched to one of her first choice high schools, even though there were still openings in those schools. Her second-choice tier of schools consists of schools at which she will neither be safe nor academically challenged.

My daughter did not hear of this devastating news by way of a letter sent to our home but rather from her guidance counselor at school. An absurdity in and of itself! When she was told of this terrible situation, she was so distraught that she spent hours roaming the streets hysterically crying because she had no high school to attend. (more…)

Two local humorists, a New Yorker cartoonist and a Saturday Night Live writer, have created a deck of New York “superhero” cards, I recently discovered. The superheroes range from Summer Intern to Paul Giamatti to Unemployed Banker.

This hero seemed worth sharing with our readers:

Every year, I fill out a form specifying which courses I want to teach and what time schedule I would like. Each September, I sit down with my department coordinator, and she calmly and methodically persuades me to do whatever she wants me to, whenever she wants me to.

Two years ago, she asked me to prep English learners for the English Regents exam. I said OK, and spent all year making the kids write until their hands were ready to fall off. Most of them passed, and for some, it was miraculous.  Of course, they’re fortunate that more stress is placed on content than grammar and usage (“conventions” rates the very bottom of the grading rubric). I showed them how to write highly formulaic four-paragraph essays that minimally met the requirements.

One technique entailed copying directions and converting them to first person. Another featured repeatedly rehearsing canned literary references, many of which could be trotted out to support virtually any quote about anything. No technique, in my view, much encouraged writing habits that would prove useful in the long haul. There was no time for such things and besides, half my kids could barely communicate in English. Sadly, there was almost no time to work on that either.

English language learners should not be taking this test at all. It’s designed for native speakers. If my kid couldn’t pass this in eleventh grade, I’d be very concerned. But a kid who came from Korea two months ago needs other things — including the grammar and usage that the state test doesn’t value that much. (more…)

• A deal to save free student Metrocards could come as soon as today. (Times, Post, NY1, WNYC)
• State education officials are considering eliminating the social studies exam to save money. (Post)
• In addition to Jamaica, other schools once slated to close have few students for next year. (Post)
• The city discouraged students from choosing to enroll at those schools. (GothamSchools)
• Four charter schools opening in the city this fall have close ties with local churches. (WSJ)
• Proposed new rules would suspend students who send sexual text messages at any time. (Daily News)
• Lower Manhattan’s community board wants the city to stop school bullying. (Downtown Express)
• The Times says we should blame individual teachers, not standardized tests, for test tampering.
• A Chicagoan reports, with pessimism, from this week’s Board of Education meeting. (Times)

• Yogi Berra met with a Bronx charter school and said nothing weird. (Charter Center)
• Submit what he should have said in the comments section.
• A G&T program on Roosevelt Island seeks applicants. (Insideschools)
• City says a Queens contractor defrauded taxpayers out of more than $1 million. (CityRoom)
• Only 147 people have watched a YouTube video Arne Duncan made for principals. (Eduflack)
• What it’s like to be gay or lesbian in high school, from a graduate. (NPR)
• Latest from Chicago: Raises will stick, but so will big class sizes increases. (Sun Times)
• In L.A., lessening teacher layoffs with a 12-day furlough. (AP)
• The edu-jobs bill hit a major wall in the Senate. (AP)
• A teacher says he got better at his job by “letting go of teaching.” (Classroots)
• A South Bronx housing project will get a new scent, from a perfume company. (NYMag)
• Clara Hemphill compares South Bronx schools a decade ago to the schools today. (Ken Hirsh)

Yesterday I wrote about extreme under-enrollment at one of the schools a judge ordered the city to keep open against education officials’ will.

Currently, Jamaica High School is looking at an incoming ninth grade of only 23 students — a class size so small it may have to phase out its ninth grade. One of the reasons for little student interest could be a letter the city sent to families assigned to one of 14 high schools marked for closure.

The letter warned families that the schools might end up closing anyway, if the city wins its appeal. It also described the schools as “failing.” And in a sentence describing the teachers union’s suit to keep the schools open, the letter says the union was joined by “others,” instead of naming the NAACP.

