GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Reversing a previous proposal, the Department of Education will award credit to city high schools whose students enlist in the military or enroll in “rigorous” career training programs the year after graduating.

This fall, the department is preparing to factor students’ post-graduation outcomes into schools’ annual progress report grades. When officials first devised the new metrics, which will augment performance data of students who are enrolled in the high schools, they proposed giving credit only for students who enrolled in college the semester after graduating.

In a series of feedback sessions earlier this year, principals pushed back against the narrow scope of the proposal. They argued that students who meet the military’s enlistment standards have been adequately prepared for life after high school as well.

This week, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced that the department agreed with the principals — and would liberalize the metric even more by granting credit when students enroll in vocational training or public service programs such as AmeriCorps.

“This new version of the metric will reflect the diverse pathways our students pursue after graduation that lead to meaningful careers,” Walcott told principals in a weekly email message sent last night.

The switch was part of this year’s final revisions to the methodology behind the progress reports, which the city uses to decide which principals to reward and which schools to shutter. (more…)

The system the city uses to award letter grades to schools is complicated and in some ways flawed — but it’s the best system we have.

That’s the conclusion of a report by the Independent Budget Office, the city’s budget watchdog that since 2009 has been charged with scrutinizing Department of Education data. The office examined the city’s progress reports, released annually since 2007, to see whether their underlying metrics produce meaningful results.

The progress reports were meant to radically reorient the way that New Yorkers thought about school performance. Instead of assessing schools simply by the proportion of students passing state tests, the progress reports focus on students’ improvement from year to year. In a precursor to the “value-added” measurements now being used to assess teachers, the reports use a complex and evolving algorithm that controls for student demographics to calculate just how much students have progressed.

The city then assigns each school a letter grade based on its score. The letter grades inform both the city’s decisions about which principals should receive bonuses and which schools should be considered for closure and families’ choices are where to enroll.

The IBO concludes that the progress reports offer a more sophisticated analysis of school performance than ever before — but that there is room for improvement. “The methodology used by the education department is a significant improvement over simply basing measures on comparisons of standardized test scores,” the report concludes. “Still, the School Progress Reports have to be interpreted with caution.” (more…)

The results of the Department of Education’s learning environment surveys, due tomorrow, aren’t likely to go public until June. But Catina Venning, the executive director of Fahari Academy Charter School, doesn’t want to wait. Since the start of the year, she has been polling Fahari’s families monthly about their satisfaction and tweaking the school’s practice in response.

She launched the polls after Fahari scored a B last year on the section of the progress report that counts survey results — the “environment” section. Looking closer, she found the source of the problem: parents had graded the school poorly for communication.

“We looked at our survey from last year and the numbers were a little bit lower than they were in our first year and that was not pleasing to us at all,” Venning said. “We want to make sure parents are getting the services they’re signing up for.”

The new mini-polls’ instant feedback has already led to some changes. After only 55 percent of parents reported receiving weekly phone calls from their child’s advisors in a fall survey, Venning issued a course correction. Soon, advisors were submitting weekly contact logs to administrators, and parents were receiving not only more frequent reports but also weekly newsletters.

The polling is part of a larger outreach push that includes a new director of family engagement and a parent she’s brought on staff to work with families after school. (more…)

The principals of top-ranking city schools got their annual bonuses today, adding as much as $25,000 to some school leaders’ pay.

The bonuses, guaranteed under a city agreement with the principals union, went to administrators at schools with the highest scores on the city’s progress reports. A total of 275 principals and their assistant principals received bonuses totaling more than $5 million.

The bonuses went to the principals of some of the city’s most selective schools, such as the Anderson School for gifted students and Staten Island Technical High School, one of the city’s specialized high schools. But they also went to administrators at schools that serve low-performing students, including eight transfer high schools, which had their own bonus division.

In at least a couple of cases, the bonuses went to principals who have gotten into hot water. Darlene Miller, the principal of the NYC Museum School, received a bonus despite being arrested for driving drunk over winter break, as did Ling Ling Chou, who was removed as the Shuang Wen School’s principal last summer amid multiple investigations. (more…)

Click on the chart for an expanded view.

A handful of the high schools the city wants to “turn around” are already doing a better-than-average job at preparing students for college. (more…)

Two weeks after receiving the surprise news that their schools could close this June, some teachers are staging protests while others say they are too stunned to respond, for now.

At Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx, Ann Looser is hoping fifty to 100 of her fellow teachers will stay after school tonight to protest city plans to “turn around” Herbert H. Lehman High School. As Lehman’s union chapter leader, Looser has led efforts to raise awareness about the city’s plan to “turn around” the school. Under the plan, which the city devised to keep federal funding despite a breakdown in negotiations over teacher evaluations, 33 low-performing schools would be closed and reopened after having half of their teachers replaced.

