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A few weeks ago I sat in the library at Christopher Columbus High School and listened to a Department of Education official explain to our confused and upset parents that closing our school would actually benefit their children. The official argued that the school’s closure would actually increase students’ chances of graduating, rather than damage them.

This seemed a counterintuitive idea to me, so I decided to dig into the data. The DOE keeps a wonderful public archive of graduation and dropout data in longitudinal reports. I looked at what happened to students at Bronx high schools Roosevelt and Taft during the years they phased out, and compared them to Columbus and John F. Kennedy along with city averages.

Why did I focus on these schools? I began my career as an English as a Second Language for seven years at Kennedy. In 1999 I was invited to become a staff development specialist for the DOE’s Office of Bilingual Education (later the Office of English Language Learners) and for two years I visited Roosevelt every Tuesday and Taft every Wednesday to support their bilingual and ESL teachers. Then in 2002 I moved to Columbus, where I’ve worked as teacher and UFT Teacher Center staff. Looking at these four schools provided me a glimpse into the sad unraveling of the places I spent my career.

First, I took a look at the 7-year longitudinal studies — those showing the ultimate outcomes for students who entered Taft and Roosevelt in the last four years the schools admitted students. In both cases, graduation declined for the first couple of years by a small amount, with the final two cohorts doing significantly worse. Roosevelt graduated only 17.6 percent of the students who entered in 2002, and Taft graduated just 29.5 percent of them. These outcomes did not compare favorably with either the citywide average for those years, or schools currently on the chopping block, Columbus and Kennedy.

Conversely, I took a look at dropout rates for the same cohorts. Here we see rates in the closing schools rising to the point where, in the final cohort, over 80 percent of the final cohort at Roosevelt dropped out, and over 70 percent of the final cohort at Taft. (more…)

Students at my school who travel long distances come to school less often, I concluded earlier this month. But what does their commute mean for their academic achievement?

In the second phase of my study, I examined how the length of a student’s commute relates to his academic progress. Again, I looked only at the self-contained special education students at my school, Columbus High School in the Bronx, and I used credit accumulation as the tool to measure progress. My results show that the negative impact of a long commute on attendance is magnified when looking at credit accumulation.

Here’s the bottom line:

Having looked at these numbers and through the raw student data, I noticed that for the students traveling farther to school there was a subset of students outperforming others — the students taking work-study programs or internships. (more…)

With funding for student Metrocards on the line, students’ commutes have been a hot topic lately. But is it good for students to be commuting long distances?

I do not doubt that a great many students across the city travel long distances to attend a school they feel are the best fit for their needs. But students don’t always take on long commutes out of choice. Suspecting that lengthy commutes actually hurt many of our most vulnerable students, I undertook a study into attendance statistics that suggests that it might be better for some students to have a shorter trip to school.

The Background

We already know that enrollment patterns have an impact on progress report grades and contribute to the low scores received by schools that have been slated to close. Three years ago, I noticed a relationship between self-contained special education students (high-needs students requiring smaller classes) and progress report grades: Schools receiving poor grades serve far higher percentages of self-contained students.

In the last few months, I have looked deeper into these patterns within the Bronx, trying to understand the increasingly high concentrations of self-contained special needs students within the remaining large high schools (see the details by district here). I hypothesized that this ongoing shift was also not good for the students, who were being assigned to travel increasingly far to get to school as their neighborhood schools closed. I sought research on the relationship between commute and achievement for these most vulnerable of students, but kept coming up empty. (more…)

Christine Rowland is a teacher and professional developer at the UFT Teacher Center at Christopher Columbus High School. She has been at Columbus since 2002.

On Monday, a team from the Department of Education walked into Christopher Columbus High School to announce that it would be closed. It was a profoundly upsetting day for our entire community (on Pearl Harbor Day, as Columbus’s UFT chapter leader Donald March pointed out). I would like to take this opportunity to address the issues surrounding this decision and to appeal for a reversal.

Until several years ago, Columbus was a school that contained a diverse student body not only in terms of races, nationalities and language backgrounds, but also abilities. In 1998, 41-56% of the entering freshmen and sophomores were on grade level in reading and math at entry. By 2005, this number dropped to 5.9% of entering freshmen in reading and 14% in math. (more…)