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The rise of small high schools has decimated programs for students whose native language is not English, making the students more likely to drop out.

That’s the conclusion of a report released today by two watchdog groups that look out for immigrant students, Advocates for Children of New York and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The groups studied two large, low-performing high schools that the city decided to replace with small, themed schools and found that students who are classified as English language learners enrolled in smaller numbers in the new schools. Students who did enroll often did not receive the services they needed, the groups found.

What’s more, according to the report, most of the new schools are too small to offer a range of language services:

State law mandates that schools create bilingual programs if they enroll more than 20 students in the same grade who speak the same native language. The DOE has interpreted this mandate to mean that parents of 20 students in the same grade who speak the same language must “opt-in” to select a bilingual program – and that merely meeting the numerical enrollment threshold is insufficient. (more…)

Hundreds of Bronx teachers turned out on Friday to protest the high school principal they say is responsible for a 70 percent teacher turnover rate. In record time over the weekend, the Bronx division of the United Federation of Teachers produced a video about the event, which it coordinated.

Teachers charge that in the four years since Iris Blige has been principal of Fordham High School for the arts, a small school that opened in 2002, the school has run through nine assistant principals, four business managers, and more than 100 teachers. (This data point is in clear view on a protester’s poster in the video.) Blige replaced the founding principal, Sal Mazzola, who was removed after two years in charge because of poor performance, according to the school’s Insideschools review.

Fordham High School for the Arts' teacher turnover figures from its 2006-2007 state report card

According to the school’s most recent state report card, more than a quarter of all teachers left the school after the 2005-2006 school year, and the previous year the school lost more than half of all relatively new teachers. The UFT says turnover has only accelerated since then, with more than 70 percent of teachers leaving during the 2007-2008 school year.

Has President Obama finally picked a side in the education wars? Three prominent New Yorkers are worrying that he is at least leaning — and that it’s not in the right direction.

Deborah Meier, the respected small schools pioneer, said President Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan as education secretary “leaves me sad.” Today, Diane Ravitch, the NYU historian and Meier’s blogging partner, described Duncan as “Margaret Spellings in drag.” “This is not change I can believe in,” she wrote in Politico. And on Saturday, Ann Cook, another small-school movement doyenne, said she is also concerned about  Obama’s choice of Duncan.

All three women sympathize with the “Broader, Bolder” manifesto, which argues that schools alone cannot be expected to close the achievement gap and whose members are more suspicious of popular innovations such as charter schools and test-driven accountability systems. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein leads another camp, which strongly supports test-based accountability, the No Child Left Behind law, and charter schools. Klein’s Education Equality Project circulated a rival petition.

Obama made a point of not selecting a side in the debate. He chose two top education advisers, one from each camp. And he touted his chosen education secretary, Duncan, who had signed both petitions, as a pragmatist. But in the last few weeks, concerns about Duncan have begun to surface. (more…)

When I reported last week about the total review of special education that is set to start soon at the Department of Education, I noted that a complaint was pending with the U.S. Office for Civil Rights against the DOE’s policies about admission to its new small high schools.

In fact, the civil rights office actually issued a decision on the complaint that same day. Based on an interview with the parent leader who filed the complaint and data provided by the DOE, OCR determined that it is not possible to conclude that the DOE excludes students who require special education services or English language instruction from its new small high schools.

The decision comes two and a half years after David Bloomfield, a past president of the Citywide Council on High Schools, filed a complaint alleging that the DOE’s policy allowing small schools to exclude at their start some students with special needs violated those students’ civil rights.

Kim Sweet of Advocates for Children of New York told me last week that OCR generally rules on complaints quickly. But the ruling itself suggests a reason for the delay: In its decision, OCR cited DOE data that showed that after three years, small schools enroll a higher proportion of students with special needs than other high schools.

In a statement, Bloomfield said the longitudinal data reflect a victory for advocates for students with special needs:

While disappointed in this result, I believe we were successful in prodding the NYCDOE to provide greater  educational access to special needs students and English language learners. The almost 3 year process of OCR deliberations clearly allowed the NYCDOE to improve its record of high school admissions, so I feel we have made our point.

One of the books I read during my blogging vacation was “Those Who Dared: Five Visionaries Who Changed American Education.” The new volume, edited by Carl Glickman, contains autobiographical essays by five progressive educators. This week, I’ll be highlighting the most provocative observation made by each one.

