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The Department of Education has named seven more schools it intends to close and three more schools where it aims to lop off middle school grades.

The 10 schools named today join 15 whose proposed closures or truncations were announced yesterday. The new additions to the closure list include three long-troubled high schools; two middle schools started under the Bloomberg administration; and the middle school grades of Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing Arts, where scholar Cornel West last week pledged to fight any closure plans.

Under the proposals, Manhattan’s century-old Washington Irving High School, which the DOE had shrunk in recent years, will stop accepting new students and will close its doors in 2015. So will Grace Dodge Career and Technical Education High School, where students recently complained that they had been left without teachers in some classes. And Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx, where students had been sounding the alarm about the school’s status for years, will also close.

Both Washington Irving and Grace Dodge are in their first year of federally funded “transformation,” an improvement strategy reserved for the most struggling schools. Department officials said that the schools chosen to replace Washington Irving and Grace Dodge would get their federal funds in an arrangement that the city used to support 16 new schools this year. (more…)

The Bedford-Stuyvesant building that houses the Academy of Business and Community Development, which could close in June.

It was bad enough news when staff and students at the Academy of Business and Community Development in Bedford-Stuyvesant found out last month that its middle school grades might phase out.

But on Thursday, the all-boys student body was herded into the auditorium for an end-of-day assembly and received a more jolting fate from the school’s principal, Simone McIntosh: Not only would both the middle and high schools be closed, but both would be shuttered by the end of the year.

Shutting down a school in a single year is an unusual plan for the Department of Education, which usually phases out schools one year at a time until no grades remain.

The change in plans at ABCD came once DOE officials had a chance to look under the hood at the school and concluded that it didn’t make financial sense to keep either school open any longer. The school was in low demand from new students in the community – just 5 percent of fifth-graders in the district ranked it as their top choice – and its existing student population has dwindled in each grade. (more…)

• The city announced plans to close 12 schools. (GothamSchools, Times, Post, Daily News, WSJ, NY1)
• Supporters of Staten Island’s P.S. 14, one of the schools on the list, are rallying today. (S.I. Advance)
• At one of the schools, Brooklyn’s century-old P.S. 19, just one in five students is on grade level. (Post)
• Students at already-closing Jamaica High School say the city hasn’t helped them. (Queens Chronicle)
• The city also said it put a charter school on probation for “serious violations” of law. (GothamSchools)
• The city is set to announce a cash competition for schools that reduce energy consumption. (WSJ)
• A tiny center for autistic students in Brooklyn gives one-on-one help to nine students. (Daily News)
• Sol Stern: The city’s flat NAEP scores offer a “grim” sign that students aren’t learning. (Daily News)

• D.C.’s racial achievement gap on NAEP is so wide that white students are far advanced. (The Nation)
• An architect of the city’s small schools shift says large struggling schools should be closed. (SchoolBook)
• Andy Rotherham: There’s some sense in Newt Gingrich’s child labor proposal. (School of Thought)
• A new health care law is providing new funding for school-based health centers. (Politics K-12)
• Now that everyone’s talking college readiness, no one cares about exit exams. (Curriculum Matters)
• Vice President Joe Biden’s brother Frank is a fan and advocate of charter schools. (Answer Sheet)
• A funny video about what happens when the school photographer tells kids to smile. (GOOD)
• Checker Finn compares foes of the Common Core to those who want to see the Euro fail. (Flypaper)
• A look at how federal funding for early childhood education has changed since 2001. (Early Ed Watch)

At 15 schools across the city today, administrators who had only just found out that their schools were slated to close broke the bad news to parents, teachers, and students. We stopped by schools in three boroughs to see how community members were responding.

Jane Addams High School for Academic Careers

Jane Addams High School for Academic Careers

Students at Jane Addams heard about the closure announcement either from their eighth-period teachers or from letters distributed by staff and DOE officials who were at the school before the 2:20 p.m. dismissal.

A school staff member said teachers were staying late to meet with administrators and union officials but that few were surprised by today’s news.

“We had a meeting a month earlier, so we were kind of expecting it.” she said, referring to the early engagement meetings the DOE has held at each of the 47 schools it considered for closure.

Since then, Jane Addams has been mired in a massive crediting scandal, first reported by the Daily News, that could threaten graduation for hundreds of students.

Students today said they were worried how the closure decision would affect their credits. But they were divided about whether the school deserved its fate. (more…)

Among the press releases that went flying after the city announced its first set of school closures earlier today, the one from principals union president Ernest Logan stood out for its stridency.

