Last January, the city tried to push 19 school closures and 32 space utilization changes through the citywide school board in one night, leading to a 12-hour meeting that lasted until four in the morning. Students teachers, and parents showed up by the hundreds to defend their schools and the teachers union held a street-filling rally complete with a jumbotron.

Tomorrow night, the city has lined up only 11 schools for closure and six space utilization changes that include grade truncations and and co-locations. The remainder of the school closure votes will take place in a second marathon Panel for Educational Policy meeting on Thursday.

But if the work load is lighter, that may not be true of the turnout. Charter school advocates are planning to show up en masse to support the few charter school co-location votes before the Panel for Educational Policy.

Last year, few charter school supporters came to the vote and many said they felt bruised by the show of anti-charter sentiment. So the following month, they arrived at the meeting in busloads to make their views heard.

Tomorrow, charter school supporters may outnumber their opponents. Because of the threatening weather forecasts, the teachers union has postponed its rally — and attendant jumbotron — until Thursday.

“The circus will be alive,” said teachers union president Michael Mulgrew.

Eva Moskowitz, CEO of the Success Charter Network of schools, is bringing parents of students at her school. A spokeswoman for the network said that 2,100 parents had signed up to make the trip to Brooklyn Tech High School for the meeting.

“They’re coming to Brooklyn to make sure that Chancellor Black and Mayor Bloomberg understand that they want bolder, faster change,” wrote spokeswoman Jenny Sedlis in an email.

Other charter school operators plan to bring parents as well. Some of those parents may have been encouraged to come by Education Reform Now, a lobbying organization that supports charters as one of its causes. ERN has spent the last several weeks on a campaign to raise awareness among district school parents about charter schools in areas where new ones are opening next year, according to its spokeswoman Kerri Lyon.

“People think when you’re replacing a school you’re padlocking it and putting the kids on the street,” Lyon said. “What ERN wanted to do was clear up some of those myths and explain it was all about getting better opportunities.”

Last year, this swell of charter school supporters would have been matched by turnout from the teachers union, but the union has postponed its rally until Thursday because of the snow predictions.

Closure:

Metropolitan Corporate Academy
Paul Robeson High School
School for Community Research and Learning
Urban Assembly Academy for History and Citizenship for Young Men
New Day Academy
Monroe Academy for Business/Law High School
Academy of Environmental Science Secondary School
I.S. 195 Roberto Clemente
KAPPA II
Academy of Collaborative Education
I.S. 231 Magnetech

Co-location:

New high school 12X521 to replace Monroe Academy for Business/Law High School (12X690)
New middle schools I.S. 355 and I.S. 356 to replace I.S. 231 Magnetech
Harlem Success Academy 1 (grades 5-8) with Wadleigh Secondary School and the Frederick Douglass Academy II Secondary School in 2012-13
Success Academy Charter School with Brandeis High School

Grade Expansion / Truncation:

Harlem Success Academy 1 (from K-5 to K-6) with M149/M209 in 2011-12
P.S. 40 Samuel Huntington (from K-6 to K-5)

Today, two posts in the GothamSchools Community section challenge the city’s story. In the first (reposted from the blog EdVox), Melissa Kissoon describes what happened to her school after it started phasing out. She writes:

My first two years of high school at Lane were great. There were clubs and extra credit activities to help students get ahead or to help struggling students pass. …

Now all the great teachers we once loved have either switched to the other schools in the building or have just gone to another school completely. Now there is no money for the last year of students within my school. For example, there is no longer a library!

A second Community piece, by Christine Rowland, looks at graduation and dropout rates at the four schools where she has worked — two of which closed in 2006 and two of which are up for closure this year. At last week’s City Council hearing, the department presented data that showed that both graduation rates and dropout rates climbed at schools in the process of phasing out.

Rowland dug into the DOE’s data archives and found that that pattern hasn’t always been true. During the final years of Theodore Roosevelt High School and William Taft High School, the dropout rate spiked without an accompanying climb in the graduation rate. She’s worried the same outcome awaits the current students at John F. Kennedy High School and Columbus High School, where she works.

The discrepancy between Rowland’s findings and the city’s could come from Rowland’s small sample size of four schools. Or it could reflect a boost in performance in schools that phased out after 2006. Two years ago, I wrote about the city’s phaseout guru, who traveled from school to school helping principals focus attention on students on the cusp of graduation. (That position no longer exists.) A second DOE slide suggests graduation rate spikes in schools whose closure was announced in 2006 and 2007:

This seemed a counterintuitive idea to me, so I decided to dig into the data. The DOE keeps a wonderful public archive of graduation and dropout data in longitudinal reports. I looked at what happened to students at Bronx high schools Roosevelt and Taft during the years they phased out, and compared them to Columbus and John F. Kennedy along with city averages.

Why did I focus on these schools? I began my career as an English as a Second Language for seven years at Kennedy. In 1999 I was invited to become a staff development specialist for the DOE’s Office of Bilingual Education (later the Office of English Language Learners) and for two years I visited Roosevelt every Tuesday and Taft every Wednesday to support their bilingual and ESL teachers. Then in 2002 I moved to Columbus, where I’ve worked as teacher and UFT Teacher Center staff. Looking at these four schools provided me a glimpse into the sad unraveling of the places I spent my career.

