GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Soon after Department of Education officials informed administrators at Peninsula Preparatory Academy Charter School Monday that the school would close in June, Lisa George’s phone started ringing.

As a co-president of Peninsula Prep’s parent-teacher organization and a member of its board of trustees, George knew parents would want help figuring out what will happen to their children.

The city says the general plan for Peninsula Prep’s 350 students is for them to return to their zoned elementary schools next year.

For George’s son, a third-grader, that means P.S. 215 — one of the 19 schools the city said this year had performed so poorly that they should be phased out.

School officials said they would help families zoned for P.S. 215 and several other neighborhood schools that received D’s on their city progress reports to find other options. But choices might be hard to come by: Almost all of the public schools in Far Rockaway post state test scores that are lower than Peninsula Prep’s — one reason that the school has a waiting list longer than its roster of enrolled students.

Far Rockaway’s bleak school landscape has people familiar with Peninsula Prep confused about how it landed on the chopping block. (more…)

New York will get new terms for high- and low-performing schools — and new ways to define good and bad performance — under a proposed accountability plan designed to replace the requirements of No Child Left Behind.

The proposal, which was released in draft form late today and will be discussed by the Board of Regents on Monday, is the result of two months of planning in response to the Obama administration’s offer to waive some of the decade-old federal law’s requirements, including one that requires full proficiency by 2014. In exchange, states must to commit to prioritizing college readiness, setting guidelines for teacher and principal evaluations, and holding schools and districts accountable for their students’ performance on state tests.

Under the proposal, the bulk of the state’s testing program would remain unchanged. But elementary and middle school students would take science tests; the bar to be considered proficient on high school exams would be raised; and proficiency would be calculated not just by whether students met certain benchmarks, but by how much they improved.

Schools that fall short would not get extra funding to pay for tutoring services, an arrangement that has shown mixed results. Instead, they would get extra money to carry out more of the initiatives that the Regents themselves have endorsed, such as improving teacher training and revising curriculum standards.

Five percent of low-scoring schools would become Priority Schools and have to undergo federally mandated school overhaul approaches. Another 10 percent would become Focus Schools, and their districts would have to develop plans to improve them.

For the first time, school districts will be evaluated with the same scrutiny as schools were under NCLB.

“Since district policies often contribute to why schools have low performance for specific groups of students,” the proposal says, “districts must play a lead role in helping schools to address this issue.”

New York City, a district certain to house many Focus and Priority schools, will not be evaluated as one entire district, according to a provision. Instead, each of the city’s 32 districts would be evaluated based on state test scores for its schools.   (more…)

The Department of Education is giving a Brooklyn charter school with a history of trouble just weeks to fix its most flagrant violations.

We wrote in April that Williamsburg Charter High School had after a sharp enrollment decline.

Now, the city has placed the school on a one-year probation, saying it is “in material and substantial violation of its charter, and in serious violation of applicable laws and regulations.”

Those laws and regulations include ones governing management, finances, and the school’s relationship with the Believe High Schools Network — a relationship that the city says the school entered into illegally and must terminate within six weeks.

At least three of WCHS’s six board members are employed by the Believe network or one of the other two schools it operates, according to the letter, sent by Recy Dunn, head of the DOE’s Charter Schools Office, to the chair of WCHS’s board. “Any decisions made by the Board in regards to WCHS’s relationship with the Network would not be valid as those three members would have to recuse themselves; with only three voting Board members remaining, a majority vote decision would not be possible,” the letter states.

Whether the board actually voted on the Believe relationship is not clear: The board met only four times last year, instead of the required 12.

The letter also raises red flags about the school’s budgeting, pointing out that the school’s own reporting put current assets at about $509,000 and current liabilities — the amount for which it’s on the hook — at nearly $5 million. (more…)

Created by teachers at the High School for Telecommunication, DataCation collects and analyzes student data, rivaling the city's own database.

When he began teaching at a Bronx high school, Jesse Olsen found the school had a large blind spot when it came to taking attendance.

If a student came to class for the first half of the school day and then skipped out, she’d go down in the official record as being present for the full day. The information holes made it impossible for teachers to know what their students’ true attendance was like, Olsen said.

A new, sophisticated database known as ARIS, for Achievement Reporting and Innovation System, might have been just the thing to solve the problem. But the system only let schools see how many days a student had missed, not how many classes they were skipping.

So Olsen took matters into his own hands, drawing on his computer science training to build an attendance system for his school, Validus Preparatory Academy.  In doing so he joined a growing number of teachers who don’t rely on the city’s data tools to track student information.

Brought into the city’s public schools in 2008 as a major initiative of Chancellor Joel Klein, ARIS cost $80 million to make. It debuted at the same time that Klein began to ask teachers to keep close track of student data and use it to adjust their instruction. (more…)

Two elementary schools in the South Bronx, P.S. 161 and P.S. 277, are half a mile apart. They are both mid-sized, high-poverty elementary schools serving mostly Hispanic students. Last school year, both schools had similar percentages of their students passing state exams in math, reading, and science.

