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April 11, 2012

Walcott: Turnaround will happen even without federal funding

by Geoff Decker, at 7:22 pm

When members of the Panel for Educational Policy vote on more than two dozen school closure proposals later this month, they won’t know whether the city will get federal dollars to fund the schools that replace them.

Speaking to state lawmakers today, Education Commissioner John King said he does not plan to respond to the city’s applications for federal School Improvement Grants until “early June” — well over a month after the PEP is scheduled to vote on closure plans for 26 schools. The panel has never rejected a city proposal.

The closures are part of an overhaul process known as “turnaround” that the city devised in large part to win the funds. When Mayor Bloomberg announced the turnaround plans in his State of the City speech in January, he cited the availability of the federal funds — about $2 million per school each year — as a key motivator.

But lately, the city’s rhetoric has changed. When the Department of Education published details about its school closure plans last month, it explained that the turnarounds would happen with or without the federal dollars. Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg also told GothamSchools that new principals wouldn’t have to replace half of their staffs when the schools reopened, a provision that could disqualify the schools from receiving SIG grants.

Walcott told reporters at the hearing today that closure was the best move forward for the 26 low-rated schools with or without the supplemental grants. The schools are eligible for more than $150 million over a three-year period, but Walcott said the city’s plans could be implemented without the extra funding.

“If we have the money, that’s great,” he said. “But money should not drive policy. The policy should be, how do we benefit the students in the long run, and that’s my overall goal.”

State Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan said the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the city and state’s implementation of federally funded reform initiatives, including the $700 million Race to the Top program, was the main reason that she called King and Walcott to testify at today’s hearing.

“I think there is a lot of anxious concern among people in these school communities about the ability to carry out these plans,” said Nolan, whose own alma mater, Grover Cleveland High School, is among those on the chopping block.

Parents, students, and elected officials have questioned the city’s ability to implement such a large-scale reform in a short window of time at dozens of protests and press conferences since January. They have raised a host of questions about how the city would be able to recruit students and hire new teachers to schools that still have no names, or how new academic programs could be created and developed in a matter of months.

“It will not be a smooth transition with all that is involved,” said Carmine Pulera, a teacher at Grover Cleveland. “The logistics, the uncertainty around money — it’s just too much work, and emotionally, it’s extremely draining.”

Michael Benedetto, a Bronx Assemblyman whose district includes Lehman High School, one of 26 schools slated to be closed, criticized the city’s plan as being largely a political one “based on a frustration with the teachers union that [they] couldn’t come into agreement with.”

“[Bloomberg] has turned to this turnaround to punish the union,” Benedetto said. “It calls into question the very rational of why so many schools are being targeted.”

The city has not released details about the contents of its SIG applications, and state and city officials have declined to share specifics while the applications are being assessed.

“They are submitted as, essentially, a draft,” King said. “We review them, we ask the city to make changes, and so there’s a back and forth that happens with the districts.”

Nolan said she would file a Freedom of Information Law request to see the applications. Meanwhile, public hearings for the school closures will pick up next week. A total of nine schools will host public hearings.

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  • JEFF S

    So the State legislators are complaining.  Why not simply pass a bill prohibiting the city from implementing turnaround?  That would be the end of this garbage once and for all but then again that might take some courage on their parts.

  • SOSnyc

    Gotham Schools… please, please, please, can you clarify if this rumor of school closures is about closing schools being taken off NYCDOE accountability because they are closing schools, thus improving NYCDOE data? Is this really the case? I would hate to think these decisions are foregone conclusions just to make NYCDOE data look better.

