GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Eighth-graders and their parents began queuing up outside Brooklyn Technical High School on Saturday an hour before the annual citywide high school fair’s start time, and by 9:45 a.m. a long line of families wrapped around the block. When the doors opened at 10 a.m., they poured into the stuffy building, some of the tens of thousands of families that passed through the fair this weekend.

Inside, Brooklyn Tech’s eight stories were something of a labyrinth — but no more so than the high school admissions process itself. Parents and students that we met outlined varying strategies for navigating the fair and the journey to high school.

Laura Napiza with daughter Samantha, left, who wants to be a teacher

Laura Napiza and her daughter Samantha tried traversing the hallways but seemed completely lost. “We just got here and it’s very overwhelming,” Laura Napiza said. “We’re looking for a high school with a strong academic program that also has something that she’d be interested in. Right now she wants to be a teacher.”

They said their goal was to visit the Queens High School of Teaching, Liberal Arts, and the Sciences and Maspeth High School — if they could find those tables. Saying they planned to inquire about graduation rates, student-to-teacher ratios and extracurricular options, the mother and daughter disappeared into the melee.

Spencer Jackson and Beverly Brailsford creating a plan of attack for the fair

Beverly Brailsford and her son Spencer Jackson came in with a clear plan of action: Head straight to the seventh floor and methodically work downwards, hitting only the schools with strong academic programs and track and field teams. First, though, the pair found a quiet hallway where they could sit down and prepare. With the high school directory in her lap, a pen in her hand, and a notebook turned to a fresh page, Brailsford took notes on schools such as Aviation High School and Medgar Evers College Preparatory School while Jackson played on his phone. “I think it’s more of a mom thing,” Brailsford said of the process. “As long as they have what he’s into, it works for him.” (more…)

• Under-the radar erasure analysis done on 11 Regents exams found red flags at 34 city schools. (Times)
• On new report cards, more schools got low scores. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, Post, NY1, WSJ)
• Michael Winerip: Jacqui Getz, leader of the brand-new PS 126, is a model of a good principal. (Times)
• Struggling students at Brooklyn’s PS 224 are not getting required tutoring services. (Daily News)
• Even after violent incidents fall at once-dangerous schools, the city leaves metal detectors in place. (Post)
• School bus cuts in Queens have give some students long commutes on public transport. (Daily News)
• Middle school students got information about high school options at a citywide fair. (NY1, WNYC)
• The Daily News praises the city’s new middle school plans for showing that money alone isn’t a cure.
• In California, parents trying to use the “trigger law” to take over schools face steep challenges. (Times)
• A Buffalo parent calls on New York City to get push for a parent trigger law in New York. (Daily News)
• New York State is considering applying for an NCLB waiver but hasn’t decided. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s aggressive school reforms could be short-lived. (Huffington Post)
• After a civil rights lawsuit threat, Arizona stopped sending investigators to audit teachers’ accents. (Times)
• President Obama’s No Child Left Behind waivers are an end-run around a recalcitrant Congress. (Times)
• New scrutiny is being applied to D.C.’s middle schools, which vary widely in quality. (Washington Post)

• A guide to all seven floors of the citywide high school fair, happening in Brooklyn this weekend. (DOE)
• Why is Chancellor Walcott pushing middle schools when research says they shouldn’t exist? (Flypaper)
• Photos of a student’s math work show he’s both very clever and also error-prone. (No Sleep ‘Til Summer)
• GEM espionage finds that only 100 people attended E4E’s meeting with Chancellor Walcott. (Ed Notes)
• The UFT is now holding meetings in all five boroughs for teachers in the ATR pool. (NYC ATR)
• Even when they’re subbing glue for proper dental care, kids say the darndest things. (Mr. Foteah)
• A 1969 essay about the intractable problems of urban education. (National Affairs via Mike Goldstein)
• President Obama emphasized that NCLB waivers don’t mean freedom from accountability. (Politics K-12)
• Dana Goldstein: The waivers prove the Obama administration is committed to narrow reforms. (Nation)
• The waivers require states to publicly announce their students’ college-going rates. (Curriculum Matters)
• Richard Kahlenberg: Steven Brill misses the fact that teachers union support reform, too. (New Republic)
• All of a sudden, Republican presidential candidates are talking again about abolishing USDOE. (Fox)
• A new website shows the recent efforts of FiftyCAN, which pushes for reform at the state level. (Eduflack)

The City Council’s education committee has given a great deal of scrutiny to schools the Department of Education wants to close. Now it’s turning its attention to the new schools the department wants to open.

Today, the committee held an oversight hearing about the DOE’s new school creation process, which has resulted in more than 400 new schools in the last nine years.

The process to open a charter school is set in law, but how new district schools come to exist is more obscure, Robert Jackson, the committee’s chair, said during the hearing.

“Some charge that there’s been two many new schools opened in too short a time, with too little planning and preparation and too much emphasis on quantity over quality,” he said.

Of the 500 district and charter schools that have opened since 2002, just six have closed because of poor performance, said Marc Sternberg, the DOE deputy chancellor in charge of new schools. He said the schools’ success stems in large part from the department’s selection process for school models and principals.

That process has gotten more stringent this year. Prospective school leaders will have to complete a rigid, three-month-long series of assignments, and at three points, some will be culled from the pool. (more…)

After years of volatility, letter grades on progress reports for the city’s elementary and middle schools are the most stable and accurate they’ve ever been, according to Department of Education officials.

Queens schools had the highest grades on this year’s city progress reports, which were released today, and charter schools received higher scores, on average, than schools across the city. Of the 1,219 schools to receive grades in this year’s reports, 298 schools received an A, 411 received a B, 354 received a C, 79 received a D and 32 received an F.