First, I took a look at the 7-year longitudinal studies — those showing the ultimate outcomes for students who entered Taft and Roosevelt in the last four years the schools admitted students. In both cases, graduation declined for the first couple of years by a small amount, with the final two cohorts doing significantly worse. Roosevelt graduated only 17.6 percent of the students who entered in 2002, and Taft graduated just 29.5 percent of them. These outcomes did not compare favorably with either the citywide average for those years, or schools currently on the chopping block, Columbus and Kennedy.

Conversely, I took a look at dropout rates for the same cohorts. Here we see rates in the closing schools rising to the point where, in the final cohort, over 80 percent of the final cohort at Roosevelt dropped out, and over 70 percent of the final cohort at Taft.

All of the schools also discharged a large number of students during these years. Students who leave their schools for GED programs are classified as discharged, but advocates also believe that many discharged students would be more accurately counted as dropouts. Taking into account discharges, Roosevelt graduated only 9 percent of its final cohort in seven years.

I hypothesized that there would be a significant difference between the closing schools and non-closing schools when I looked at the initial 4-year graduation and dropout rates against the final 7-year rates, since Columbus and Kennedy would have had the additional time (an extra three years) to work with high-needs students, including those who speak little English, to help them to graduate. (The city’s own longitudinal data reports point out that a high percentage of English language learners graduate in the three years after their original graduation date. ) The closing of Taft and Roosevelt would leave the educators in those schools just four years with each child, regardless of their need level, for the final class of students.

The 4-year graduation rates, particularly in the first years, did not show the same dramatic difference. The final graduating class from Roosevelt however, was a mere 11.6 percent.

But then I looked at the 4-year dropout rate. This was simply stunning and left me feeling very queasy.  The percentage of students dropping out rose dramatically over the four phase-out years — with the 4-year dropout rate at Taft topping 70 percent and Roosevelt at 63 percent in their final year of existence!

So now for the mystery. Why does the DOE claim that students benefit during the closure of our schools? Yes, I only focused on two local Bronx schools, but glances at other schools that have been closed suggest similar patterns.

The department usually focuses on the argument that as schools shrink they are able to provide a greater degree of personalization. If this is the case, what happened to produce these devastating outcomes for students at these schools? Could it be that many teachers whom students had looked to as mentors left or were excessed in the process of phasing-out?  Could it be that as time passed there were fewer opportunities to engage in the extra-curricular and senior activities that inspire so many students? Could it be the loss of libraries and other school facilities that were closed as the years?

Maybe the department needs more time to consider the increasing concentrations of poverty and academic need in certain high schools. There is indeed a domino effect of school closures: Larger high schools that stay open see their highest-needs populations rise as other schools close around them.

Last week’s release of a 2008 DOE internal report by the Parthenon Group would appear to confirm that the department has known for several years that the concentrations of high-needs students at some schools virtually destined them to failure as centralized admissions offices continued to fill those schools with ever-increasing proportions of such students. The report released last week by the city’s Independent Budget Office also suggests that schools currently under threat of closure have higher concentrations of need than their peers — including a considerably higher percentage of families identified as low-income (particularly at the high school level) — a factor the Parthenon report does not even consider. This is significant when we consider that socioeconomic status is a great predictor of ultimate academic attainment.

As a concerned educator in one of the schools facing an uncertain future, I believe that it would be wise, all things considered, to postpone the decision on our schools until these various reports can be given full consideration. Maybe the key fix our schools need is a more balanced admissions practice.

City officials came the closest they’ve gotten to acknowledging the Department of Education’s role in a Brooklyn school’s problems on Friday when a deputy chancellor said he was aware that teachers and parents feel abandoned.

Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky spoke at P.S. 114 — a Canarsie elementary school the city hopes to phase out next year — after more than two hours of parents and teachers testifying that the DOE ignored the school’s problems. Though they’d petitioned the city to remove a principal who overspent her budget by $180,000 and was hiring unnecessary staff, Maria Pena-Herrera wasn’t forced out until 2008. Now, the school owes the city thousands of dollars and has seen its students’ test scores plummet in the last year.

Polakow-Suransky responded to the outpouring of anger by telling parents that the city hasn’t made a final recommendation to close or keep P.S. 114 open. 

“I want to recognize the fact that in the view of the faculty of the school, and in the view of many of the parents, that we haven’t done what we needed to do to support you,” Polakow-Suransky said. “And that came through loud and clear. And I think that I want to be clear with you that we do see this school as our responsibility, five years ago, three years ago, and today.”

His comment suggested that the city could change its mind before the Panel for Educational Policy votes on the school’s closure this Thursday. Last year, officials decided to save Alfred Smith High School’s automotive program shortly before the panel was to vote on its closure.

But many in attendance said they believed the city had sentenced the school to failure years ago when allowed the principal to rack up debts.

“This school lost Project Read, Project Math, lost its gifted program, lost two guidance counselors, lost half of its gym teachers, lost dozens of other things, because of the mismanagement of the principal you sent here,” said City Councilman Lew Fidler. “And it’s not like the teachers and the parents didn’t tell you so.”

Teachers said that, for years, they essentially ran the school on their own and often didn’t know where the principal was.

Angela Best, the parent of a P.S. 114 fifth grader and a second grader said she didn’t know what she’d do if the school closes. Her daughter in second grade will be eligible to enter the lottery for Explore Excel Charter School, which will open in the building next year.

“I’ve been here for nine years and my kids have succeeded,” she said. “They should give P.S. 114 the money they’re spending to open the charter school.”

