List of schools city must “turn around” grows by twenty-one

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December 9, 2010

List of schools city must “turn around” grows by twenty-one

by Anna Phillips, at 1:31 pm

New York State’s annual worst-of list is out today and it includes 21 new struggling schools that New York City will have to radically change in the next several years.

Many of these schools are already on the city’s radar. Two of them — the School for Community Research and Learning and I.S. 195 — are on the list of schools the city plans to begin closing next year. Others, such as Herbert Lehman High School, earned poor grades on their annual progress reports and were considered for closure.

With the addition of these 21 schools, the number of schools eligible for (but not yet undergoing) federal “turnaround” strategies is up to 43. By next April, the city’s Department of Education has to send the state a plan for how it will improve each of these schools.

“We need to apply to the state with a school-by-school plan with a proposed budget and we’ll go back and forth with them on a draft until they finally approve,” said DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld. “We have a technical deadline of sometime in April, but obviously we want to get moving on this as soon as possible.”

If the city’s plans are approved, schools will begin working under one of the improvement models next September. For each of them, the city will receive, at most, about $2 million for three years. The size of the grants will vary depending on the size of the school.

Last year, when state education officials named the schools eligible for school improvement grants, it gave the city extra time to submit its plans for how to improve them. City officials said that with the addition of 21 schools, they may need to ask for more time again.

DOE officials have four school improvement models to choose from, but they are only considering two: transformation and turnaround.

The least invasive of these, known as the “transformation” method, is already being used by eleven city schools. This model relies on removing a school’s principal, bringing in extra support services, and experimenting with longer school days and new teacher training.

In comparison, the “turnaround” model is like a root canal for a school. It calls for a school’s principal to be replaced and its teachers and administrators to reapply for their jobs. Only 50 percent of the staff can be rehired, but the students remain the same. In some respects, it is similar to the process the city currently uses to phase-out schools and open new ones in their stead, except that in the “turnaround” model, the school retains its name and does not change the type of students it admits.

City officials said that because of the similarities, they are considering using the turnaround method — and the federal money that comes with it — to improve schools they initially planed to close, such as the School for Community Research and Learning and I.S. 195. Other schools that landed on the city’s closure list this week, such as Jamaica High School and Paul Robeson High School, that are also eligible for the federal grant money, could be put through the turnaround model instead.

In order to use the turnaround model, the city will have to forge an agreement with the teachers and principals’ union, allowing them to side-step the contract and remove school employees without a hearing.

Elizabeth Kellner

I am not an education professional, so I am curious to hear what experts think about why middle and high schools overwhelmingly dominate all these lists of troubled schools — is it because as children grow older, societal forces which families and schools have limited resources to combat, overwhelm these children, are we then finally seeing the cumulative effects of years of poor educational experience starting in elementary school, is there something biological/developmental going on or is it all of the above?
MissUnderstood

Elizabeth, I suspect it’s all of the above and more to some extent. All that we know is that we are failing our black and latino boys (look at the school’s demographics) and that nothing to date has fixed this nationwide problem.
edward

Maybe it’s because there are more elementary and middle schools than high schools.
NYCParent

As other posters, especially teachers, have said over the past few months, many of these students arrive at their middle or high schools with poor reading and writing skills. The DOE does little to help them in the early grades, and next to nothing in later grades. So how on earth are they supposed to be able to handle the work at those grade levels? And what good will it do to just shuffle them around to other schools, except get those schools shut down? Of course, every time the DOE shuts down a school, it shakes up the status of the unionized teachers in those schools, so maybe that’s the real objective, and the struggling kids are the means to bring that about. Except now we have the DOE shutting down its own new schools already, rather than helping the kids, so go figure on that one.
Smith

Elizabeth, there is a lot more school choice at the upper levels. That means a greater degree of stratification among the student population and therefore much higher concentrations of struggling students at some schools.
miss teacher

I worked at IS 339 back when it was IS 147- it’s sad to see that it’s still struggling. Believe it or not, I worked with some terrific teachers back then and from the press the school’s gotten it seems that they currently have a solid staff.
Truth

Does this mean that 50% of the teachers at Lehman High School could be gone?
A former teacher