First up is Deborah Meier, one of the progenitors of the small schools movement who founded an influential elementary school, Central Park East, in East Harlem in 1974. She went on to help create a host of non-traditional schools in the neighborhood and now teaches at New York University’s education school.

A proponent of play, democratic classrooms, and assessments other than standardized tests, Meier generally isn’t part of the education policy discussion dominated by fans of “no excuses” schools such as KIPP. But in her essay, she describes one challenge currently facing some “idealocrat” reformers: How to sustain innovative schools that are only barely able to exist in the first place. On that question, Meier doesn’t have much advice. She writes:

None of the schools I started were permanently protected from the standardizing influences that have surrounded them in the last 20 years. Above all, I never figured out how, in the world of here and now, such schools could survive without very particular conditions — strong godfathers, politically strong leadership, and few key politically hep parents. Sustainability, short of revolutionizing the entire system to one’s way of thinking or breaking free altogether of the public system, has eluded me.

We’re making like the students and taking a Thanksgiving vacation Thursday and Friday. Here are a few morsels to gnaw at when you finish the turkey.

• Inside Higher Ed makes the most complete list ever of Ed Sec possibles. (via Richard Whitmire)
• Diane Ravitch wonders about the distance between Good Intentions, Ignorant Elites, and Scoundrels.
• Did you know that I hurt my foot? Other facts about me are in this Alexander Russo interview.
• Kevin Carey reviews Malcolm Gladwell’s book, and quotes this passage on KIPP: “Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it…”
• Arne Duncan of Chicago is killing in Flypaper’s who-will-be-Education-Secretary poll.
• Liz Willen wonders what we can learn from a school where a tradition of dressing like pilgrims became controversial.
• Ed in the Apple gives four reasons New York City small schools have high graduation rates.

From an invitation advertising the retreat.

Here’s an interesting picture of how things happen at the Department of Education.

A while ago, a source told me about a retreat he attended at a hotel in Westchester, where the Department of Education invited a bunch of education people — especially small school and charter school leaders — to a hotel for a two-day community-building experience.

An invitation had promised discussion of “The Future of Our Work,” including a run-down of the successes and challenges of the Bloomberg administration’s school efforts. Successes included the fast expansion of small and charter schools, which the invitation concluded are out-performing traditional district schools and the reorganization of the school system with “schools at the center.” Challenges included the financial “sustainability” of partner groups that assist the schools; the requirement of sharing facilities with traditional public schools; and “Human Capital development.”

There was also a lot of worrying about what is probably a bigger potential obstacle: The possibility that, come 2009, when the state Legislature votes on whether to keep, abolish, or alter mayoral control of the public schools, the system could be organized in a completely different way. There was no question on which side the Department of Education stood. At the end of the first day, a group that is fighting for the preservation of mayoral control of the public schools, but which has said it has no formal ties to the Bloomberg administration, spoke about its political plans. Chancellor Joel Klein also gave a speech passionately declaring that the successes that have happened would endangered if mayoral control was abolished. (more…)

SEATTLE — One of the most interesting parts of the Gates announcement (detailed more in this Ed Week story that just went up) is not the new direction the foundation is taking, but the conclusions it has drawn about its old direction, which leaders are criticizing for not focusing enough on what happens inside classrooms.

What does this mean for New York City, where the explosion of small high schools has been largely bankrolled by Gates funding — and where efforts to improve the public schools have been focused mainly on structure, not curriculum?

Bill Gates suggested that the New York City small schools have been an exception to the overall disappointing results of small school projects, noting that in 2006 the schools’ graduation rates at small schools were 18 percentage points higher than the citywide rate. Then he thanked Chancellor Joel Klein, who was in the audience, and Mayor Bloomberg, who was not, for working with the Gates Foundation.

But just a few minutes later, Gates pointed out one major shortcoming of the New York City small schools: Students were just as unprepared for college as were students citywide. Less than 40% of graduates, he said, met the City University of New York’s standards for college readiness, giving them no appreciable advantage over graduates citywide. (I’m looking into what he’s referring to; my guess is that his evidence is the number of students who graduated with a full Regents diploma, versus the easier-to-attain local diploma.)

Later, announcing the foundation’s intention to improve teacher performance by exploring with merit-based pay systems, Bill Gates named three programs he sees as exemplary models — none of them New York City. (The three places were Denver, Prince George’s County, Maryland, and the charter school network Green Dot.)