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Students and parents rally outside Cypress Hills Collegiate Preparatory Academy today. Photo by Emma Hulse.

Less than six years old, Cypress Hills Collegiate Preparatory School is the small-schools dinosaur on its campus — and it could be on the verge of extinction.

After just barely escaping an F on its latest report card, the DOE placed Cypress Hills Collegiate on a shortlist of schools that could be shuttered due to poor performance. The school had gotten an F on its first progress report grade in 2010.

Today, students rallied in front of the Franklin K. Lane building, where Cypress Hills Collegiate shares space with three other schools, to defend their school. The protest was the latest in a series of events supported by the Coalition for Educational Justice, which has helped community members at a number of schools at risk of being closed push back against the DOE’s characterization that the schools are low-performing. On Tuesday, parents and elected officials representing 15 of the 47 schools will bring that message to the DOE’s Manhattan headquarters.

Before the rally, student organizers told me that Cypress Hills Collegiate would be more successful if there were more computers and elective courses and if students could use the building’s library.

“It’s not being used at all,” said sophomore Odalis Rojas about the library. Rojas belongs to the Future of Tomorrow youth organization run by the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, which founded Cypress Hills Collegiate. “It is there for no reason.”

Gabriel Cano, a senior on Cypress Hills Collegiate’s student government, said instruction had grown more challenging during his time at the school. But it had also become less interesting, he said, with budget cuts causing the school to cancel cooking and sign language classes and reduce extracurricular activities. (more…)

A screenshot from the Facebook event advertising a rally to support Juan Morel Campos Secondary School

Community meetings at schools that the Department of Education is considering closing have started attracting a new constituency: students.

That’s because the meetings, which the DOE calls “early engagement conversations,” are now being held at high schools. Until this week, all of the meetings had happened at elementary and middle schools, for which the city released a shortlist of potential closures in September.

One meeting took place Monday evening at Wadleigh Secondary School for Performing Arts, where some members of the school community are arguing that its progress report data aren’t bad enough to warrant closure. Last night, students made the case for keeping Manhattan’s High School of Graphic Communications Arts open. And today, students have recruited crowds to defend Juan Morel Campos Secondary School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Tiffany Munoz, a Juan Morel Campos junior who was student body president last year, said students were alarmed when they heard that the school could close and quickly invited hundreds of current and former students to a Facebook event, “Save Juan Morel Campos Secondary School (I.S. 71) From Being Closed.” Tonight, when the school’s superintendent meets with community members, 150 students who RSVPed yes plan to let her know that the school is a tight-knit community with a thriving arts and music program where teachers push students to do their very best. (more…)

This story originally appeared in Spanish in El Diario, which supplied the translation.

The city’s school system has a new person in charge of helping the parents of the 1.1 million children in public schools. The problem is that many have not heard of him since he was appointed last July.

After three months in his role as “chief parent” of the New York City Department of Education, organizations that defend parents’ interests said they have not yet heard from Jesse Mojica and do not have knowledge of his plans to improve the troublesome relationship between the department and families throughout the city.

Mojica was recruited in July by new Chancellor Dennis Walcott to occupy the $138,000 a year position as executive director of the office of Family and Community Engagement.

Placida Rodriguez, from the parent action group Make the Road New York, an organization based in Queens and Brooklyn, expressed her dissatisfaction at the little attention Mojica has paid so far.

“Basically I have had no contact with Jesse Mojica,” said Rodriguez. (more…)

For Natoshia Wheeler, the argument that schools do better when they have more resources is proven every night in her living room.

Wheeler has three children in Brownsville schools. Her youngest and oldest attend two low-performing schools that share a building, the General D. Chappie James Elementary and Middle School of Science, where she is PTA president. Her middle daughter attends I.S. 392, a selective middle school located just six blocks away.

Recently Wheeler’s middle daughter brought home a new laptop that her school provided, equipped with a tools for free online tutoring. The tools allowed her to complete complicated projects, such as building a model island with different biomes on it, that enthralled her siblings.

But at the Chappie schools, Wheeler said after-school programs have been cut, the art teacher was let go, and students can’t always bring books home to use while completing homework. What’s more, she said, the three-year-old schools are only just finding their feet after replacing P.S./I.S. 183, a perennially failing that closed in 2008. Last year, on their first progress reports, both schools got D’s.

So when the elementary school got an F and the middle school got a D on their most recent progress reports, Wheeler said she was not shocked — but she was surprised that the city said it was considering shuttering the school. The city has not yet announced any closures but has named 20 elementary and middle schools that are eligible according to the Department of Education’s guidelines. (more…)

Producers of a new documentary about parent activism say they aim to inspire parents across the country to press for change.

The film, “Parent Power,” traces the organizing story that emanated from an effort to improve a single Bronx school in the mid-1990s and resulted in the citywide Coalition for Educational Justice. Set to premiere on Thursday, “Parent Power” was produced by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, which has long supported parent activism efforts, in collaboration with FPS Video Productions. (The premiere, at NYU’s Cantor Film Center, is open to the public.)

