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A plan to move a high school seven miles from its Williamsburg home has support from school leaders and students. But elected parent officials from its current geographic district and the one it would move to this fall say the plan is ill-conceived.

Members of both the Community Education Councils for District 14 and District 19 joined together at a public hearing Monday night to argue that the school’s high quality and focus on writing makes it a poor choice for the move.

Ever since the Department of Education announced it was considering moving Williamsburg’s Academy for Young Writers to East New York, members of the school community have given their endorsement. Under the plan, Young Writers would get space in a brand-new building and expand to include middle school grades.

“We’re excited about the opportunity described in the proposal,” Principal Courtney Winkfield said at a public hearing about the move Monday night, which drew about 50 people.

“In this current school year over 60 percent of our students come from East New York and Brownsville, and travel an hour each day. About 25 percent come from Crown Heights or Bed-Stuy, and travel an hour and 45 minutes to get here,” she said. “[The DOE] is taking a program that has served them for the past several years, and putting it in their neighborhood.”

But parent leaders in District 14, where the school is currently located but which supplies just 10 percent of students, said they don’t want to see Young Writers leave — in large part because a Success Academy charter school is set to move in under a DOE proposal. (more…)

When black and Hispanic students sit down to fill out their high school application forms, they tend to prioritize schools that are better performing and more racially diverse than their middle schools, which are on average, lower-performing and more racially isolated. But a study shows that the schools that actually accept them are more like the middle schools they come from.

That’s one of the findings in a study that tries to begin to understand the mysteries behind the city’s enormously complex high school selection process. Completed by New York University Assistant Professor Sean Corcoran and Teachers College Professor Henry Levin, the study was presented at a forum on high school choice at the New School today and also appears in the book Education Reform in New York City that was published this month.

Corcoran and Levin’s findings are interesting not only as an insight into why some students make the choices they do. They also add depth to the core claim of Mayor Bloomberg’s reforms: that by expanding students’ options for where they go to school, the quality of their education will improve. (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…)

Following on Randi’s heels, the city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, has a statement out on the New School report that found 20% of elementary school students missed at least a month of school last year.

Gotbaum’s take is that the problem stems from a lack of “institutional support” from the Department of Education, which is failing to support principals who want to increase attendance but don’t have the resources to do it.

The full statement:

The DOE plays hooky when it comes to a strong absenteeism policy. They are placing the blame on principals, but I go to schools all over the city, and I see principals who are trying hard to address the problem head-on. They want to lower the absenteeism rates at their schools, but they can’t do it without institutional support from the DOE. The DOE must do more to increase attendance monitors in high-need communities and provide resources and logistical support to help schools deal with language barriers when trying to reach parents and students at non-English speaking homes. And more should be done to help principals find creative solutions like working with CBOs that know the community and expanding school-based health care, so kids aren’t missing full days of school for a doctor visit.

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.