GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

In the grand MSM tradition of serving largely as a stenographic service for ruling class premises and narratives, this article waits until the last paragraph to inform readers of the real reason why these schools purport to graduate more students: they were explicitly allowed to refuse enrollment to the neediest students, who were then funneled into neighborhood high schools targeted for reorganization/turnaround/closing.

There is another simple explanation for why the small schools graduate higher percentages of students: they have a far larger percentage of newer, untenured teachers who are forced to pass unprepared students. All teachers are currently under explicit pressure from principals to pass almost everyone; after all, students’ failure can only be attributable to bad teaching, right? That, combined with the credit recovery scams that Tweed employs, keeps kids flowing through the system, where they later back up in CUNY remedial programs.Having been funded by the Microsoft Foundation, this study is a last-ditch effort to polish their destructive record of closing neighborhood high schools and replacing them with administration-heavy boutiques that filter out the highest needs students. Once Tweed has killed off the remaining neighborhood high schools, it will then target these schools for closing and charterization.

I’m confused by Philissa’s last paragraph after reading Winnie Hu’s piece in the Times — did these schools have to educate comparable numbers of ELL/special ed students, or didn’t they?

Even if the question of whether the small schools are more successful than large is a little more settled today, I find it hard to square the small-schools movement with the “Civil Rights issue of our times” rhetoric. What does it say to poor minority kids that they can’t go to the big comprehensive high schools — with sports teams, clubs, rich course offerings, real facilities, etc. — that everyone else gets to attend?

Exactly: Tim, Vote and Michael.  
One thing I find interesting… no one seems curious about/interested in building on these schools/these ground breaking successes.  Parents rush to successful small schools, move into the neighborhood, lay down roots/make huge commuting commitments and then expect:  DOE will want to expand Successful-Small-School A to include a Middle School – Not Happening.  Parents expect there to be room for siblings and/or siblings in need of services.  Parents get frustrated with overcrowded classrooms and lack of accessibility to shared resources in these “Campuses.”Multiple small schools in one building may work on paper (and I’m glad the numbers are positive), but there are HUGE problems going on inside these “Campuses” that are characterized as whining and glossed over because, “…building counsels deal with those issues.”

So 105 schools serve 20,000 students or about  200 kids per school so that’s  50 per graduating class. Obviously class sizes are small and that matters–just a thought

From the Times coverage:
“Gordon Berlin, president of MDRC, said the lottery process ensured that there were comparable numbers of special education students and English-language learners represented in both groups of students being tracked. He said attendance records for the students prior to high school were also comparable, and would not have affected the results.”

I think the point you are referring to in your comment doesn’t bias the results in the most obvious way, i.e. the kids that went to the small schools were different than the kids that didn’t.  However, it could create a “peer effect”, i.e. it might be easier to learn in schools that have fewer students with special needs and ELL’s.  This is a similar, and fair, point as has been made against gold-standard studies on charter schools, which also suggest charter school superiority but can’t account for peer effects.

These schools got to hire staff aligned to mission. And they were able to avoid the real doozy teachers who ended up in atr pool

The only reason that the smaller schools do better is because they select certain kids they know will perform well and filter out the struggling kids who mind end up making the school look bad. The struggling kids end up going to larger high schools that are required to take anybody and also have diminished funding .Thus, they end up on the chopping block for closure after being deemed a “failure”.

I’m sure it had nothing to do with scrubbing Regents exams or pressuring teachers to increase their passing rates. I wish Mr. Hughes great success in his quest to uncover this great mystery.

Please. Another “study” “supporting” Bloomberg’s “innovations”. And the test scores went up during his administration, the check is in the mail, and it’s not me, it’s you. Right.