GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The question one has to answer is whether or not it is the sole purpose of a high school education to prepare all students for college.  There are lots of good paying jobs available for students with certain skills that do not require a college education.  Perhaps that is where the problem is today.

It’s clear there is much you do not understand. Many “A” schools post very low college ready rates but are regularly touted as exemplary schools. College persistence rates are released to schools privately, hence you will never see that data but it’s interesting data nonetheless.

The citywide average college ready rate is 21.5% That means that only approximately 1 in every 5 students actually enters college without needing remedial math and english. From math, we know there are “outliers” but how do we get such a low citywide average if most schools are posting high college ready rates? Mathematically impossible.

Let me clarify “proficiency rates” for you. High school students are assessed by credits and Regents exams. Exams are given scores (65%, 75% etc).
These scores are not referenced as proficiency scores but percentages. The proficiency scores are the ELA and Math scores (ranging from 1.00 to 4.50) that are assigned to students in grades 3 through 8 upon completion of their state exams. They then come to high school with single digit proficiency scores. Even the most accomplished student (level 4) has a single-digit proficiency score (after all, 4 is a single digit).

Bloomberg’s statement is a “shock and awe” tactic at which he has become very adept. What he doesn’t point out to the everyday New York tax payer is the following:

These 24 schools have high concentrations of Special Needs and ELL students who require substantially greater support (both academic and social emotional) to advance in alignment with their peers. The counseling support most special needs students require is often divided up by school psychologists and social workers who are itinerant – i.e. they are in the building only 1 day per week and are “shared” with other schools. Therefore, despite what a students individual education plan mandates, that student receives what is available.

These 24 schools, because of their low report card grades, watch their incoming proficiency levels deteriorate each year because parents will not send their children to schools that have low report card grades (understandably). Therefore, students who struggle greatly with reading, writing and mathematics are assigned to these schools. That requires intensive, academic support and intervention that should extend beyond the school day but there is usually no money available to pay teachers to work outside of the contractually mandated time. Therefore, if it doesn’t happen during the school day, it doesn’t happen.

There is a reason why middle school progress report cards (starting this year), will reflect “high school ready” metrics. There are simply too many students still being socially promoted by completing a magical portfolio approved over the summer and then, voila, they are deemed high school ready.

Last point, why is it acceptable for Bloomberg to selectively micromanage the educational system? What does he know about cultural pedagogy, depth of knowledge levels, Common Core writing standards or formative/summative assessments? Not much, I suspect. Shouldn’t the person making the decisions that impact 1.1 million students and thousands of teachers know a little something about the work?

So each year I get a crop of 9th graders.  In a class of 30, two-thirds don’t read on grade level.  That’s one huge hurdle.  They cannot understand anything in their American history textbook for the most part because the reading is so difficult.  On a page there are so many vocabulary words they don’t know that the reading is nonsensical to them.  Then we have the behavior issues.  Because they can’t do the work, they try to spend a lot of time getting out of doing the work.  They try to disrupt class as much as possible so no one will realize they can’t do the work.  A large part of my job is to make the reading as accessible as I can.  I won’t go into the variety of ways I “scaffold” instruction and “differentiate” so the students can indeed be successful in class.  It works well, however, when they have to do an assignment without my help they falter.  Most of my students cannot just write something on demand.  They need a lot of prewriting help, graphic organizers, help with reading instructions.  Teaching is complex.  I know most people out there who are not in the classroom don’t believe it.  They remember their school experience in which someone stood in front of a classroom and fed them information.  These people probably were good students, on grade level who could read and write.  The gap between my students thinking skills and their literacy skills is huge.  They are good thinkers, they have great ideas they have terrible literacy skills.  It takes years to close that gap.

These kids, if they’re there for one more year, will never recover in their entire lives.”
 
If he is the head of the DOE for another year the system may never recover!  He is blind to the fact that it is Mr. Bloomberg himself who is inflecting the damage. If only he didn’t have the teacher bashing, anti-union New York daily papers to help spread his propaganda!

Sounds like you’re doing all the “right” things, hopfully your school provides double periods of English, an Advisory class, and links the readings between the English and Social Studies classes … excellent teachers and school leaders in a collaborative setting are the essentials.

“These kids, if they’re there for one more year, will never recover in their entire lives.”

   This is borderline slander, IMO.  Maybe the UFT can get a restraining order on his mouth.

Bloomberg has given us a look at the darker side of his nature in the past few years, but a comment like this is almost beyond belief, and you know his lackeys
at the Daily News and Post are not going to call him on this kind of a statement because they have basically been printing the same stuff the past few days after being given their marching orders by Bloomberg’s PR assassins.

The principal at Lehman and her assistants really jumped the gun and did ignore everything, completely thinking that we were going to be “Throggs Neck.”. She has some connections, but will be let go down the road. She is hated. Lehman’s #’s are down down down.

Bloomberg is starting to look more and more like Bogart in the film classic the Cain Mutiny! How about Anthony Hopkins in The Bunker?

The issue cannot be stated any more clearly than you have done it, elaza, and it is always a topic of discussion in the teacher’s lounge, as we discuss the latest articles in the Post or News blasting our profession.