The city graded schools on a curve, so that 60 percent scored either an A or a B; 30 percent received C’s; and 10 percent received D’s or F’s – twice as many as last year.

That means new additions to the city’s list of schools that it will consider closing. Schools that received a D or F, or three consecutive years of C or lower, are automatically added to the list of potential closures. Last year, 62 schools fell into that group, but this year, the total was 116.

It is the fifth year that the city has issued the reports, which assess schools based heavily on students’ state test scores and their improvement since last year, as well as attendance rates, and feedback from parents, students, and teachers. Schools also earn extra credit for progress made by students with disabilities and English language learners. For the first time this year, schools whose low-performing black and Latino boys made gains also got extra credit.

“By acknowledging progress in schools that help struggling students, we can keep more students on track during elementary and middle school,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement.

Changing standards on state tests over the past two years had thrown the DOE’s progress reports into a cycle of unpredictability. Inflated test scores in 2009 resulted in just two schools receiving F’s, while 84 percent earned A’s. Last year, after state tests became harder to pass, almost 70 percent of schools saw their grades drop and a third of schools saw their grades swing – mostly downward – by two or more letters. (more…)

When the Obama administration first announced in August that it would offer states No Child Left Behind waivers, New York State said it would wait and see what the eligibility requirements were before deciding whether to apply. Today, President Obama announced the plan’s details, but the state still isn’t ready to commit.

The U.S. Department of Education is encouraging all states to apply for the waivers, and Race to the Top winners — which include New York — are seen as likely to win them. State and city education officials also expressed enthusiasm about the option.

“The president’s proposal to grant waivers to states that take steps to raise academic standards, address their lowest performing schools and measure the success of schools based on student progress — not just absolute proficiency — is commendable,” New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement.

But State Education Commissioner John King said the state wouldn’t decide whether to apply until October’s Board of Regents meeting. Before then, he said, state officials would reach out to “key stakeholder groups and accountability experts” to assess how the state could “best respond to this opportunity.” The first application deadline is in December. (more…)

The city official in charge of closing schools and the union chief who has sued to keep schools open are both set to speak at a conference tomorrow about what can be done to help schools without shuttering them.

The conference, “Effective Alternatives to School Closings: Transforming Struggling Schools in NYC,” was organized by the Coalition for Educational Justice, the Alliance for Quality Education, and the Urban Youth Collaborative, all advocacy organizations. The event is meant to send a message to city policymakers that there are ways to reform failing schools without shutting them down, according to Ronnette Summers, a parent and CEJ member who helped organize it.

The city Department of Education has closed 117 schools since 2002 and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said this week that he plans to close additional schools, particularly middle schools, that do not meet the department’s standards.

“Every year there’s more and more schools on the closing list and that seems to be the only reform strategy that the Department of Education uses to improve schools,” Summers said. “People in places where they know [closure] is not working felt that it was important to bring it to New York City to let them see that there’s other ways to improve schools.” (more…)

In an education department that’s driven by data, what gets measured is a clear expression of values.

So this year’s elementary and middle school progress reports signal that the city is serious about integrating disabled students into regular classes, helping minority boys, and quickly getting immigrant students learning in English.

The broad contours of what we’ll see later today when the Department of Education releases the newest progress reports, based on the last school year, have been clear for months. Back in the spring, the DOE told principals that it would not insulate schools against steep score drops as it did last year, so we know that more schools will get failing grades that put them at risk of closure.

In fact, the department set a fixed distribution of scores: 25 percent of schools will get As, 35 percent Bs, 30 percent Cs, 7 percent Ds, and 3 percent Fs. Last year, just 5 percent of schools were awarded D or F grades.

We also know each school’s state test scores, announced last month. While high or low average scores don’t always equate to high or low progress report grades, because the reports are based mostly on the test scores, they often do. (The department is also guaranteeing that schools with test scores in the top third citywide get no lower than a C; last year, only schools in the top quarter got that promise.) Also, because fewer schools registered large test score gains or losses this year, progress report grades are likely to be relatively stable.

That means that the biggest changes could come as the result of the department’s annual tinkering with the reports’ formula. (more…)

• Four people were hospitalized after a school safety agent used pepper spray to break up a fight. (Post)
• This year’s elementary and middle school progress reports, out today, were graded on a curve. (Post)
• The union says more classes are oversize this year. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, NY1, WSJ)
• Families waitlisted for Tribeca’s PS 234 did not have to go to Chinatown after all. (Downtown Express)
• The new head of the elite Fieldston School has an unusual pedigree and little K-12 experience. (Times)
• The Obama administration has set requirements for states that want to escape NCLB rules. (Times, WSJ)
• A new report concludes that single-sex education is ineffective and reinforces stereotypes. (Times)
• Tacoma, Wash., teachers ended their weeklong strike after agreeing to a new contract. (Reuters)

• The Obama Administration laid out eligibility rules for No Child Left Behind exemptions. (Politics K-12)
• States will have to agree, as New York already has, to new teacher evaluation systems. (Teacher Beat)
• Rick Hess: American education policy worries too much about “the achievement gap.” (National Affairs)
• A teacher who was skeptical of her iPad when she got it lists the many ways she uses it. (Miss Brave)
• Deborah Meier lists nine reasons to oppose Chicago’s extended school day plan. (Bridging Differences)
• A new report finds that “teaching artists” bring innovative approaches to schools. (Curriculum Matters)
• Andy Rotherham reviews the ed track records of Republicans running for president. (School of Thought)
• The first song of the year for PS 22′s famous choir: “Pilgrimage” by Suzanne Vega. (PS 22 Chorus)
• Teachers and staff at PS 80 in Queens explain how they alleviated violence in the halls. (NY Teacher)
• For the first time since Mayor Bloomberg entered office, poverty in the city is on the rise. (Wonkster)