In a statement the length of a short essay, Logan decried school closures as “a losing strategy” that traumatizes needy students, shuts out educators, and prevents scrutiny of the city’s reform efforts. Adding eight months to mayoral control’s age, he said twice that the Bloomberg administration has had a decade to fix all schools but has not.

Nine of the 15 schools whose closures or truncations were announced today have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools; one replaced a failing elementary school just three years ago. Logan suggested that at least two additional Bloomberg-started schools would show up on the second installment of the closure roster when it comes out tomorrow.

“The fact is that closure is an admission of failure by City Hall, whose weak or non-existent interventions amount to either a cynical statement of indifference to children of poverty or an inferiority complex about their own ability to come up with solutions,” Logan said.

The statement elicited a rebuttal from Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who called Logan’s statement “embarrassing” for the union. (more…)

The six charter schools the Department of Education deemed so weak that they could be closed won’t be shuttered — for now.

But the department put a seventh school, New York French American Charter School, on probation for what it said were “serious violations” of state law and its own charter that could have left students unsafe.

The notice of probation sent by the DOE’s Charter Schools Office to NYFACS’s board yesterday lists concerns about the school’s financial stability, discipline procedures, teacher certification, academic instruction, and safety practices. It notes that the school is already late in producing audited financial statements for the last year.

“The school has no established financial controls and operational policies; the termination of one Operations Director and the hiring of a replacement has left the school in operational disarray,” reads the report, which also notes that the school has few books and that a parent volunteer with keys to the building had reportedly taken to sleeping in the school overnight. (more…)

In the first wave of annual closure announcements, the Department of Education has announced plans to shutter or reshape 15 low-performing schools.

The schools include three elementary schools, three middle schools, a secondary school, and five high schools. The department also announced plans to cut off middle grades at three other schools.

Schools that landed on the chopping block today include Jane Addams High School for Academic Careers, where a crediting scandal has erupted in recent weeks; nine schools in Brooklyn; and a handful of schools that opened under the Bloomberg administration.

One school, the Academy of Business and Community Development, would close rather than phase out over time. Its middle and high school students would be dispersed to other schools next year.

Representatives of the department’s Office of Public Affairs informed members of the City Council about closures in their districts this morning. Simultaneously, department officials were delivering the bad news in person at schools.

The 12 schools were culled from 47 whose academic performance landed them on the DOE’s closure shortlist. Officials said they would announce another list of closure plans tomorrow. Last year, the DOE shortlisted 55 low-performing schools and moved to close 26 of them. (more…)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott responds to District 2 Community Education Council member Tamara Rowe's questions at a town hall meeting.

Parents in Manhattan’s District 2 came to a town hall meeting Wednesday night with Chancellor Dennis Walcott with one item at the top of their agendas: plans to manage school crowding.

But Walcott wanted to talk about other things. He opened his remarks by talking about the city’s scores on a national exam, then segued into announcing that the Department of Education would soon name the schools it wants to close.

No District 2 schools are on the city’s shortlist for closure. Three high schools located in the district, but not administered by it, are on the list.

Walcott was tight-lipped about which schools would receive closure notices over the next two days. But he said department officials had been considering whether the shortlisted schools “have the capacity to improve.” And he told reporters that the decisions would support the middle school reform initiative he announced earlier this year.

“I made a commitment around middle schools and I intend to adhere to that commitment,” Walcott said. “I want 21st-century middle schools that are meeting the needs of our students.”

Most of the roughly three dozen parents who braved heavy rain to attend the meeting wanted to talk about the demand for new neighborhood elementary schools and the city’s recent rezoning proposals. (more…)

• City students’ NAEP scores didn’t change since 2009. (GothamSchools, Times, NY1, Daily News, Post)
• Nationally, urban school districts have made NAEP gains since 2002 but still score low. (WSJ)
• The head of a group of urban districts says New York is improving despite flat NAEP scores. (Daily News)
• The city will begin announcing which schools it plans to close today. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook, NY1)
• Researchers at NYU are studying the effectiveness of the Tools of the Mind pre-K curriculum. (WNYC)
• A Bronx principal will get sensitivity training after the DOE found he made inappropriate comments. (Post)
• Seminars held at a Bronx school help students prepare auditions for arts high schools. (Riverdale Press)
• The city is appealing a legal order to release emails between Cathie Black and officials. (Daily News)
• Florida’s governor, who pledged to cut state spending, wants a $1 billion increase for schools. (Times)
• New Jersey lawmakers could soon revamp the way voters weigh in on how schools are run. (WSJ)
• Oakland’s schools chief’s reform plans blend calling for closures and community schools. (WSJ)