My added issue is that they now take most students, despite their reading or academic ability, and put them in one class, and we, as teachers, have to differentiate our course material (and evaluation!!) to adapt to this wide variety in skill levels.  

We are told that “tracking” students into classes of similar students is not a good thing, but I only see this as a form of macro-differentiation, one which allows teachers the freedom to deal with a relatively homogenous group of learners that we don’t have to prepare 3 or 4 readings for.

I’ve always thought that if we take this new approach to its logical and conceptual limit, we should get rid of all the specialized schools such as Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech, and allow these higher achieving students to be blended into “regular” schools.

Unfortunately, I don’t see things getting any better.

 To Nycdoenuts:Certainly we’re in agreement, and and when I read your comment last night I agreed with nearly all of it.

The issue was that how one of the details read seemed to give the wrong impression as to who’s to blame. I see where you’re coming from now, and I agree with what you meant by that statement.

Believe me, it’s clear to anyone watching that Bloomberg and the DOE (or as I have grown to call it: DOD, Department of Dysfunction) are the biggest hypocrites this side of the Hudson.

I don’t know which school you went to, but unless you have visited and looked at all the achievements and data, along with the wishes of the community, your comment really holds no water.

A “no child left behind policy,” and, IMO, the self-esteem movement of the past few decades has led us to the point where the people in power feel we are failing as schools and teachers if we don’t magically make everyone ready for college. Many parents (rightfully so) are also pushing their children to achieve more than they have, and in their eyes this means a college education.

I’m not sure there are as many good paying jobs available as you do.  What is a “good paying job” if you want to remain in the Tri-state area?

One issue is that post-industrialization America does not offer HS grads or dropouts the kind of steady union work with benefits that so many post WWII individuals were able to move into at some point. Many recent HS grads are going to have to scramble to find a job which will allow them to buy a house or raise a family without going into major debt at some point.

Heck, I was only able to get a house in Queens because of inheritance money, and I had been working as a teacher for many without having the ability to buy a home in the borough I work in.

Getting a college degree these days guarantees nothing but loan debt, so even if people do get degrees nothing is guaranteed, but politicians and policy makers still consider the college diploma to be some kind of holy grail that all students should aspire to.

…And so it goes.

 And don’t forget: he put back in term limits after he was safely in office.

 Yes, Newtown won along with your school in the Robotics competition.

According to the Newtown Robotics team, the teams from the more elite schools (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science) were absolutely livid that our schools won, since you know, it isn’t supposed to happen: teams from schools that have less than stellar reputations and are mostly working class should not best a school that students had to take a nerve-wracking test to get into (and, I suspect, has a student body that is mostly better off economically). As a result, the teams basically snubbed Newtown and did not show much good sportsmanship after they won.

Being familiar with such an attitude in the elite schools and having suffered because of it (I won’t say how in case of retaliation), the success the school had was that much sweeter.

But anyway, this goes right in line with what you were saying. My school, like yours, was improving under the restart model and won the robotics competition, which I thought they would consider before putting the school on the chopping block.

I just hope we all leave this madness relatively unscathed.

The City, aka, Michael Bloomberg,
is preparing legal action seeking a restraining order against the arbitrator’s
decision to keep the 24 schools open. Is he above all laws, rules and binding
arbitration? The mere act of thinking to overturn a binding arbitration on the
Mayor’s part is obstruction of justice!!! You are in fact hurting students and
communities with such reckless acting out behavior. You are too unreasonable.
Stop this nonsense already!!!!!!

No matter what the press is told, they are continuing to move forward with current plans. They have invested too much to abandon ship. They will not reverse what has happened unless the Supreme Court overturns the arbitrators decision. Even then, I’m sure they are working on a loophole that they will exploit to ensure that those teachers who would have come back don’t get to do so. That’s why your principal was not there – he/she already was directed not to return.

 If this is true, this is a huge violation.  Anyone else in any of the schools experience this as well?

Time to get out the pitchforks, storm the school, and reestablish order. In a more perfect world teachers and students would be at these schools now, making sure that things were being done right.

If there is no order stopping the reinstitution of the old regime, under what authority can the new principal and DOE staff be there and in charge?

Whatever you do teachers of turnaround schools, do not let Bloomberg intimidate you into not returning to your schools. If you do, you will be playing right into his hands. Whatever your story, put on your armor, go back to work, and fight for your students and your school. Not qualified? First, he mandates that all teachers must have Masters Degrees (which raises their salaries) and be certified in their subject areas. Then he decides that teachers’ salaries should come out of a school’s budget rather than the DOE budget, which makes principals less likely to hire an experienced teacher. He then decides to get rid of experienced, high-salaried teachers (which he created). Finally, in these “turnaround schools”, principals are allowed to hire teachers with no experience who are “working on” their certification. Something is rotten in the DOE.

She was talking about the “mean” (average) age. They had to let some younger teachers go so they wouldn’t appear to be biased. We, too, lost a few younger teachers, but most were older and/or had more than 10 years in the system.

After what he has done to the NYC school system, I can’t see why any young qualified teacher would even consider working under these conditions. I am truly grateful that I was able to retire this year. I can’t stand seeing what he has done to our schools and the effect it has had on the students I teach.