]]> http://gothamschools.org/2011/01/31/city-officials-confront-blame-for-a-brooklyn-schools-fall/feed/ 6 http://gothamschools.org/2011/01/31/how-not-to-close-a-school/ http://gothamschools.org/2011/01/31/how-not-to-close-a-school/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:14:08 +0000 Melissa Kissoon http://gothamschools.org/?p=53678 Melissa Kissoon is an 18 year old graduate of Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn and a youth leader with Future of Tomorrow and the Urban Youth Collaborative. This post originally appeared at EdVox, a blog featuring members of UYC and the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice.

I was a victim of high school phase out. My first two years of high school at Lane were great. There were clubs and extra credit activities to help students get ahead or to help struggling students pass. I had some teachers I really liked and there were many teachers who had been in the school for over 15 years. Overall it was a great school despite its reputation and as a student, I would say it was improving. Then one day in 2007 the principal and deans got us together to tell us our school is phasing out, which meant that they would be putting another school into our building and would no longer accept any new students or freshman. Also, the building would be incorporating not one school but FOUR. Do you know what it’s like to have four new schools come into your school building?

Once the four new schools came, it was hard to be proud of a school that was no longer ours. I was a cheerleader for my school, so school pride was something that was very important to me. The four schools came and took the fourth floor in our building and we weren’t allowed to set foot on the fourth floor anymore. Then when the next year came, and there were more students in the new schools and fewer in our school, the DOE split the rest of the floors in halves. So, if your classroom was around the corner, you could no longer just walk over to your room, you’d have to go upstairs and around and back down stairs to make it to your class. As a result of this, many students became late for their classes. Students missed class time and got in trouble because our school was chopped up and our building was divided!

Now, all the great teachers we once loved have either switched to the other schools in the building or have just gone to another school completely. Now, there is no money for the last year of students within my school. For example, there is no longer a library! Lane doesn’t have enough money for a library and the other four schools have small budgets, so none of the students have a library. Students with essays due and no printer or computer can’t print-then they struggle to figure out how to pass their class.

Almost all the after school activities belong to the other schools, including the sports and the ROTC. Two of my friends are in their last year at Lane this year, which is also Lane’s last year open. One of them is only taking one academic class. He scored well on his SAT and is applying to Brown University but there are no AP classes for him to take and he is done with school every day at noon. My other friend was told last year that he had enough credits to graduate. He was 16, a junior and not ready for college. There is a difference between having enough credits to graduate and getting a rigorous education and being prepared for college. The phase out has failed us all, hundreds of us in Brooklyn and thousands of us in New York City.

We as the students should have a right to decide what should be done to our school, because one simple decision has affected over 1,000 students in a negative way. There is no longer school pride, there is no drive to be there, there is no encouragement to pass, there are no familiar teachers, there are no resources around to help us pass. All that remains is a push, a push out of the school by any means possible.

I graduated and I’m in college now. But I look back at the last four years of my life and I feel robbed of my high school experience. My school was no longer MY school; I was basically being kicked out of a school that made a promise to support me and give me all I need to pass. Students must be consulted about the use and future use of their school.

If the Department of Education is truly committed to students, they must include us in decisions about OUR education.

• Gov. Cuomo won’t heed Mayor Bloomberg’s call to wrap repeal of “last in, first out” into his budget. (Post)
• But the state might be weighing a plan to let Bloomberg fire some teachers, including ATRs. (Post)
• The current budget would cut all teachers hired since 2006, Bloomberg said. (Times, NY1, Daily News)
• That number is probably 15,000, but could be as high as 21,000 teachers, he said. (WSJ)
• Meet a young teacher (who belongs to Educators 4 Excellence) who would be laid off. (Post)

Also in New York City:

• The city twice assigned a weak student to high school, then sent her back to eighth grade. (Daily News)
• Schools that already weren’t providing required ESL instruction are cutting ESL classes. (Daily News)
• The city is trying desperately to fire a top-paid teacher who is not allowed near students. (Post)
• Speaking in London, Joel Klein said it’s easier to prosecute murderers than fire bad teachers. (Post)
• The former president of the PTA at Brooklyn’s PS 29 is suspected of stealing $100,000. (Daily News)
• The city’s closure hearing at Brooklyn’s PS 114 turned rowdy on Friday night. (NY1)
• Prospect Heights parents protested against plans to reshuffle schools in the neighborhood. (NY1)
• The Daily News says the PEP allowing a charter school on the Upper West Side is a moral issue.
• Chris Whittle, the persistent for-profit schools investor, will open a new private school next year. (WSJ)
• Twenty-five years after the Challenger shuttle disaster, the city offers space instruction. (NY1)

Elsewhere:

• A proposed law would give Mass. parents time off work to help their children in school. (Boston Globe)
• D.C. chief Kaya Henderson’s task: Do what Michelle Rhee did, without backlash. (Washington Post)
• Some of the revamped AP courses are launching this year, but U.S. History is not. (Times)
• Schools are dealing with ongoing emotional fallout from parents’ job losses. (Times)
• George Will says American schools are falling hopelessly behind the rest of the world’s. (Post)

Chancellor Cathie Black showed what she has learned and what she hasn't in her first month on the job on NY1 last night.

Chancellor Cathie Black’s interview on Inside City Hall last night is worth watching in full. The interview exposes just how much Black has been able to absorb in her first month on the job — and how much she hasn’t.

