GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Parents and children hold a brief press conference to oppose the closure of P.S. 161's middle school.

At the same time that supporters of Satellite III were laying blame for their school’s decline Thursday night, backers of Crown Heights’ P.S. 161 said they were confident their new principal could reverse that school’s slide.

Three years ago, P.S. 161 was an in-demand primary school, with more than three quarters of its students performing at or above grade-level. This year, the school is under-enrolled, D-rated, and set to lose its middle school grades, according to a Department of Education proposal.

Citing the school’s low test scores, which show less than half of students passing state tests, and a steep drop in enrollment between fifth and sixth grades, city officials said truncating the middle school grades will benefit the school in the long-run. Without a middle school, they said, the school could focus efforts to boost achievement in the elementary grades.

“Let me be clear that the school is not closing,” Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg told the crowd of 70-some parents, students, and education activists peppered through the school auditorium. “We see the truncation of the middle school as an opportunity to focus on the existing strengths of the school and reinvest in what is working here.”

Parents and community leaders said the middle school remains a high point in a district with dwindling middle school options.

“The CEC is very concerned about what is going on in general in District 17 this January,” said Claudette Agard, a member of the elected Community Education Council for the district. “We have four schools on this [closure] list. We are not defending failure, but the failure that you are citing and you are speaking of is not under this leadership.”

PTA President Demetrius Lawrence, the father of two current students and one graduate, said the school’s new principal, Michael Johnson, has the skills to turn the middle school around but needs more time. (more…)

At a hearing for Satellite III's closure, audience members listen to an all-sibling quartet.

The fall of Satellite III began the day Kenyatta Reid resigned as principal.

That was the story told and retold Thursday night at a public hearing about the Department of Education’s plan to close the Clinton Hill middle school.

After six years as the school’s beloved principal, Reid was selected in 2010 to start a new middle school and, according to his supporters, the city replaced him with an incompetent placeholder. For the next 10 months, they said, professional development stalled, school culture crumbled, and any semblance of progress achieved under Reid began to vanish.

That critical 10-month period — and the poor marks that followed — would provide the evidence on which the city based its plan to close the school. Last year, just 19 percent of students were considered proficient in reading and 34 percent were proficient in math. The school got a D on its most recent city progress report. But before that, the school had never earned a failing grade and was safe under Reid’s leadership.

The interim principal during that period, Ronald Wells, came under fire from parents and teachers who said he was an absentee leader. Wells was removed as principal of Martin Luther King High School, which has since closed, in 2002 and has been an interim principal at several schools since then.

“I don’t want to give one man that much credit, but he was definitely a catalyst” for Satellite III’s slide, said Monique Smalls, a PTA member.

Even a trio of elected officials have come together to place the blame squarely on Wells for the school’s poor performance. (more…)

Ama Willock urges DOE officials not to close her son's school, Middle School for the Arts in Crown Heights

As Mayor Michael Bloomberg touted the success of the small schools opened during his tenure in his State of the City address, families and staff from one of them were preparing to fight the city’s closure plan.

The Department of Education opened Middle School for the Arts, or M.S. 587, in 2004 to replace M.S. 391, a much larger school that was persistently low-performing.

But the Crown Heights school never fulfilled its promise. Last year, only 13 percent of the 334 students met state proficiency standards in reading, and only 11 percent were proficient in math. In December, the city proposed to close the school.

That proposal drew about 40 students, parents and staff members to speak out at a public hearing in the school’s auditorium Thursday evening. They said the school’s low test scores do not accurately capture what happens there and argued that replacing the school again would not solve its problems.

The hearing kicked off a three-week sprint of hearings the city has scheduled at each of the 25 schools it proposes to close or shrink this year, 11 of them middle schools. More hearings could be added to the docket if a plan Bloomberg announced in his speech — to close 33 struggling schools, at least in name, in order to retain federal funds — moves forward. (more…)

Teachers and parents from Canarsie's P.S. 114 carried signs at a Panel for Educational Policy meeting where the board was set to vote on the school's closure.

Threatened with closure when their school’s test scores sank, parents and teachers at a Brooklyn elementary school quickly mobilized their local elected officials in their defense. The plan worked. At the last minute, the city pulled its proposal to close the school.

But not a month later, PS 114 parents and teachers are wondering exactly how much their school was saved. That’s because they’ve learned that the Department of Education plans to slash the school’s enrollment by roughly 200 students in the next three years to accomodate a new charter school. The charter school, Explore Excel, was originally supposed to help replace P.S. 114 as the school was slowly closed.

Currently, P.S. 114 enrolls 754 students in kindergarten through the fifth grade, but its enrollment has been on the decline. Last year, it had 844 students and the year before that, 887.

With a new charter school slated to open in the building next year, Department of Education officials have decided to trim the student enrollment further to make room for the new school to grow. (more…)

The city is postponing tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy vote on the last of its 25 proposals to close district schools this year.

City officials announced today that the school board would wait to vote on the proposal to shutter Queens’ I.S. 231 Magnatech until its March 23 meeting. It’s the second proposal the city has dropped from tonight’s agenda. Yesterday city officials announced that they were abandoning their plans to close P.S. 114, which was also scheduled for a vote tonight.