Filmmakers Norm Fruchter, an Annenberg Institute policy analyst, and Jose Gonzalez, a parent activist from the South Bronx, gathered 15 years of footage and photography of parent organizing efforts. They also interviewed teachers union president Randi Weingarten, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, parent activist Zakiyah Ansari, and others involved in supporting the parents’ efforts.

I spoke with Fruchter, who told me about the making of the movie, the origins of its story, and his hope that parent activists across the country tune in.

JC: Where does this story begin?

NF: [In 1996,] parents at the New Settlement Apartments in the South Bronx were concerned about their local elementary school. (more…)

The city official in charge of closing schools and the union chief who has sued to keep schools open are both set to speak at a conference tomorrow about what can be done to help schools without shuttering them.

The conference, “Effective Alternatives to School Closings: Transforming Struggling Schools in NYC,” was organized by the Coalition for Educational Justice, the Alliance for Quality Education, and the Urban Youth Collaborative, all advocacy organizations. The event is meant to send a message to city policymakers that there are ways to reform failing schools without shutting them down, according to Ronnette Summers, a parent and CEJ member who helped organize it.

The city Department of Education has closed 117 schools since 2002 and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said this week that he plans to close additional schools, particularly middle schools, that do not meet the department’s standards.

“Every year there’s more and more schools on the closing list and that seems to be the only reform strategy that the Department of Education uses to improve schools,” Summers said. “People in places where they know [closure] is not working felt that it was important to bring it to New York City to let them see that there’s other ways to improve schools.” (more…)

In his first major policy speech, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott called for major changes to the ctiy's worst middle schools.

To shake middle schools from mediocrity, the city is turning to school reform strategies it considers tried and true.

In the next two years, the Department of Education will close low-performing middle schools, open brand-new ones, add more charter schools, and push more teachers and principals through in-house leadership programs, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced today in a 30-minute policy speech, the first of his six-month tenure.

For 10 schools, the city will ask for $30 million in federal funds to try a new reform strategy set out by the federal government, “turnaround,” in which at least half of staff members are replaced, Walcott said.

The efforts—which the city plans to pay for with a mixture of state and federal funds—are meant to boost middle school scores that are low and, in the case of reading, actually falling.

“People have tried and struggled with the complicated nature of middle schools for decades,” he said. “But the plan I’ve laid out is bolder and more focused than anything we’ve tried here in New York City before.”

Experts and advocates who helped engineer the last major effort to overhaul middle schools, a City Council task force that produced recommendations but short-lived changes at the DOE in 2007, disputed Walcott’s characterization. They said Walcott’s announcement reflects a change in style but not substance.

“Much of what he said is not new,” said Carol Boyd, a parent leader with the Coalition for Educational Justice, which has long urged more attention for middle schools. ”There is a definite party line, except Joel [Klein] wasn’t able to deliver it with the same believability that Chancellor Walcott does,” she said. Boyd sat on the task force.

“There’s nothing new [or] interesting about this plan,” said Pedro Noguera, the New York University professor who chaired the council’s task force and has spoken out against school closures. “It sounds like more of what they’ve been doing, shutting down failing schools.” (more…)

Since becoming chancellor in April, Dennis Walcott has made many public appearances but few policy pronouncements.

That’s set to change tomorrow morning, when Walcott is set to deliver the first policy address of his tenure, a speech at New York University titled “Why We Can’t Rest: How To Move the Middle.”

The city is mum on what exactly the speech will be about, but it’s clear that Walcott has spent some time talking about middle schools in the last week. On Thursday, he met with roughly a dozen principals of high-scoring middle schools — both district-run and charter — to ask them a question that has long bedeviled educators and policymakers: How to curb the performance drop-off that takes place after students leave elementary school.

The 2011 state test scores released last month told a familiar story: Middle school students scored proficient at a far lower rate than students in the elementary grades.

“We still need to increase our focus on those years,” Walcott said at the time.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the city has made improving middle schools a priority.  (more…)

A top Department of Education official butted heads with a parent this morning over the credibility of parent advocates, suggesting that advocacy groups do not reflect the views of “real parents.”

The dispute took place during this morning’s “On Education” panel, which GothamSchools co-hosted.

During a back-and-forth with Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch over the success of mayoral control in New York City, the DOE’s typically reserved chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said the complaints of parent advocacy groups are not as credible as the surveys the city collects on parent satisfaction.

“Ninety-two percent of parents report that they are getting really good service each year from their schools,” he said. “I would urge people before categorizing stuff based on the voices of politicians or specific parent advocacy groups that may not have had their needs met, to really look at the data about what real parents are saying.”

On the panel, William Thompson, a former city comptroller and prospective mayoral candidate, raised his eyebrows and appeared startled by the comment (1:55 in video). (more…)