A portion of the letter reads:

Back in December, your high school application listed one or more programs from 14 high schools that the Department of Education decided to phase out because they were failing. As part of the phase-out process, we decided those schools would not admit new students in the fall. However, the United Federation of Teachers and others filed a lawsuit in state court challenging our decision. On Friday, March 26, 2010, the Court ruled that the Department of Education did not comply with the procedural requirements necessary for phasing out these schools. We wholeheartedly disagree with this ruling and we are appealing. At this time however the court ruling requires us to permit students to enroll at these schools.

(more…)

Charter school leaders concerned about frozen budgets got a friendly hearing at City Hall Tuesday. But they didn’t get any promises that officials will follow their call to unfreeze their budgets. And the mayor himself did not show up.

Instead, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott offered to schedule a second meeting with the leaders of the schools to continue discussing their request.

I explained the outlines of charter leaders’ request earlier this week. The gist is they want the city not only to lobby on their behalf in Albany — but also, if lawmakers decide to freeze charter school budgets anyway, to make up the difference from its own coffers.

A reader who attended the meeting sent over the above photos from it. They show a strong turnout from a community that once shied away from politics, but followed the lead of more outspoken leaders when Michael Bloomberg ran for reelection last year and when mayoral control of schools came up for renewal.

The more politically active leaders — Eva Moskowitz, of the Success Charter Network in Harlem; Seth Andrew, of Democracy Prep in Harlem; and Stacey Gauthier, of Renaissance Charter School in Queens — made personal appearances. The heads of the largest networks — Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First — sent representatives from their charter management organizations.

I highly recommend reading the new report released by the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs on “Empowerment and Accountability in New York City’s Schools.” It is detailed, balanced, and extremely educational. Reviewers have focused on the report’s conclusion that the DOE’s grading system is “deeply flawed,” perhaps the report’s most important conclusion.

Within the report’s 68 pages, though, are some powerful reminders of our system’s recent history:

When I [author Clara Hemphill] visited 30 schools in District 7 in the South Bronx as a reporter for the Insideschools.org website early in Mayor Bloomberg’s first term, the schools, with a few noteworthy exceptions, were in a sorry state. I met principals who routinely called for an ambulance to take an out-of-control child to the nearest psychiatric emergency room because they didn’t know what else to do. The middle schools were chaotic, with children wandering aimlessly in the hallways as teachers lectured to half-empty classrooms. Some of the elementary schools were sweet, warm places with kindhearted teachers doing their best — but the children didn’t know how to read. While I saw pockets of good instruction, some parents complained to me that their children were taught mostly in Spanish for as many as five or six years, learning almost no English. Books and supplies were scarce.

Returning to a dozen of those District 7 schools recently, I found much has changed. Books and supplies are abundant. Most of the schools I visited were orderly, with children in classrooms rather than roaming the corridors. Instruction is mostly in English … Principals are now appointed from the applicant pool selected by Tweed, rather than by the district office. Some of these new principals have a wealth of talent and experience … The principals … say it’s easier to recruit and retain staff largely because teacher salaries are substantially higher than they were before the Bloomberg-era increases … District 7′s test scores started at the absolute bottom in 2002 and made some of the most dramatic gains of any large district in the state…

Looking even further back, the report tells of the dark side of past governance: (more…)

Three decades before he became a GothamSchools contributor, education lawyer David Bloomfield was a young teacher trying to organize his colleagues.

While working to unionize teachers at the New Lincoln School, a now-defunct experimental private school in Manhattan, Bloomfield got help from United Federation of Teachers founder and then-president Al Shanker. In the background of the photograph they took together is Paul Bradford, the UFT liaison assigned to New Lincoln who now heads the union’s retiree chapter on the West Coast of Florida.

Bloomfield sent us the picture after coming across it before the New Lincoln reunion held last weekend. “To go back and see my once-third-graders grow into adulthood and to be thanked for work done 30 years ago is a ‘Wonderful Life’ experience that, perhaps, only comes from teaching,” Bloomfield wrote in an email. “I felt like Mr. Chips!”