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The students who enroll at new small schools are not always just like those who enrolled at the large high schools they replaced, a new study has found.

The study, by Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and Jennifer Jennings, an assistant professor at New York University, confirms Jennings’ earlier analysis of student enrollment patterns on the Evander Childs High School campus. But it also suggests that when it comes to who enrolls, not all new small schools are alike.

“New small schools don’t look that different overall. But the ones that replaced large schools do,” Pallas said last night at a presentation sponsored by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg called for an end to social promotion for the city’s fourth and sixth graders this morning, a change that would expand one of the most hotly debated education policies of his tenure.

At a press conference this morning, the mayor and Chancellor Joel Klein called their efforts to end social promotion “a great success,” citing rising test scores and the decreasing number of students enrolled in summer school. Ending social promotion means that students who do not meet proficiency standards on state tests are held back until they do. Some of these students attend summer school and are bumped to the next grade in the fall when they pass the exam, while others can have waivers signed that let them out of retention program.

Bloomberg said that once the citywide school board is reconstituted, he would ask it to end the policy in grades four and six — the only remaining tested grades in which social promotion is still in practice. In 2004, when several board members told the mayor that they would vote against ending third grade social promotion, he had them removed and replaced overnight with people who supported his policies. The event is commonly known as the “Monday Night Massacre.”

Standing in the library of the Patrick Henry School (P.S. 171) in East Harlem, Bloomberg said that with the new retention policy, “kids will either learn what they need or teachers will know they haven’t learned.”

Asked about researchers’ claims that retention policies can raise the dropout rate, Bloomberg said he was “speechless,” adding, “It’s pretty hard to argue that it does not work.” Klein said that since 2004, when the DOE ended social promotion for third graders, support for its end has been “unanimous.”

There is significant opposition to the administration’s retention policies, said Norm Fruchter, director of the community involvement program of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. (more…)

A Daily News report this week cast doubt on the validity of the state’s math scores. A major problem the News pointed to is that the math tests seem to repeat themselves, broken-record style, making it easy for teachers to coach their students on how to give correct answers — without necessarily understanding the underlying math. A second problem is that the tests may be getting easier over time, the story said.

Here’s a graphical portrait of what this means in practice, courtesy of Jennifer Jennings, the doctoral student at Columbia University whose analysis informed the News’s story.

A math question seventh-graders answered in 2009:

A math question for seventh-graders in 2008:

And finally a question from the same test’s 2007 version, assessing the same concept, but in a much more difficult way: (more…)

Six years after Schools Chancellor Joel Klein vowed to crack down on a bureaucratic loophole that allowed principals to hide students’ failure to graduate high school, a new report (PDF) suggests that the loophole remains open and may be growing wider. The report calls for closer study of the students classified as “discharges” — departures from the system, but not dropouts — through steps including a state audit.

The report says that 21 percent of students who entered high school in 2003 both never graduated and were never counted as dropouts, instead falling into a category known as “discharges.” The percentage was up from 17.5 percent among the Class of 2000. The rate is especially high among special education students, and includes a remarkable jump in 2005, when the special education discharge rate shot up to 36 percent from 23 percent in a single year.

Students classified as discharges can include those who left the school system for legitimate reasons, such as moving to another state, deciding to enroll in an outside G.E.D. program, or death. But some advocates have argued that principals can also misuse the discharge code, entering students who simply dropped out in order to inflate their graduation rate artificially.

A recent audit of 12 high schools in New York State by the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, found that high schools classified students as G.E.D. discharges who did not actually enroll in a G.E.D. program. “As a result,” DiNapoli’s audit concluded, “the report cards understated the number and percentage of dropouts and overstated the percentage of graduates for some of the schools we reviewed.” The audit did not probe any New York City high schools.

Two persistent critics of the Bloomberg administration compiled the report: the executive director of Class Size Matters, Leonie Haimson, and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, Jennifer Jennings. Jennings was the author of the now-defunct Eduwonkette blog, whose analysis of New York City education data became (as I reported) a thorn in the Bloomberg administration’s side. The report is being released at a press conference this morning held by a third critic, the city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum.

City school officials were already disputing the report’s claims yesterday, before it had been released. (more…)

View the TV program here.

A new television look at Joel Klein’s reforms airing in Australia paints a mixed picture of the results for schools. While one Bronx high school explains how it has flourished under Klein’s leadership, the sociology graduate student Jennifer Jennings, who blogged under the alias Eduwonkette, urges Aussies to consider that school an exception, not the rule, in New York City.

The Australian education minister, Julia Gillard, has been eying Klein’s reforms as a model for her  work down under.

The new TV story, airing on Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service network, on a program called “Dateline,” focuses on Bronx Lab School, a small high school in the Evander Childs building the program calls the “poster child” for Klein’s reforms. Principal Marc Sternberg explains that the city’s move to give principals more freedom allowed his school to flourish.

“It is because the chancellor communicated very clearly to us what we had to accomplish, and then left the rest up to us,” Sternberg says. “If a school a decade ago was creative in some of the ways that we have been creative, they would have been breaking all the rules.”

But the documentary piece also visits Jennings, who argues that small schools like Evander Childs got advantages over other public schools in the kinds of students they admit. “I think that if you were under the impression that there was going to be a miraculous rebirth of your schools as a function of looking at a lot of the PR in new york city, you’d end up with quite a disappointed education minister,” she says.

Watch the full program here.

The education blog world is kicking off this last week before school starts by extending a warm welcome to Jennifer Jennings, the blogger formerly known as Eduwonkette. After she heard that other researchers were being accused of posting the incisive education statistics analysis she herself had authored, Jennings decided to shed her cloak of anonymity — in articles that appeared this morning in New York Magazine and Education Week, which hosts her blog. On Eduwonkette, Jennifer reveals herself in typically irreverent fashion: through a comic strip.

Jennifer is a graduate student in sociology at Columbia who has authored papers on “bubble kids” in Texas and on the impact of accountability systems on students and schools. For encomia, check out Education Notes Online, the Education Optimists, and the NYC Education News Yahoo group. It’s clear that, far from being a “con artist,” as a DOE spokesman recently called her, Eduwonkette Jennifer is actually a gifted scholar with rare interests in applying an on-the-ground mentality to her research and making her scholarship accessible and intelligible to those outside the academy. We’re thrilled to be able to offer some of her New York City-centered analysis here on GothamSchools.