I would like to add that it is easier to close middle and high schools because there is more fragmentation with the student body- the kids come from all over and are not necessarily the neighborhood kids. With all the dezoning of schools, middle and high schools students come from all over so the student body does not see itself as a group unless it is a specialized school- they see themselves as having a common trait. Then as the youngsters get older, naturally there is less parental involvment. The kids travel to school alone, and share less readily what is happening at the school. The parents are tied to their elementary school and would see it as terrible if we closed it- where would the kids go? where would they travel to? who would take them? We would see more outcry is you shuttered the elementary schools. This was part of the overarching plan to deunionize the teaching staff and create a transient, ill paid teaching force.
Celso Garcia

They will close whatever schools they want to close. I.S. 195 has a staggering 75 percent of students that are esl, billingual, special education including seriously disabled students. The real answer is they are comparing the schools that have similar demographics but not really similar children. Kipp charter school wants more space since they are co-located in the same building. The DOE is doing everything possible even fudging the numbers and understaffing, starving out I.S. 195 of the resources of the building for their politically connected buddies. I believe harlem has enough charter schools now its time to fix the schools in mostly minority and segregated neighborhoods.
The Santi Connection?

Santiago Taveras (Santi) was born in the Bronx, moved to the Dominican Republic for seven years, and returned to the Bronx at age 10. Santi attended PS 261, Riverdale JHS 141, and John F Kennedy High School in the Bronx and subsequently graduated from CCNY with a BA in Education in 1989 and an MA in Education in 1991. In 1996, he earned a second MA in Supervision and Administration from Bank Street College. He was an educator at Central Park East I Elementary School and subsequently worked as a math and Spanish teacher at Central Park East Secondary School. In 1992, Santi was the founding Assistant Director of East Side Community High School, a small school on the Lower East Side. He founded Banana Kelly High School in 1997 where he served as Principal for four years before accepting the challenge of phasing out the troubled South Bronx High School (SBHS). During the phasing out of SBHS, Santi wrote the proposal for the Academy for Careers in Sports and served as its founding Principal before joining Region 9 in 2003 as a Local Instructional Superintendent. He joined the New York City Department of Education’s Office of Accountability in 2006 as the Executive Director of School Quality under the leadership of James S. Liebman, Chief Accountability Officer. In his current (and evolving) role, Santi supports high school and community district superintendents, oversees Quality Reviews, and supervises the Data Management Team. He is the highest-ranking Dominican educator in the DOE. Among his awards are Principal of the Year (selected by Bronx HS Parent Association Presidents) and the Harriet Tubman Award from Brotherhood/Sistersol. He
Teacher

Even saying there are a high number of ELL students doesn’t tell the whole story. An ELL student who arrives in say kindergarten will likely do well when they reach the testing grades (3rd and up). A student who has just arrived in say 6th or 7th grade and who is still required to take and pass standardized tests in English and Math is most likely not going to score a 2, nevermind a 3 or 4. It also matters where the child has come from. There is a wide disparity of education in other countries (including within the countries.) If a student arrives here when they are 12 years old, they will be placed in the age-appropriate grade, even if they have NEVER attended a school in their country and even if they are completely illiterate in their own language. So saying a school has a high ELL population only tells a small part of the story… where they’ve come from, when they arrived and how literate they are in their native langauge helps tell another part (don’t think all of that is calculated in DOE schoool/teacher scores though.) Another thing to consider is that most public schools have to continue to accept students who arrive throughout the school year. Not so with charter schools or specialized schools. Do you know how difficult it is for the teacher who receives several non-English speaking students mid-year?? All of the students suffer because the newly admitted students require so much differentiation and one-on-one instruction.
ASTRAKA

Regarding, “In order to use the turnaround model, the city will have to forge an agreement with the teachers and principals’ union, allowing them to side-step the contract and remove school employees without a hearing.”

Is this the start of destroying every public sector union?
We are becoming a “banana republic”. There is no respect for any agreement that the city is making with any union. They are using weak union leaders like Weingarten and Mulgrew to destroy the uft. I am sure other unions will face similar attacks in the near future
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December 9, 2010

List of schools city must “turn around” grows by twenty-one

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