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Chancellor Dennis Walcott is interviewed by WNYC's Brian Lehrer at a forum on public school options.

Many of the parents and teachers attending a forum last night about school choice said it was their first time hearing Chancellor Dennis Walcott talk about the Bloomberg administration’s school policies.

Walcott defended the school choice model that has developed during Bloomberg’s tenure at the event, which was organized by the New York Times and WNYC in conjunction with their SchoolBook reporting project.

(Listen to WNYC’s coverage of the event.)

The event took place against the backdrop of a spate of school closures announced by the Department of Education earlier in the day. The city’s closure strategy, meant to clear space for better school options, has in large part fueled the increasing number of choices that families face, especially when applying in middle and high school.

Parents and teachers we spoke to said the apparent options could be dizzying, even for the most involved families. educators, some parents said they didn’t think Walcott’s answers got to the root of their concerns.

“It’s very confusing. The whole process reminds me of voting. People don’t engage because there’s too much information out there. They don’t know how to process all of it,” said Tania Cade, who has a child in third grade at P.S. 278 and another in seventh-grade at a gifted-and-talented program in Washington Heights. “I don’t think that [Walcott] addressed that issue at all. It’s all up to the parents, and God bless those parents who don’t have the time or don’t speak the language.” (more…)

High school junior Brandon Alexander, 16, passes a mixing bowl to School for International Studies culinary arts teacher Mayra Valdes in the school's basement kitchen.

For Principal Fred Walsh, every student counts.

That’s because his school enrolls fewer students than the Department of Education says it should.

With this in mind, Walsh tries to begin each school day by shaking hands with each student who walks through the doors of the Brooklyn School for International Studies, and, ideally, end them shaking hands with prospective parents from Cobble Hill’s elementary schools. In addition to handshakes, Walsh shares with local parents promises of the school’s growing elective programs in journalism and culinary arts and, for the first time this fall, polished brochures touting those programs.

Walsh says his dogged efforts to sell International Studies to Brooklyn families are necessary but also distracting from the task of running a school for fewer than 500 students. They highlight an unintended side effect of the Bloomberg administration’s “system of schools” in which high school and many middle school students select their schools: Few schools are many students’ first choice. And when too few students enroll, schools end up being saddled with students who made no choice at all.

That’s the situation that Walsh is trying to head off. At a time when most local parents are choosing to send their children elsewhere, Walsh is working hard to bring attention to his mid-performing neighborhood school. His attempts have ranged from the ambitious (building a state-of-the-art kitchen) to the bluntly pragmatic (hiring a public relations consultant).

But competition over students and Walsh’s old under-the-radar approach has caused the school’s enrollment to yo-yo and, over time, decline by nearly 10 percent since it opened with 512 students in 2004. The decline signalled trouble to the DOE, and opened the doors to increasing numbers of high-needs students.

And the small boost in enrollment the school saw last year—from a low of 445 to 481—might be too little too late: Next year the school is likely to be joined by a new Success Academy charter school in the squat, four-story building on Baltic Street it already shares with two other schools.

Last month the Department of Education identified the Brownstone Brooklyn building as the prime site for the charter school because both International Studies and the School for Global Studies, the school upstairs, have many more open seats than students in grades 6 through 12 to fill them. That means, the DOE says, that there is room in the building to spare.

Before the announcement, Walsh said he worried that both schools would have to increase class sizes and cut programs once they start sharing space with the charter school, which would open with 190 kindergarteners and first-graders next fall and slowly grow into a full-sized elementary school after that.

And even though International did not make the city’s list of potential closures this year, community members say they are worried that the DOE could close or move it in the future.

The only way to escape the pressure, Walsh said, is to raise International Studies’ profile. (more…)