GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A hard-charging principal’s efforts to rename a long-struggling school in the Bronx is meeting stiff resistance from a local community group.

District 9 Community Education Council last night voted against a proposal by M.S. 22 Jordan Mott to change its name to College Avenue Academy at Jordan Mott. The rejection comes after the council for two months delayed voting on the proposal, typically among a CEC’s least controversial duties.

When city officials told M.S. 22 last year that it would be among dozens of schools to undergo a federal school improvement strategy called “turnaround,” they promised that the school would get a pot of extra funds, many new teachers, and a new name.

A judge shut down the city’s plans over the summer. But high staff turnover at M.S. 22 meant the school could get new teachers and federal dollars anyway.

Now, the school is out to complete the trifecta. Principal Linda Rosenbury wants to change the school’s name to College Avenue Academy at Jordan Mott, a similar version of the name the city planned to use this year had the overhaul plan gone through. The school sits on College Avenue, where there is no college, although its official address is on 167th Street.

Rosenbury said that she sought the new name because it was a new direction create a new association for the school and accurately reflect the school’s new focus on academics. (more…)

City school officials have underreported the number of students who dropped out of high school in the past by reclassifying some of them, according to a report released by the State Comptroller today.

The report, which comes out of an audit completed by Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office in January, examines a group of students that are labeled as “discharged,” meaning they have left the school system for legitimate reasons, such as moving to another state or deciding to enroll in a G.E.D. program. It finds that some of these students should actually have been labeled as drop-outs, but because of paperwork errors or school officials’ failure to follow state regulations in certain cases, they were counted as discharged.

Students who are discharged don’t count towards the city’s drop-out rate and some advocates have argued that principals can misuse the discharge code, entering students who simply dropped out in order to inflate their graduation rate artificially. Overall, the comptroller’s report found that even with the improper discharge classifications taken into account, the city’s graduation rate was “generally accurate.”

To determine whether the city’s Department of Education was improperly classifying drop-outs as discharges, auditors in the comptroller’s office examined the records of students who started high school in 2004 and should have graduated in 2008, but were discharged along the way. They randomly chose 500 of the 17,025 general education students who were discharged and 100 of the 1,923 discharged special education students. (more…)