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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…)

Image courtesy of the Center for New York City Affairs

The City Council’s education committee this morning is taking up concerns that the city could be in for a rude awakening in the coming years as high school graduation requirements become more stringent.

In the past, students could opt for either of two diploma types: The local diploma requires scores of at least 55 on five state Regents exams, while the more challenging Regents diploma requires those scores to be 65 or higher.

Starting with this year’s ninth-graders, all students will have to earn Regents diplomas. Some advocates are warning that the state’s new requirement could slash the city’s graduation rate, particularly for needy students. They point out that if that requirement had been in place five years ago, the city’s graduation rate would stand at just 37 percent. (more…)

High school students are not the only ones missing school. Chronic absenteeism in the elementary grades is a major problem, too, especially in districts with a high concentration of poor and immigrant students (see chart), according to a report released this morning by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

Twenty percent of kids in the city’s elementary schools missed more than a month of school during the 2007-2008 school year, researchers found while investigating whether attendance systems put into place after the death of Nixzmary Brown are catching child abuse before it becomes deadly. In some schools, more than 40 percent of students missed that much school, making them “chronically absent.” The numbers vary widely across the city, as the but also within individual zip codes, the report points out.

Why does absenteeism matter? New research shows that kindergarten — which is not mandatory in New York State — is essential to academic success. “Among poor children, chronic absence in kindergarten predicts the lowest levels of educational achievement at the end of fifth grade,” concluded a recent report out of Columbia University’s National Center for Children in Poverty.

The Center for New York City Affairs report indicates that patterns of school non-attendance begin early in a child’s school career, said Clara Hemphill, the education reporter who was senior editor for the report (and who was also my boss for a time at Insideschools.org, the Web site she founded).

“The DOE has poured millions of dollars into reforming high schools, but this report shows that by high school much of the damage is already done,” she said.