  • guest

    If the schools are closed and reopened, the data is not counted for two years against the citywide average. Those schools are no longer PLA, they don’t exist anymore, So, if you close a whole bunch of high schools, the effect would be to raise graduation rates citywide.  The new Mayor and Chancellor will be left holding the bag when the numbers come back on, and grad. rates plummet.   Bloomberg looks good, Mulgrew gets punished for not caving on Teacher Evaluations.  It’s the old shell game, with the kids, teachers and parents being the little ball.  The shell game (also known as Thimblerig, Three shells and a pea, the old army game) is portrayed as a gambling game, but in reality, when a wager for money is made, it is a confidence trick used to perpetrate fraud. In confidence trick slang, this swindle is referred to as a short-con because it is quick and easy to pull off – wikipedia

  • Lisa Donlan

    Why not just end mayoral control- that they all supported!
    End the dictatorship, end the book cooking and phony metrics that serve only to lie to the public through a bought off MSM, end the irrational decision making, policies based not on data and evidence put political aims, end the mis-education of a generation oif children..
     END MAYORAL CONTROL  and restore sanity  and transparency and rational decision making

  • Pogue

     Bingo.

  • Transformation Teacher

    Also keep in mind, many of these schools are the largest high schools left in NYC. So taking away the data of these schools will in fact have a decent impact on the overall nyc grad rate.

  • http://twitter.com/nycdoenuts nycdoenuts

    SOSnyc and Guest are absolutely correct. Closing these schools, and then reopening them with a new name, completely relieves the city from being held accountable for their failure for several more years. As guest points out, the city-wide graduation rates (among other data) would automatically rise as a result. Bloomberg and Walcott wouldn’t be here when that data comes back online and graduation rates may very well fall right back again, so why would they care?

    Even more disconcerting is that no one in the press seems to be asking them about this aspect of closing the ‘Turnaround’ schools. From a reader’s perspective, it seems that whenever City Hall or Tweed make an assertion, the media simply take that assertion at face value without ever digging just a little deeper. This pattern was evident (to me) just this week over another topic: The 16 terrible teachers that ‘absolutely positively must go’. The press simply accepted the Chancellor’s assertions about one teacher in particular (from Jamaica HS) and printed the assertions -with his name- as though he was, in fact, everything the DOE made him out to be. Yet a more rounded view, provided by that teacher on his blog here
    http://chaz11.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-story-on-what-really-happened-and.html 
    and here
    http://chaz11.blogspot.com/2012/04/my-response-to-inaccurate-daily-news.html 
    and here
    http://chaz11.blogspot.com/2012/04/principal-sci-investigation-my-story.html 

     .. as well as other teacher bloggers who know him, and his story and took to writing in support of that him and his professionalism, like here
    http://iceuftblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/walcott-press-character-assassination.html 
    and here
    http://pissedoffteeacher.blogspot.com/2012/04/after-thought.html 
    and here
    http://www.accountabletalk.com/2012/04/why-chaz-must-be-fired.html 
    and here
    http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2012/04/on-eric-chasanoff-lets-hold-reporters.html 
    and here
    http://www.southbronxschool.com/2012/04/hypocrisy-of-sock-puppet-dennis-walcott.html 

    reveal that the DOE was probably just plain wrong in making that assertion to begin with, that they had released inaccurate information about this guy (inaccurate information that actually made him look like a really bad guy) AND that the teacher was, in fact, a popular, even darn good teacher who just didn’t get along with his principal and made one comment that was allowed to be manipulated as a sexual reference (which it was in fact, not). 

    Should the press go run down and double check the factual accuracy of every single assertion that the DOE makes? I don’t know. I do, however, know that in the cases of both  the ‘Turnaround’ schools and that of Chaz, teachers’ lives can be put through a living nightmare because of these lapses. I’m not so sure that passes the ‘cool’ test.

    Because as the city becomes relieved from it’s accountability measures,  the teachers themselves (who never had influence in running these schools anyway) will be held fully accountable (for ‘everything since the beginning of time’ as the mayor once put in after the blizzard)  because fully half of the teachers of these schools will either lose their jobs or lose their spots and wind up in excess.

    I just don’t understand why more people aren’t talking about that. It’s almost like they want the DoE to get off the hook.

  • why?

    So Walcott is saying the $58 million is irrelevent? Then why close pre-k, kindergarten and Beacon programs all of which cost a fraction of that put together?

  • A Brooklyn Turnaround Victim

     Because that would be too easy…:(

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