The panel was originally scheduled to vote on the proposal at one of last month’s marathon meetings dedicated to the city’s closure plans. The city delayed the vote after the legally-mandated public hearing to discuss the plans at the school in late January was disrupted by a snowstorm. The city then agreed to hold a second informal parent meeting, which was cancelled, again because of bad weather.

That meeting was rescheduled for last night, but the district’s parent council members did not attend. Parents told the city they wanted a more thorough meeting that included the district representatives and members of the school’s leadership team, and city officials agreed, said Department of Education spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld.

With little more than a week to go before the citywide school board votes on a Brooklyn elementary school’s closure, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is entering the debate over the school’s future.

Canarsie elementary school P.S. 114 has been one of the most controversial stories of this year’s school closure season. Teachers and parents at the school have argued that the Department of Education caused their schools’ problems when it installed a principal who overspent her budget by $180,000. (more…)

City officials came the closest they’ve gotten to acknowledging the Department of Education’s role in a Brooklyn school’s problems on Friday when a deputy chancellor said he was aware that teachers and parents feel abandoned.

Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky spoke at P.S. 114 — a Canarsie elementary school the city hopes to phase out next year — after more than two hours of parents and teachers testifying that the DOE ignored the school’s problems. Though they’d petitioned the city to remove a principal who overspent her budget by $180,000 and was hiring unnecessary staff, Maria Pena-Herrera wasn’t forced out until 2008. Now, the school owes the city thousands of dollars and has seen its students’ test scores plummet in the last year.

Polakow-Suransky responded to the outpouring of anger by telling parents that the city hasn’t made a final recommendation to close or keep P.S. 114 open.  (more…)

As the snow began to fall last night, Chancellor Cathie Black headed to Harlem’s I.S. 195 to attend her first public hearing at one of the 25 schools the city wants to shutter.

The city has been holding hearings at each of the schools slated for closure all this month in advance of next week’s Panel for Educational Policy vote on the plans. At some of the closure hearings, city officials have faced off with angry, passionate crowds protesting the city’s plans.

Black did not see that anger at last night’s meeting, which no parents attended, reported WNYC’s Beth Fertig. The bad weather may have discouraged turnout, but the school’s chapter leader also told Fertig that the school has struggled with parent involvement and the city’s teachers union has not mobilized to challenge the school’s closure as it has elsewhere.

Earlier this month, Black paid a visit both to both I.S. 195 and the charter school that shares the building, KIPP Infinity. The district middle school, whose progress report grade dropped from a B to a D last year, was the first school school slated to close that Black visited. The city plans to use the space vacated by I.S. 195 to re-site KIPP’s high school and open a new district middle school, though the details of the plan have not yet been announced.

After the hearing, Fertig and a few other reporters got the chance to speak with Black. The chancellor discussed why city officials made the decision to close 25 schools this year, last week’s rowdy PEP meeting, and her decision to delay planned special education reforms by a year.

Here’s the full audio and a transcript of their conversation. Fertig’s full report on the meeting is available here. WNYC and GothamSchools are partnering on The Big Fix, an ongoing series examining the city’s efforts to improve low-performing schools.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Reporter: So Chancellor, I just wanted to know first of all, why did you decide to come tonight?

Black: I think it’s very important. You know, I will attend as many meetings as I possibly can. Last night I did a town hall, tonight a joint public hearing, next week we have the two panel meetings.  It’s all a part of being the chancellor, of reaching out, of being – hearing what’s on people’s minds. I mean, we — these are hard, I mean, this is a difficult — it might have been a quiet evening but it’s still difficult for everybody. (more…)

The 25 schools the city is trying to close are low-performing, but their students are among the city’s most challenging — and are only getting needier over time.

Those are the findings of a report released today by the Independent Budget Office, the city’s data watchdog.

City officials argue that these low-performing schools should be closed because other schools serve similar student populations with better results. But critics of the closures often counter that the schools were set up to fail after the city sent them comparatively larger numbers of under-prepared, special needs and English language learning students.

The report confirms that many of the schools slated for closure have been enrolling increasingly high percentages of the city’s most challenging students since 2005.

In 10 of the 14 high schools on the closure list, for example, ninth-graders who entered the school in 2009 arrived with lower scores than their predecessors in 2007. The percentage of students entering the schools overage has grown to more than double the citywide average. (more…)

City officials often defend their strategy of replacing large, struggling high schools with smaller ones by arguing that it’s the only proven way to boost student achievement in those schools.

Today, a top official in the office that supports schools as they phase out said that the reasons for why that strategy works remain a mystery.

At a City Council hearing today called to discuss how the Department of Education monitors students in schools as they phase out, officials argued that as schools closing shrink by a grade each year, students receive more individualized support from remaining staff members.

Josh Thomases, the Deputy Chief Academic Officer of the DOE’s school support division, cited a 2005 New York Times story that described the final years of Morris High School in the Bronx, when students reported receiving more individualized attention as the school shrank. The piece recounts an incident in which a student left school one day, forgetting that she had a second Regents exam to take that afternoon. An attendance teacher was dispatched to pick up the student as she got off the bus near her home. (more…)