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Chancellor Cathie Black showed what she has learned and what she hasn't in her first month on the job on NY1 last night.

Chancellor Cathie Black’s interview on Inside City Hall last night is worth watching in full. The interview exposes just how much Black has been able to absorb in her first month on the job — and how much she hasn’t.

In a moment first highlighted by NY1 education reporter Lindsey Christ on Twitter, Black declared, ”The public school system in New York City has been unbelievably successful since the birth of our nation.” She was responding to a question from host Errol Louis about why she chose to send her children to private rather than public city schools.

Black did not elaborate, but the statement is confusing given that public schools in New York City did not emerge until the early 1800s.

Another moment of exposure had to do with teacher attrition. After a discussion about the “last in, first out” policy, Louis asked Black if she was concerned that almost half of New York City school teachers leave after 6 years in the classroom (PDF link).

Here’s how Black responded:

Well you have to know, like, what’s really at the heart of the issue. I don’t know that we know what’s really at the heart of the issue. Teaching is a hard job. We want the ones who are committed. We want the ones who make a difference. We want the ones who want to work hard and really change the lives of these young people. They’re there on a mission. So, you know, some are going to leave.

She then returned to the “last in, first out” question, arguing that perhaps teachers would be less likely to leave if they weren’t concerned about being laid off. “Right now there have to be a lot of teachers thinking, ‘Maybe I don’t have a job next year.’ Can we afford to have thousands of teachers think to themselves, ’I have to leave the system now because I may not have a job in a few months?’ That’s going to be a catastrophe,” she said.

For years, researchers have asked why teachers leave schools — particularly struggling schools. A 2007 paper by a group studying New York City teachers, the Teacher Pathways Project, summarized the major findings this way:

• “Teachers are more likely to stay in schools in which student achievement is higher and teachers — especially white teachers — are more likely to stay in schools with higher proportions of white students.”
• “Teachers who score higher on tests of academic achievement are more likely to leave,” as are teachers from out of town.
• Less-qualified teachers are more likely to stay at a school than teachers with higher qualifications, “especially if they teach in low-achieving schools.” (more…)

Today’s State Supreme Court decision in the lawsuit over 19 school closures appears to be good news for most of the 66,000 eighth graders who have been waiting for months to find out where they’ll go to high school.

But for the 8,500 students who applied to one of the 14 high schools the city tried to close this year, there’s little guidance in the 14-page ruling.

The ruling adds even more confusion to an already complicated high school matching process. It doesn’t explicitly tell the city to release high school placement letters, originally set to go home Wednesday, to students who didn’t apply to any of the schools whose closures were contested. But it also says that the court doesn’t intend to prevent most eighth-graders from finding out their placements. (more…)

The New York State Department of Education has singled out 34 New York City public schools, most of them large high schools, that it believes should be replaced.

Many of the schools are already on the city’s to-be-closed list and others have had poor reputations and low grades on the city’s annual report cards for years. Now that SED has designated which schools are the bottom five percent across the state, school districts will have to submit plans to Commissioner David Steiner detailing which of four federally mandated plans they intend to implement.

The plans are a menu of sorts: four options the U.S. Department of Education believe can transform “persistently low achieving” schools into success stories. Before the list came out today, state officials said they planned to replace many of the schools with charter schools, a proposal that could be severely delayed by the state legislature’s recent decision not to lift the state’s charter cap.

Long before the list came out, Chancellor of the Board of Regents Merryl Tisch said the state’s choices would not be controversial. (more…)

In the last round of school closure announcements for the year, the Department of Education said today that it intends to close three more high schools starting next year.

The three schools are Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education School, a vocational school in the South Bronx; Monroe Academy for Business/Law, one of five small schools on the Monroe campus in the Bronx; and the School of Business, Computer Applications and Entrepreneurship, located on a Queens campus where two of the other three schools began phasing out this year.

The announcement brings to 20 the number of schools the department plans to close next school year, with high schools making up 15. A DOE spokesman, William Havemann, said the department does not plan to propose any more school closures this year. (more…)

In the most sweeping round of school shuttering this year, the Department of Education announced today that it intends to phase out nine more schools, eight of them high schools and three of them opened under Chancellor Joel Klein.