In a moment first highlighted by NY1 education reporter Lindsey Christ on Twitter, Black declared, ”The public school system in New York City has been unbelievably successful since the birth of our nation.” She was responding to a question from host Errol Louis about why she chose to send her children to private rather than public city schools.

Black did not elaborate, but the statement is confusing given that public schools in New York City did not emerge until the early 1800s.

Another moment of exposure had to do with teacher attrition. After a discussion about the “last in, first out” policy, Louis asked Black if she was concerned that almost half of New York City school teachers leave after 6 years in the classroom (PDF link).

Here’s how Black responded:

Well you have to know, like, what’s really at the heart of the issue. I don’t know that we know what’s really at the heart of the issue. Teaching is a hard job. We want the ones who are committed. We want the ones who make a difference. We want the ones who want to work hard and really change the lives of these young people. They’re there on a mission. So, you know, some are going to leave.

She then returned to the “last in, first out” question, arguing that perhaps teachers would be less likely to leave if they weren’t concerned about being laid off. “Right now there have to be a lot of teachers thinking, ‘Maybe I don’t have a job next year.’ Can we afford to have thousands of teachers think to themselves, ’I have to leave the system now because I may not have a job in a few months?’ That’s going to be a catastrophe,” she said.

For years, researchers have asked why teachers leave schools — particularly struggling schools. A 2007 paper by a group studying New York City teachers, the Teacher Pathways Project, summarized the major findings this way:

• “Teachers are more likely to stay in schools in which student achievement is higher and teachers — especially white teachers — are more likely to stay in schools with higher proportions of white students.”
• “Teachers who score higher on tests of academic achievement are more likely to leave,” as are teachers from out of town.
• Less-qualified teachers are more likely to stay at a school than teachers with higher qualifications, “especially if they teach in low-achieving schools.”

The researchers themselves — a team from Stanford and the University of Albany — wondered how attrition related to teachers’ effectiveness at improving student achievement. Maybe the turnover wouldn’t be so upsetting if the teachers leaving were also the teachers who were least effective.

Studying New York City schools between 2000 and 2006, the group found that less-upsetting possibility was indeed true, but only in part. After a year of teaching, the most effective teachers were more likely to stay put than the least effective teachers, as judged by value-added measures. But after another year or two, more effective teachers’ next moves depended on the quality of their schools. If they taught at low-performing schools, they tended to leave them, on average, for higher-performing schools.

Here’s a link to the paper I’m drawing from (note it’s a PDF).

A final noteworthy moment came when Louis asked Black about the report out this week from the Independent Budget Office, which found that schools slated for closure served a more troubled student population. Were those school being treated unfairly?

Black’s response:

I would differ with the statement DOE sent you a problem. We have seen in several situations same neighborhood, same children, same problems same situations. When we re-do the whole structure — the physical outside stays the same, new schools go inside — this group of kids and this group of kids are performing better — 20 and 30 percentage points better. Nothing has been changed on the outside except for the level of commitemnt and teachng and effectiveness that’s going to hopefully impact that child in a positive way.

Watch the full interview online here.

Our comments section is about to get a little bit nicer.

Our comments section has its moments of glory, instances of brave citizens discoursing civilly despite a national education debate dominated by divisive misconceptions.

But too often, it’s ugly down there. Too often, comments include personal attacks and deliberate deceptions.

And so we embark on a niceness campaign. Down the road, we are open to making more major changes, such as asking commenters to log in with a registered verified identity or creating a community policing system where other commenters can vote comments up or down a la Gawker.

Another idea is to change the structure so you can respond right underneath other readers’ postings and flag comments you find inappropriate. We hope you will share more ideas.

For now, we have drafted a recommended list of principles to govern our most basic (and, at present, only) moderation decision: Do we allow a comment to be published, or do we delete it? (Right now, given our editorial capacity, every comment that the WordPress computers don’t flag as possible spam is published immediately by default. For more on the spam catchers, see #4 below.)

Most of these principles we already follow in an ad hoc way, but we want to codify them. The list is below. Please share your feedback. Once we’ve got something we all like — or at least, most of us like — we’ll publish it permanently on the site.

Draft GothamSchools Community Policy

We encourage vigorous debate and welcome constructive criticism of our coverage. However, we do reserve the right to moderate these discussions and occasionally will delete comments that violate our community policy.

1. No obscenity, vulgarity, profanity, racism or sexism. If you think something might cross the line, it probably does. Disagreement with people’s arguments is fine, but personal attacks — including on other commenters and GothamSchools writers and editors — will not be tolerated. We tend to agree with Jon Stewart that Nazi analogies are rarely appropriate. We reserve the right to judge what crosses the line.

2. Do not impersonate a person you’re not and do not “sock-puppet.” This should not come as a surprise, but we can see your IP addresses and e-mails, so we know if you’re doing this. If you post as Cathie Black or Joel Klein, we will delete your comment unless we can verify that you are actually Cathie Black or Joel Klein. We follow this definition of “sock-puppeting” as the New York Times defined it: “the act of creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one’s self, allies or company.”

3. You’re welcome to post under a username that allows you to retain anonymity, but we encourage everyone to use their real names and e-mail addresses (which are not shared publicly). We feel the same way about this matter as does the New York Times, which writes in its comment policy: “We have found that people who use their names carry on more engaging, respectful conversations.”