But under the city’s progress report card grading system, P.S. 161 was ranked in the top fifth of schools, and P.S. 277 was ranked in the bottom fifth.

Why? The reasons are highlighted in a new report whose authors examined each school in-depth.

Visiting P.S. 277, the report’s co-author Clara Hemphill found engaged students and energetic teachers. But its well-rounded curriculum — which teaches skills that are part of state standards but not tested on standardized exams — isn’t weighted heavily in the city’s report card accounting. The school also has a high poverty rate and lots of homeless kids, but the progress report system doesn’t count those students when determining whether the school serves a challenging population. (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein’s strategy of empowering principals while holding them more accountable for results helped struggling schools get better. But his A to F grading system is “deeply flawed” and needs improvement.

That’s the message of a new, incredibly detailed report from the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs.

The report is the result of a study of hundreds of schools, including in-depth interviews with principals and school visits. The authors focused especially on the Bronx’s District 7.

The report is being released this morning at a panel discussion featuring Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch; the Department of Education’s accountability chief Shael Polakow-Suransky; John Garvey, until recently the City University of New York’s liaison to the public schools; and MS 223 principal Ramon Gonzalez.

We’ll have more details after the panel. For now, here’s the report: (more…)

Comptroller William Thompson called the letter grades given to city schools “arbitrary” and said he would probably eliminate them if he is elected mayor. Thompson made the remarks in an exclusive interview with GothamSchools today.

The controversial reports assign each school a letter grade using a complicated formula that takes into account student test scores and responses to surveys. Critics of the reports have said that they are not statistically reliable and unfairly stigmatize good schools. Today, Thompson called the reports “foolish.”

“Information about schools is important,” Thompson told me. “I think that we’ve seen how arbitrary these letter grades are and I probably would not keep letter grades.” (more…)

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city's new accountability chief.

Accountability czar James Liebman is officially leaving the Department of Education, but he isn’t going far. From his office at Columbia University, he will help the city win federal stimulus money to boost the very programs he pioneered during his three-year tenure.

In an interview today, Liebman said he’ll go back to teaching criminal law this fall. But he’ll also help the department put together “the most powerful proposal” for federal innovation funds, he said. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that New York City’s accountability and teacher pay initiatives are top candidates for a $650 million grant program meant to spur innovation.

Liebman is leaving behind an accountability system that has divided educators and parents. ”I think [he] has forever changed the way this public school system thinks about accountability and the way public school systems around the country will think bout accountability in the future,” said Eric Nadelstern, the department’s chief schools officer.

But some principals reacting to the news of Liebman’s departure this afternoon showed relief. One laughed joyfully when she saw the city’s press release at an event today. Another jokingly wrote to a fellow principal, ‘No more progress reports?’

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the former principal who is replacing Liebman, said the basic tools created by the accountability office would not change. (more…)

After years of criticism that its school report cards are too difficult for most parents to understand, the city is redesigning the report cards that give each school a letter grade.

Starting this fall, the Department of Education will produce one-page progress reports that contain only the most important pieces of performance data about each school. The new reports are meant to deliver complicated accountability information “in a more parent-friendly way,” according to Phil Vaccaro, a representative of the department’s accountability office. Vaccaro presented a draft of the new report to the city school board yesterday.

The “progress report family summary” has the same content but a different design from the data-packed two-pager currently produced for each school. For example, instead of having eight different numbers to describe student progress, there is just one, the proportion of students who made a year’s progress in a single year.

A member of the school board, Dmytro Fedkowskyj, worked with the department to develop the new reports. ”We need to present them in ways parents can understand,” he said, adding that parents who misunderstood the reports could make misinformed school choices.

Critics of the progress reports said the family summary might actually be too simple. (more…)

Robert Tobias

The former testing czar at the old Board of Education, Robert Tobias, sometimes offers criticism of the accountability programs being produced these days at Tweed Courthouse. He’s also been hatching an accountability system of his own — this one to study the effectiveness of teachers produced by New York University’s school of education, where he now works.

Preliminary results suggest that teachers trained at NYU are getting above-average results in English, but they give students no extra boost on math tests, Tobias said last week at the educational research conference Philissa and I attended in San Diego. He also found that NYU-trained elementary-school teachers produced significantly greater results for students than middle-school teachers, and that the teachers get better as they become more experienced. The effect tapers off at between five and nine years into the job, he said.

Tobias’s results could provide one clue about what’s being found in an ongoing research project about teacher training programs in New York City. So far, that project has found that different programs produced different student results but has not named the programs that had the largest effects.

The results could also be important as alternative teacher training programs like Teach For America increasingly bring into question the need for traditional programs based entirely at universities. “As a dean I want to say I want to steal these three and have them do it at my school,” said Rick Ginsberg, who runs the education school at the University of Kansas, referring to the professors working with Tobias. “We’re fighting this battle all the time.” (more…)