At Lehman, Looser and her colleagues have been trying recruit families, local politicians, and journalists to attend tonight’s “early engagement” hearing. The goal, she said, is to convince the city not to upend progress that the school had been making with the help of federal funds.

Under “restart,” Lehman had used the funds to offer credit recovery programs, peer mentoring, and extra training for teachers, Looser said. She said the extra help came at an important juncture, just as a new principal arrived after years of turmoil that included a grade-changing scandal. Purging the school’s teachers would set those efforts back, Looser said. (more…)

Samuel Gompers High School, one of 19 schools slated to close, was quiet before dismissal Friday afternoon.

Some of the teachers at Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School held their breath when administrators called them into the school’s music room shortly after third-period this morning. Moments later, officials from the Department of Education and the teachers union announced that Gompers would be one of 19 schools the city tries to close this year.

Gompers’s progress report card grade dropped from a C to an F this year. But even last year city officials had flagged the school for its low performance, making it one of a handful of schools eligible to receive federal school improvement grants. When Gompers wasn’t selected for the funds, some predicted that closure would become a more likely intervention for the school.

The news still came as a surprise for three teachers I spoke to today, who asked not to be identified because they were instructed not to speak to reporters.

“It came as a complete surprise to us,” said one technology teacher. “Our school management team told us they had a strategy and as long as we followed it we’d be okay.”

The teacher, who has been at the technology-focused school for nearly a decade, said this year administrators told teachers to document all of their lessons diligently and collect more data on student improvement — policies that rankled some more experienced teachers. (more…)

Behind the letter grade that each city high school received this week is a mess of data.

Progress report scores take into account everything from how many ninth-graders earned six credits in academic courses to the number of overage students to the relative performance of students with special needs. The city’s spreadsheet containing the underlying data for the progress reports runs to more than 200 columns.

We sorted and re-sorted the spreadsheet to look at the city’s measures of school quality in different ways. Here are some of the most interesting things we found.

The top five highest-scoring schools include three schools for new immigrants (marked with asterisks):

Brooklyn International High School (Brooklyn)*
Manhattan Village Academy (Manhattan)
It Takes A Village Academy (Brooklyn)*
Williamsburg High School for Architecture and Design (Brooklyn)
Manhattan Bridges High School (Manhattan)*

The top five lowest-scoring schools:

Manhattan Theatre Lab High School (Manhattan)
High School of Graphic Communication Arts (Manhattan)
Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School (Bronx)
Herbert H. Lehman High School (Bronx)
Freedom Academy High School (Brooklyn)

Seven schools didn’t get progress reports after their data raised red flags with department officials: (more…)

Yesterday’s high school progress reports release put 60 schools on existential notice.

Fourteen high schools got failing grades, 28 received D’s, and another 14 have scored at a C or lower since at least 2009 — making them eligible for closure under Department of Education policy.

In the coming weeks, the city will winnow the list of schools to those it considers beyond repair. After officials release a shortlist of schools under consideration for closure, they will hold “early engagement” meetings to find out more about what has gone wrong. City officials said they would look at the schools’ Quality Reviews, state evaluations, and past improvement efforts before recommending some for closure. Last month, they said they were considering closure for just 20 of the 128 elementary and middle schools that received low progress report grades.

The at-risk high schools are spread over every borough except for Staten Island and include many of the comprehensive high schools that are still open in the Bronx, including DeWitt Clinton High School and Lehman High School, which until recently were considered good options for many students. They also include two of the five small schools on the Erasmus Campus in Brooklyn and two of the three  small schools that have long occupied the John Jay High School building in Park Slope. (A fourth school, which is selective, opened at John Jay this year.)

They include several of the schools that received “executive principals” who got hefty bonuses to turn conditions around. (more…)

In the past, Department of Education officials have cheered when schools posted dramatic progress report gains. Today, they touted the scores’ stability.

Last month, DOE officials attributed new stability in elementary and middle school progress report grades to a refined formula that offered the most accurate portrayal yet of each school’s performance. They gave the same explanation today for why 90 percent of high schools kept the same grade from last year or changed by just one level.

Another 9 percent of schools varied by two grades, going, for example, from a D to a B. Just five schools’ grades changed by more than that.

Satellite Academy High School posted the most spectacular climb, jumping all the way from an F to an A. But DOE officials attributed the size of the gain to a technical change: Low-scoring Satellite Academy had been broken into multiple small schools, with one retaining the name and identification number. That small school received the A this year.

Four schools shot up or down by three letter grades.

Brooklyn’s School for Global Studies, which began federally-funded “transformation” last year, saw its grade rise from an F to a B. When GothamSchools spoke with Principal Joseph O’Brien last month, he said he attributed the school’s gains to spending on technology and teacher training, and to a new emphasis on test performance. (more…)