4. To prevent the comment threads from filling up with spam, our site automatically places certain types of comments in moderation. If your comment includes more than two links or is over 300 words, chances are that our site will think it’s spam and one of us will have to approve it manually. If you post a comment like this in the middle of the night or on a weekend, please don’t fret if it’s not approved right away. We are probably asleep or otherwise engaged in our off-line lives.

5. If you have a correction or a criticism of our coverage, the fastest way to reach us is by email. We do read the comment threads (though often not immediately) and will occasionally respond, but commenting isn’t the most efficient way to get our attention.

6. Help us flag violations! If you believe that another commenter has violated our policy, the best way to let us know is — again — to send us an e-mail.

7. We very rarely block a reader from ever commenting, but sometimes we have no other means of maintaining civility. Should you take it upon yourself to violate the comment policy multiple times, we will contact you and ask you to stop. If you continue, we will block you.

8. Please DON’T POST IN ALL CAPS. Some sites will delete your comments if you do this and, while that seems a bit extreme to us, using all-caps does make you sound like a crazy person. Good spelling and grammar are also appreciated.

GothamSchools loves visitors. So we were delighted when a group of ninth-graders and their teachers from the Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation stopped by our offices this afternoon.

We talked about how we spend our days as reporters; how strong writing can benefit students no matter what career they end up in; and how the students might start a newspaper at their school, which just opened this year.

Just a reminder: If you’ve got a journalism class or after-school club and want to come visit, let us know.

—-Original Message—–

From: Black Cathie
Sent: Fri 1/28/2011 12:46 PM
To: Green Linda; &All Tweed
Cc: Grimm Kathleen
Subject: Re: New Carpet Runner installation next week

Great news! Should we have waited til post snow?

Sent from BlackBerry

From: Green Linda
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 11:39 AM
To: &All Tweed
Subject: New Carpet Runner installation next week

New carpet runners will be installed at Tweed on Wednesday, February 2nd, and Thursday, February 3rd.  The installers will begin removing the old frayed runners located in the halls and outside of offices, beginning at 5:00pm, both days.  There should be minimal obstruction.

Please be careful where you see the installers working.

Thank you

Linda

Linda S. Green, J.D.
Building Manager
New York City Department of Education

While my students at Bronx Lab and students at many other New York high schools spent the day taking a three-hour Living Environment Regents exam — which emphasizes memorization of a breadth of factual content — students at East Side, thanks to a state waiver exempting them from most Regents exams, spent the day in deep thought and reflection, applying and showing off what they had learned this semester.

We learned much to take back to our school, but what I saw also has much larger implications for the current local and national educational discourse.

I participated in two 90-minute-long sessions, one for an 11th-grade English class, and the other for a 12th-grade AP English class. While there were a range of skill levels and fluency in English amongst the students I interacted with, all six were impressive in their presentations and reflectiveness. Each student chose one piece of writing to share, along with a cover letter which summarized their learning. The seniors also held a debate in which they each had to argue, using the lens of a school of literary theory, which character from a text they read most challenged the status quo. In my group, students used the lens of feminist theory to articulate which character most undermined and transcended the patriarchy in their societies.

I cannot possibly explain how enjoyable and impressive it was to listen to the students. Particularly in the senior class, the standards for students were higher than any school I have ever encountered. Students were not only doing high-level college literary analysis, but they displayed an amount of reflection, self-awareness, and thoughtfulness that most adults do not have. Others in my department observed roundtables in seventh- and ninth-grade history, and everyone came away impressed with what they saw.

There were a number of conclusions I was hoping my department would take away from watching these presentations, and thankfully, many of them came out over lunch together afterwards. While in the long run, I would love nothing more than for my department, if not our school, to implement a similar program, in the immediate future, we saw the value of having students formally reflect on their learning. We saw how much more impressive students’ understanding and complexity of thought is when they have the opportunity to go in-depth over a smaller amount of skills and content, rather than emphasizing a limited understanding of a breadth of content. And we saw that students are capable of much, much more than what is tested on the state’s exams.

In a time when much of the public discourse on public education focuses on accountability, teachers’ resistance to so-called accountability measures is often mistaken for laziness or a fear of change. People who decry teachers as lazy or afraid of change are misguided. In his welcome letter to his guests, East Side’s principal, Mark Federman, wrote:

We, meaning the students, staff and school as a whole, will put it all out there for each other, our families, our friends, our colleagues and our community to see: the good, the bad, and everything else. This is not an easy thing to do. Our students’ work and our own work is not always as pretty as we want it to be. And no matter how hard they have worked and we have worked, we are never quite satisfied. However, we offer it to the public because it is to the public that we and our students are ultimately accountable.

The work I saw on Tuesday from East Side students was real, meaningful, and worthy of public accountability. The work Bronx Lab students did that day was arbitrary, meaningless for students’ lives, and not worthy of their time or capabilities. I am more than happy to have myself and any teacher in this country held accountable for the kind of work I saw at East Side, for it was truly work that asked students to meet high standards, not just to get a high score on a multiple-choice test.

Instead, those students will be able to use passing course grades to fulfill their graduation requirements. Students are normally required to take five Regents exams to graduate. Students must score above a 55 for the test to be counted towards a local diploma; for the more rigorous Regents diploma, they must reach the 65 mark.

Seniors who want to earn a Regents diploma must wait to re-take the exams in June, the next time they are offered. The January tests that would have been given today will not be re-administered. This raises the stakes for some seniors who plan to graduate in June by reducing the number of opportunities they have to pass the exam this year.

