Recent Comments
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Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The CCS do nothing to change the fact that American math education is a weed-out system that does not care whether students ever actually learn how numbers work.
Just like now, thousands and thousands of students are going to pass the tests, only to enter the next grade without actually learning the requisite prior knowledge necessary to understand what’s going on at the next level. Instead of taking the time to remediate, teachers will continue to be forced to teach to the next level’s test. And so, teachers will be fired, schools will be closed, students will drop out, and math will remain unattainable for the majority of the populace.
I teach high school math, and it’s depressing how little event the most adept students remember from their middle school math curricula. Fractions? Percents? Ha. I have lower achieving students in grades 10-12 that struggle to do single-digit arithmetic. They pass their Algebra Regents exams though, so who cares if they can multiply or not, right?
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Wouldn’t it make sense to give us examples of test questions linked to the Common Core? Why are they keeping teachers in the dark?
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Since parents and students are forced to select 12 schools and they can only attend one, isn’t the case that all NYC public schools have about 12x the applicants vs. seats?
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New York children are being victimized by a Balkanized instructional control mechanism. Ironically Bloomberg had it right when early on he advocated for a uniform curriculum — his mistake was choosing the wrong one, at the behest of the former Deputy Chancellor for Instruction Diana Lam (remember her?)
Now principals basically freelance without adequate supervision. District superintendents are toothless figureheads, and the networks and network leaders are beholden to the principals.
Without clear expectations, we are left with a formula for disaster.
And should anyone be surprised that NYC kids, exposed for years to constructivist math, are at a disadvantage and falling behind?
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No this is not no joke! Excuse me? I am so enraged as we sit here today on this morning where we see the front page of the newspapers and how the parents is begging to be in a charter school setting. HOw what you can say now? What? I cannot hear you! You are so upset that in a few short years we will expand and the it can be. Why else would so many parents want there kids in charters. We are the new gene generation and we have been sent to clean up the mess from the public educators who refuse to leave when they turn a certain age when they are not working right to support our youths. I got my pencil case and it represents my dedication. No one out there can admot the truth which is what the advanced ming knows which is the meaning that when we have arrived.
Stop hating the fact that you are washed up. The Sucess network is leading the way in environmental protection against the public zone. We are moving into your schools by the dozens. We have meetings all the time and we get free stuff besides pencil cases we get sharpeners and wooden stands with our names on it. plus we have a labtop. -
“Just ask any public school or the DOE for wait lists. Go ask a charter. If charters are using these names to claim demand and steal public money they should be required to make the demand lists public.”
Norm, are you saying that I can go to any public school and they’ll give me a list of the names of families on their wait list? I’m being serious; it’s not clear to me what you’re saying.
As for charters, have you ever asked a charter school for its wait list? Or for any of the information that you keep saying charters should disclose? I don’t understand why you’re not covering and following up on this on Ed Notes.
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As a parent, I can tell you that charters would be my absolutely last choice and only if there was not a decent public school for my children to attend. I don’t understand the appeal of charters. Why are we not all working together to make sure every child has an excellent public school to attend? Instead we are dividing our attention between public and charter. Why? If every public school was excellent then there would be no need for charters. Why isn’t that the goal? Proponents of charters seem to have given up on public education.
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These are excellent points. I don’t think this is an easy question, but I think the DOE should put out a periodic report laying out the data that they have along with important notes like the ones you mention.
Meanwhile, while I agree that demand is dependent upon options, I think it would still be very interesting to see demand subject to the current options.
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I’d love to see a thorough accounting of demand. I think the DOE should put out a detailed school-by-school report periodically. I haven’t seen that before, but let me know if it exists. I’ll continue to try to ignore the insults!
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I refuse to live in a world in which this is not a joke. Would that it were a more clever one…
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Well if it’s not whoever it ”I be working in” that school is teaching ghetto
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Ken
Your cardboard cutout figure is not farfetched. When one co-located public school started counting charter school lunched served to see it they matched the actual numbers the charter school ordered the lunch people not to release the info. As to your usual disingenuous “don”t we want more info on public and charter” give me a break. Just ask any public school or the DOE for wait lists. Go ask a charter. If charters are using these names to claim demand and steal public money they should be required to make the demand lists public. How much do you want to bet that will never happen? -
In order to get demand figures, you have to have choice. The DOE routinely shares out high school demand figures (see the annual HS directory). It wouldn’t be too difficult to do the same for middle schools in districts that offer choice. Only one district in the city offers district-wide choice at the elementary level. Other districts may have a few options that are non-zoned and some schools allow variances for non-zoned kids, but with many schools operating at-or-above capacity, you can’t get a real read on the demand that would exist if you eliminated zoning (which I don’t advocate at the elementary level BTW even though I support that for older kids — little kids should be guaranteed a seat at a school reasonably close to their home since they’re too young to commute independently).
If, for example, you opened up enrollment at P.S. 234 (Tribeca) or P.S. 321 (Park Slope) to any family that wished to apply, demand would skyrocket. Even if you opened it up to anyone in the home district exclusively, demand would skyrocket. So it’s not really fair to compare demand for those schools against elementary charters with current admissions policies as they are.