The schools slated for closure today include large high schools in every borough except Staten Island. Paul Robeson High School in Brooklyn, Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan, Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, and Beach Channel High School in Queens all will not accept new students for next year, provided that the city school board approves the closures next month. Together, the four schools have nearly 6,000 students.

Beach Channel received attention in 2007 after students and teachers complained about a destabilizing influx of students who had not chosen to attend the school but were placed there. Those students included many who would have been zoned for Far Rockaway High School, a large school nearby that has since begun to phase out.

Today’s proposed closures also include three schools that were opened by the current administration: (more…)

Jamaica High School, a long-beleaguered school in central Queens, is among four more schools the Department of Education today said it would phase out beginning at the end of the school year.

The other schools are the School for Community Research and Learning, a Bronx high school; the Academy for Collaborative Education, a middle school in the Bronx; and PS 332, a neighborhood K-8 school in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. All four schools have poor state test scores and problems maintaining enrollment and discipline, according to the department. They join four other schools whose proposed closures were announced yesterday.

According to the school governance law passed in August, the proposed closures must be given public hearings and approved by the city school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy. The panel has never rejected a DOE policy proposal.

At more than 1,500 students, Jamaica is the largest school the department has so far this year indicated it would close. It has jumped on and off of the state’s list of “persistently dangerous” schools, and its graduation rate has hovered below 50 percent. This year, it has more than 500 ninth-graders but fewer than 200 twelfth-graders, according to DOE enrollment data. (more…)

The city’s Department of Education announced plans today to close four public schools that the department believes are “failing” to educate students.

Citing the schools’ low graduation rates and poor scores on state standardized tests, the DOE said it would phase out two high schools and two middle schools next year. The schools are William Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn’s East New York, the Academy of Environmental Science Secondary High School in East Harlem, the middle school grades at Frederick Douglass Academy III in the South Bronx, and KAPPA II middle school in East Harlem.

Officially, the four closures must be approved by the citywide school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy, and be discussed in public hearings, in accordance with the city’s new school governance law. In the past, the department has told schools they would be closed without advanced warning, and teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said little had changed this year. (more…)

Two more schools have joined the list of schools being closed because of poor performance, the Department of Education announced today.

IS 116 in the Bronx and PS 241 in Harlem will both phase out beginning at the end of this school year. Their youngest students will be assigned to new schools in the same locations, while older students will stay on until they graduate from their current school. This brings to 13 the number of schools so far slated to close at the end of the year.

PS 241 is the third school in Manhattan’s District 3 to be closed this year. After the DOE announced the second, PS 194, earlier this week, an active District 3 parent wrote to a Yahoo group for the district’s families:

This is the second time in a little over a week that the DOE has moved to close one of our schools without any prior consultation or heads up to the District 3 community. … it is imperative that every District 3 parent be concerned and voice your opinion about this.

IS 116 is just blocks from another closing school, PS 2, in the Morrisania section of the Bronx.

The tally of schools slated to close in June reached 11 today.

Parents at PS 198 in the Bronx, PS 194 in Manhattan, and PS/IS 72 in Brooklyn are learning today that the Department of Education is closing their schools at the end of the school year because of poor performance. Staff members learned about the closures yesterday, according to the DOE.

All three schools have low test scores and haven’t posted significant progress according to the DOE’s way of measuring improvement. Two of the them received D’s on their most recent progress reports; the third, PS 198, got an F. (more…)

The school closure count is now up to eight after the Department of Education broke the bad news at another school today.

Families at PS 2 in the Morrisania section of the Bronx learned today that their school will close in June. Students in the upper grades will phase out while children in the lower grades will get the first shot at enrolling next fall in a new school opening in the same location.

The Web site Insideschools notes that PS 2, never a very successful school, was destabilized when it moved into a shared building in 2005 to make room for two small high schools. For the last two years, it received a D on its DOE progress report, which the department uses to evaluate school improvement.

The news about PS 2 comes on top of three school closures announced last week and four more announced yesterday.