State Education Commissioner David Steiner encouraged students to wait and sit for the exams later in the year. ”We hold a Regents Diploma as the goal for all,” he said in a statement. “However, this is the fairest course of action for the seniors affected this week.”

City and state officials spent the day discussing how to accommodate students who needed to take exams today to graduate as planned.

“We are pleased the State took this step that will alow those seniors with sufficient credits and coursework to graduate this month,” Chancellor Cathie Black said in a statement. “However, we fully understand how disappointing it must be to all of those students who studied so hard for their Regents exams, and for the teachers and parents who worked with them.”

City officials estimated that between 400 and 500 students would benefit from the state’s decision. Last year, just under 3,500 students graduated between January and May. Of those students, roughly 400 used the winter Regents exams to fulfill graduation requirements.

The solution is similar to one offered in 2004, the last time city students missed January Regents exams because of snow.

Regents exams are normally administered three times a year, in January, June and August.

STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCES:
SOME SENIORS CAN USE COURSE GRADES TO GRADUATE
AS REGENTS EXAMS ARE CANCELED DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER;
NEXT ADMINISTRATION IN JUNE

The State Education Department announced today that seniors who were scheduled to take Regents exams this week and were unable to do so because their schools were closed by inclement weather may use passing course grades (per local policy) to meet the requirements for a local diploma. This option is being allowed only for the small number of seniors for whom passing grades on Regents exams not available this week due to inclement weather would represent their only outstanding requirement for January 2011 graduation.

Education Commissioner David Steiner said, “We hold a Regents Diploma as the goal for all; however, this is the fairest course of action for the seniors affected this week. I urge all the affected students to come back in June to earn the scores they need for a Regents diploma.”

This announcement today follows the precedent established in January 2004 – the last time such a large number of students were affected by school closures during a Regents examination period. A final count of seniors exercising this option will be determined as principals and superintendents audit coursework and grading policies to establish student eligibility and report to the State Education Department.

All students unable to take exams due to school closures this week are reminded that the next scheduled administration of the exams is in June. January exams are offered in approximately 1600 schools statewide and account for approximately 15 percent of all Regents exams administered in a year. To ensure that students have multiple opportunities to take the Regents exams, New York offers them three times a year. The Department views the January Regents examination period as primarily a makeup testing opportunity for students.

Public, non-public and charter school officials will receive further details in a guidance memo from the Office of State Assessment tomorrow.

New York City’s public schools are suspending more students than they did a decade ago, and for longer periods of time, according to a report released today.

Data on student suspensions obtained by the Student Safety Coalition through Freedom of Information requests and analyzed by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows that the city’s public schools have doled out increasingly large numbers of suspensions each year since 2002. Black students are being suspended in disproportionate numbers, and a third of the suspensions have taken place during months when students spend weeks sitting for state exams.

The NYCLU’s report concludes that the spike in suspension rates over the years is connected to changes in the city’s discipline code, which now categorizes more infractions as being suspension-worthy than it did a decade ago. It also notes that the police presence in schools has increased since 2002, when former Chancellor Joel Klein started Operations Safe Schools.

Department of Education officials responded to the report, saying that in some cases principals can decide whether to respond to suspension-mandated offenses with lesser punishments.

“We are also working with our special education team to look at ways to address behavioral issues among special education students through stronger social and emotional mediation,” wrote DOE spokeswoman Marge Feinberg in an email.

Analysis Finds Dramatic Spike in NYC Suspensions: Black Children and Students with Special Needs Most Affected

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 27, 2010 – The number of student suspensions in New York City public schools spiked dramatically over the past decade while the length of suspensions grew longer — a phenomenon disproportionally affecting black students and students with disabilities, according to a report released today by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Student Safety Coalition that analyzes 10 years of previously undisclosed suspension data.

“Education is a child’s right, not a reward for good behavior,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said. “Sadly, the growing reliance on suspensions in New York City schools all too often denies children — often the most vulnerable and in need of support — their right to an education. This harsh approach to discipline, combined with aggressive policing in schools, pushes kids from the classroom into the criminal justice system.”

The report, Education Interrupted: The Growing Use of Suspensions in New York City’s Public Schools, analyzes 449,513 suspensions served by New York City students from 1999 to 2009.

The NYCLU and Student Safety Coalition obtained the raw data for the report through a series of Freedom of Information law requests to the New York City Department of Education (DOE) in 2008 and 2009. Statisticians and academics at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University processed and analyzed the data for more than a year.

According to the data, the number of suspensions served each school year nearly doubled over the decade – even though the student population has decreased over the same period.

Among the report’s findings:

• One out of every 14 students was suspended in 2008-2009; in 1999-2000 it was one in 25. Last school year, students served more than 73,000 suspensions. In the 1999-2000 school year, students served 44,000 suspensions, even though the overall student population was much larger than today.

• Suspensions are becoming longer: More than 20 percent of suspensions lasted more than one week in 2008-2009, compared to 14 percent in 1999-2000. The average length of a long-termsuspensionis 5 weeks (25 school days).

• Students with disabilities are four times more likely to be suspended than students without disabilities.

• Black students, who compose 33 percent of the student body, served 53 percent of suspensions over the past 10 years. Black students with disabilities represent more than 50 percent of suspended students with disabilities.

• Black students served longer suspensions on average and were more likely to be suspended for subjective misconduct, like profanity and insubordination.

• Thirty percent of suspensions occur in March and May of each school year when students often are taking exams.