It might be interesting to look at the % of kids enrolled at an elementary school who live outside the zone. You wouldn’t catch people who straight up lie about their addresses, but you’d get an idea of how many families live in a more expensive home until their child starts kindergarten, then move to a cheaper place once their kid is enrolled because the DOE policy holds that once a child is in s/he can stay in a school till s/he graduates. This means that there are lots of families who really want a given school and who are willing to take on a long daily commute with their kids for several years after relocating to stay in that school. I know for a fact that there are elementary schools with 20-40% non-zoned kids enrolled. And many of those are overcrowded and even have waitlists for zoned children. That’s well above the demand for charter schools and might make for a decent comparison point.
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These figures are based on actual applicants per seat. I think they’re overstated somewhat because (as I said below) many parents try to maximize options for their kids and merely applying to a charter school doesn’t mean it’s the first choice for that family. But these aren’t the petition figures, so you’re misunderstanding that.
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This was a joke, right?
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Excuse me? My principal at the Sucess Charter is awesome. She is like a great person who really beleives in the kids. We love working here and are here for the kids. Not like in the public school systems where we got to hear that the way is bad for the parents and students how they get educated. We believe in the right to a good education and we don’t mind working long hours with being felt made to be good teachers. Just last week my principal gave us all a pencil case with the school logo on it. We get to keep our pens in this case and it makes us feel special and nice. The public schools I be working in never really gave me the power I need and never gave me a pencil case. Sometimes we get chicken and rice at night and invite the parents in to talk. We feed them so they know we love them and they also know that we know that they are all on welfare and want to see there kids get off welfare and not continue the trend from the generations. We are being the welfare reformers.
Charter schools will be taking over the area of the place where the city schools are being not operated right. The Sucess Charter schools have elite leadership and hire greatness teachers. I want to publically say that I am so weakend by the way the public school teachers behave. In charters, we don’t be allowing special ed kids here so let them all stay with the special ed teachers. -
I’ve heard that they actually use cardboard cutouts instead of real children in their classrooms. Seriously, though, it would be great if we could get better data on demand for all schools in the system, traditional and charter.
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DoEd is enthralled with consequences, so what are the consequences for an individual board member’s low evals? Could this be DoEd’s strategy to break elected school boards in favor of appointed (e.g., non-elected) school boards?
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The numbers on charter school demand are fiction. They hire people to stand at subway stops with a misleading petition of sorts about wanting choice in public schools and other ploys. If the press ever followed up on the people who supposedly want charters (try and get actual names — easier from the KGB) they would find the same kind of data that Bloomberg uses to make up his high school grad rates.
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This is a news aggregation. Other media outlets wrote about this issue and GS linked to the stories.
Also, I think you’d get a skewed picture of demand in traditional public schools if you tried to analyze it in this way, at least at the elementary level. If you had more choice in elementary school admissions, you’d see certain schools with outsize demand and others with low demand. I know your district has choice and analyzing that data would probably make for an interesting news story (hello journalists!) But absent that, most people send their children to their zoned schools and the only place you see demand-supply imbalance is through waitlists, which city papers and GS do write about.
Of course, all of this is a bit muddy because the waitlists for zoned schools tend to shrink when people get the results from private school admissions as well as GT and other choice programs (e.g., dual-language schools, things like the Children’s School in D15), and even charters. At the same time, the scope of charter demand is overstated because many parents will pursue all possibilities for their kids, but just because they participate in a charter lottery does not mean it’s their first choice by any stretch. I’m certainly going to look at the charter elementary opening in my district for my younger daughter, and I’ll probably end up applying just to keep options open, but even if she gets in, I think there is a 99% chance we’ll go to a district-run school, most likely our zone school. I just wouldn’t want to shut that option off in the event that our popular and somewhat overcrowded zone school has a waitlist and my daughter doesn’t get into any of the other choice/GT programs we apply to.
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It does seem to get a lot of attention considering charter school have large advertising budgets, almost entirely positive press, and still they only get about 7% of the public school population to apply.
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Thisis the second article on the number of families who have applied for a seat in an alternate school. How come you don’t do anything about the families who apply for seats on the public schools?
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How does the press have data regarding this investigation before the principals know anything about it? This doesn’t seem right to me on face value. If there are irregularities, why didn’t the DoE speak to the principals? Did the DOE go to the press first? I’m sure all these answers will be known soon enough.
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I challenge Arne Duncan to take a field test and publish his score! I challenge the governor and senators of every state to take their state’s assessment and publish their scores. My bet is that you’ll feel very differently about the painfully long exams you put our children through. You call it accountability; I call it corporate greed and political corruption.
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Our children are not there to searve Pearson, the schools and the state. Pearson, the schools and the state are there to serve our children. It’s about time parents have a say in the education of our kids since we’re footing the bill for Pearson and state blunders! Who’s monitoring Pearson? Is anyone at the DOE checking Pearson products before they’re inflicted on our kids? Our does the DOE just mindlessly pay the bill with our hard earned tax dollars! Who’s overseeing the DOE? Where’s the accountability in the government which requires it from our schools and teachers!
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