GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

More than half of teachers in city middle schools left their schools within three years, and most left teaching altogether, according to a new study that offers little insight about how to stem the exodus.

The study was presented yesterday at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management’s fall meeting, as part of a panel on teacher turnover. Will Marinell, a member of the Research Alliance, the independent body of researchers given access to city Department of Education data, and Teachers College professor Aaron Pallas conducted the analysis.

Mining data about teachers and their paths within the school system, the researchers found that 55 percent of middle school teachers leave their school within three years, higher than in elementary and high schools. They also found that their decision to leave was likely influenced more by their individual characteristics, such as their commute time and race, than by anything about their school.

According to the analysis, teachers are more likely to stay in their schools when students disproportionately share their race. In Manhattan, two-thirds of middle school teachers left within three years, the highest exit rate of any borough. Middle school teachers are more likely to consider leaving their school when they have a long commute or are required to teach a new subject. And teachers in schools that suspend many students are more likely to consider finding a new job.

“These rates of turnover are likely to make it challenging for middle school principals, and the teachers who remain in their schools, to establish organizational norms and a shared vision for their schools’ teaching and learning environment,” the study concludes. (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…)

Reversing its earlier findings, the city’s Independent Budget Office has concluded in a new study that most New York City charter schools receive more funding per student than their district school peers.

A year ago, an IBO study found that charter schools housed in public school buildings received $305 less per student than district schools for the 2008-09 school year. Now, the office has revised its methodology and has reached a very different conclusion.

In 2008-09, charter schools in district space were given $701 more per student than traditional public schools, the new study finds. For the 2009-10 school year, that disparity shrunk to $649. (more…)

New York City’s public schools are suspending more students than they did a decade ago, and for longer periods of time, according to a report released today.

Data on student suspensions obtained by the Student Safety Coalition through Freedom of Information requests and analyzed by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows that the city’s public schools have doled out increasingly large numbers of suspensions each year since 2002. Black students are being suspended in disproportionate numbers, and a third of the suspensions have taken place during months when students spend weeks sitting for state exams. (more…)

A high school’s size and its concentration of low-achieving and overage students strongly predicts its graduation rate, according to an internal Department of Education study obtained by GothamSchools today.

The 20-page report, prepared for the city by the consultant firm Parthenon Group in 2008, gives fodder for both supporters and critics of the city’s strategy of closing low-performing large high schools and replacing them with new small schools.

The presentation shows that large schools struggle to serve large concentrations of challenging students. But it also suggests that the Department of Education knew about this problem years ago but continued to allow many large schools to be flooded with low-performing students.

Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters and an outspoken critic of the city’s school closure efforts, provided the report to GothamSchools.

The report examines how a students’ chance of graduation varies widely depending on the type of high school he or she attends.

For example, a hypothetical black or Hispanic girl with the median city test scores and middle school attendance and no special needs would have an 83 percent chance of graduating from a small school with a low concentration of challenging students. The same student would have just a 55 percent chance of graduating from a large high school with much higher percentage of students with special needs. (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…)

A collection of independent research measuring the impact of Chancellor Joel Klein’s reforms on the city’s school system will be published next spring. But before that happens, you can listen to some of the researchers online.

Five of them are faculty at New York University’s Steinhardt School and Tim Farrell, a public affairs officer for NYU, has recorded conversations with them and posted them online.

In the first recording, Professors Leanna Stiefel and Amy Ellen Schwartz look at one of Klein’s major policy decisions: the implementation of a weighted funding formula. They find that the new formula only had a significant impact on high schools, but left little imprint on elementary and middle schools.

In 2007, Klein instituted Fair Student Funding: a program that would give schools money based on the needs of the students they serve.

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CFE found that eighth-grade attendance was more closely associated with graduation rates than any other variable.

City high schools that serve similar students graduate their students at wildly different rates, according to a report to be released today.

Among schools with the neediest students, one school graduated 90 percent of students in four years. Another graduated just 34 percent, the report found.

The report confirms that the city’s highest-performing schools overwhelmingly enroll students who already had high test scores and attendance rates. But it also shows that even among schools serving the highest-need students, some do a much better job graduating students than others.

The report was prepared by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the group that successfully fought for an extra $5.4 billion in 2004 for the city’s neediest schools.

The study looked at ninth graders who entered high school in 2004.  It separated high schools into peer groups based on the demographics and eighth-grade academic performances of that class.  (Read the full report here.) (more…)

Teacher turnover rates at charter schools nationwide are more than double those of traditional public schools, according to a study done by the National Center on School Choice.

Researchers found that charter schools lost 25 percent of their teachers to other schools and careers while district schools lost 14 percent, a difference the report called the “turnover gap.” The report’s findings are based on teacher survey data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics from the 2003-2004 school year.

“The odds of a charter school teacher leaving the profession versus staying in the same school were 130 percent greater than those of a traditional public school teacher,” the researchers noted.

The report’s authors found little data to support the idea that charter school turnover is higher because these schools have more leeway to fire teachers, a claim made by some charter school supporters.

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The city’s small, non-selective high schools significantly boost disadvantaged students’ chances of graduating, a new report concludes.

The report (available in full below) is the latest in a series of studies from New York-based research firm MDRC and funded by the Gates Foundation, which put $150 million into the growth of small schools in the city. Replacing large, struggling high schools with small ones has been one of the centerpieces of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s reform efforts.

For the group of students researchers followed, the small schools had a nearly 69 percent graduation rate, compared to a roughly 62 percent rate for students in the study’s control group. Researchers reported that the positive impact of enrolling in a small school began during students’ freshman year and was sustained over the next three years. And, the study found, the benefits applied to a wide variety of students, including low-income students of color.

The study looked at the academic records of a subset of the small schools launched under Klein — about a hundred “small schools of choice.” The schools were chosen because more students applied to them than the school had room for, and thus admissions were determined by random lottery. Researchers could thus compare students who applied and enrolled in the small schools to those who applied but were assigned elsewhere. (more…)