The report partially attributes the rise in suspensions to the DOE’s Discipline Code – the code of conduct for the city schools that catalogues infractions and the acceptable range of disciplinary responses for each one. From 1999 to 2010, the number of behaviors for which a student must be suspended grew by 200 percent.

“If you increase the number of infractions that must draw a suspension, then more children are going to be suspended,” said NYCLU Public Policy Counsel Johanna Miller, the report’s primary author. “We encourage the DOE to continue recent steps to emphasize the need for non-punitive responses like peer mediation, guidance counseling, conflict resolution, community service and mentoring. These methods are proven to effectively address disciplinary issues while providing students valuable support and encouragement.”

Research has repeatedly demonstrated that overuse of suspensions can worsen school climate and is linked to lower test scores. Studies also show that students who are suspended tend to be suspended repeatedly, until they either drop out or are pushed out of school. A study of secondary school students, published in the Journal of School Psychology, showed that students who were suspended were 26 percent more likely to be involved with the legal system than their peers.

“The increasing and disproportionate use of suspensions in New York City schools negatively impact the school environment and drive down student achievement,” said Udi Ofer, NYCLU advocacy director and co-author of the report. “The Bloomberg administration must end its zero tolerance approach to school discipline and instead provide resources to schools to address the emotional and mental needs of children.”

The overuse of suspensions combines with heavy-handed street policing tactics used in too many of the city’s schools to push students from classrooms into the criminal justice system. School safety officers, NYPD personnel assigned to the schools, have become increasingly involved in maintaining school discipline. Students, some as young as five, have been handcuffed, taken to jail, and ordered to appear in court for infractions such as writing on a desk or talking back.

While school safety officers do not have the power to suspend students, they are often complaining witnesses atsuspension proceedings, and are usually involved when disciplinary infractions are treated as criminal offenses.

The report offers the following recommendations to the DOE and state and city lawmakers:

• End the use of zero tolerance discipline. The DOE must ensure that suspensions are used only when truly necessary and that disciplinary responses complement rather than detract from a school’s educational mission. Other big-city school districts, like Los Angeles, Baltimore and Seattle, use discipline codes that are far less severe than New York City’s.

• Mandate positive alternatives tosuspensionwhen appropriate. In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest school district in the country, a commitment to positive behavior interventions and supports reduced the number of suspensions by 15 percent in its first year. The DOE should follow LAUSD’s lead and ensure that all the city’s 1,600 public schools implement effective positive discipline, including restorative justice and positive behavior interventions and supports.

• Protect students’ constitutional rights insuspensionhearings. In order to protect students’ rights, the DOE must take steps to ensure that administrators are fully aware of and respect the procedural requirements for suspending a student.

• Increase transparency around discipline and school safety practices. Greater disclosure of data concerning discipline and school safety will help policymakers, educators, parents and advocates develop more effective policies – increasing the graduation rate and closing the achievement gap.

• Provide support services for students’ emotional and psychological needs. Schools must invest in guidance counselors, social workers and school aides who are trained in conflict resolution and restorative justice methods to handle disciplinary infractions. In addition, more schools should collaborate with medical, mental health and social service providers, as well as community based organizations, to address students’ non-academic developmental needs.

•       Encourage meaningful public input in the discipline process. The DOE must show that it seriously considers the input it receives from parents and students during the annual Discipline Code revision process.

The city has been holding hearings at each of the schools slated for closure all this month in advance of next week’s Panel for Educational Policy vote on the plans. At some of the closure hearings, city officials have faced off with angry, passionate crowds protesting the city’s plans.

Black did not see that anger at last night’s meeting, which no parents attended, reported WNYC’s Beth Fertig. The bad weather may have discouraged turnout, but the school’s chapter leader also told Fertig that the school has struggled with parent involvement and the city’s teachers union has not mobilized to challenge the school’s closure as it has elsewhere.

Earlier this month, Black paid a visit both to both I.S. 195 and the charter school that shares the building, KIPP Infinity. The district middle school, whose progress report grade dropped from a B to a D last year, was the first school school slated to close that Black visited. The city plans to use the space vacated by I.S. 195 to re-site KIPP’s high school and open a new district middle school, though the details of the plan have not yet been announced.

After the hearing, Fertig and a few other reporters got the chance to speak with Black. The chancellor discussed why city officials made the decision to close 25 schools this year, last week’s rowdy PEP meeting, and her decision to delay planned special education reforms by a year.

Here’s the full audio and a transcript of their conversation. Fertig’s full report on the meeting is available here. WNYC and GothamSchools are partnering on The Big Fix, an ongoing series examining the city’s efforts to improve low-performing schools.

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Reporter: So Chancellor, I just wanted to know first of all, why did you decide to come tonight?

Black: I think it’s very important. You know, I will attend as many meetings as I possibly can. Last night I did a town hall, tonight a joint public hearing, next week we have the two panel meetings.  It’s all a part of being the chancellor, of reaching out, of being – hearing what’s on people’s minds. I mean, we — these are hard, I mean, this is a difficult — it might have been a quiet evening but it’s still difficult for everybody. But we believe deeply that the option of putting a different school, a different approach in this physical building, is going to be better for the children. And when you look at the statistics, you know, how could anybody — how could a parent want their child to be in a school that’s so underperforming?

That’s why I wanted to visit here — which I did a couple of weeks ago — and the contrast between seeing what the KIPP school in this building has done, and walking around and I spent time with the principal. But this is probably – our team has been here 3, 4, 5 times in the past year, so this is nothing that is quick. We’ve learned, frankly — I saw “we” collectively — from 2009 to 2010, over 2010 — for any of the schools that we were taking a very significant look at, we’ve been back multiple times, multiple conversations with principals, with the senior leadership team, teachers, you know the whole thing, getting a sense.

And at a certain point you come to a decision and say, “we believe there are other options.” And that is what all our whole agenda is all about — choice and options. And we believe that the school that we will put in here is going to be a better option for these children in an intermediate setting than what has been serving this community.

Reporter: While there was not very much feedback tonight, I’m wondering, have you been getting an earful about the closing process so far?

I think what we hear is that people — you know, we’re in New York, people have strong opinions. Sometimes they tend to sort of ignore the facts and just have an emotional commitment. So certainly there’s been a lot of response — everyone’s got a different point of view.

Reporter: You were at that PEP meeting last week, which was - the temperature was a bit hotter and a lot people were talking about school closings. What did you think about that and the way you were greeted?

It’s exactly what I expected. You know this happened to Joel, in different ways, and so I left my Blackberry at home [laughter] — well, that’s not actually true, I left it in my pocketbook; there were moments when I thought, “you know if I could just spend about 10 minutes, I’ll listen to you guys.” But you know, I kind of just listened, I was interested, I wanted to hear what they had to say. The crazy stuff I didn’t pay attention to.

Reporter: What was the crazy stuff?

[At this point, a DOE press officer interrupts, saying, "I think that's it." They then decide to take one more question from another reporter.]

Reporter: Since you’ve been chancellor, there have been a couple of things which I like to look at as sort of maybe moves away from…pushing forward with something, and maybe towards a more gradual process. Like for example, the special education reform being delayed a year, or the bonuses, maybe let’s suspend that…

I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. Really, I would not jump to a conclusion. I am the pedal to the metal on reform. But I think that we also want to make sure that for something as important to so many constituents as special ed I mean we want to make sure that we have thought about everything because if were going to scale something up it has got to work. It’s too important. So this was a collective decision, it was not Cathie saying, “lets really sort of” —none of it was a rethink. It is only making sure that we have thought of every single thing to make it a success for these children.

[DOE press officer: Okay, great, that's your question; let's let her get home.]

Three Brooklyn students — from left to right, 7-year-olds Olivia and Jai and 9-year-old Isabella — used their snow day to build a snow fort in Prospect Park today.

We know what high school teachers would have been doing if there had been school today: proctoring Regents exams. But we’re wondering what other teachers and students would have been doing today if 19 inches of snow hadn’t fallen.

For Jai Jaroslaw, age “seven and three-quarters” and a second-grader at Brooklyn’s P.S. 321, the unexpected day off meant getting to spend the morning in Prospect Park building a snow fort.

If it had been a normal day? ”I guess I would be doing math, and now I would have lunch,” he said. Jai’s father, Victor Jaroslaw, a teacher at Fort Greene’s P.S. 46, would have spent the day teaching science.

What would your day have looked like if school had not been cancelled, and how are you spending the day instead? Tell us in the comments.

Students are required to take the exams to graduate, and today’s test date was particularly important for some students hoping to graduate this month. City officials said today that schools ordered nearly 100,000 exams in six subjects, though frequently the number of tests ordered is larger than the number of students who sit for them.

No one seems to know yet exactly when those students will get a chance to take their exams. A GothamSchools reader told us that she spent 45 minutes waiting on 311, the city’s information hotline, this morning, before being told only that today’s administration had been canceled.

“We are in discussion with state education officials about finding a solution for students who were unable to take the Regents exams scheduled for today,” Mayor Bloomberg said during a press conference to discuss the surprise storm. “This is not a problem only for New York City. There are other cities in the southern part of the state that have exactly the same problem.”

A Department of Education spokesman said the city hoped to finalize arrangements with the state today. State policy is typically not to administer make-up Regents exams.

The last time Regents exams were canceled in New York due to snow was in 2009, and the state allowed students either to retake the entire exam or take only the missed second half of the exam in June. In 2004, city seniors who missed Regents exams because of a snow day were allowed to skip the exams altogether, provided that they were seeking only a local diploma and had passed classes in the subjects being tested.

UPDATE: A city spokesman just clarified that the 2009 Regents cancellation did not affect New York City students.

High school math teacher Akil Wilson watched Bloomberg’s press conference this morning and helpfully transcribed an exchange between reporters, the mayor and Chancellor Cathie Black about the exams:

1st Reporter: And so, all of these thousands of people will have to take the exams in June and will have to study for them again?

Black: That’s correct.

Bloomberg: Well, hopefully if you learned the material, you don’t have to study again? I mean, think about what you’re – they should be learning the material. That’s the whole idea of the test, to see whether you know the material, not whether you can pass the test.

2nd Reporter: The idea is that you can take it three times and pass it with at least a 65, so like, if you are not given that time in January to take it, you fail it in June…

Bloomberg: You know — unfortunately, we have a snow storm which we didn’t want, but God gave us. And the state will figure out ways to work it out, for the kids who need to take the test, but learning the material is not a bad idea. As a matter of fact, they’ve got the day free, they can go back to the books, and I’m sure most of them will want to spend this day doing that.

Here’s the list of Regents exam subject that were supposed to have been offered today, and the number of tests ordered in each: