The federal Education Department’s What Works Clearinghouse just released a review of the city’s Leadership Academy, the principal training program that Joel Klein brought in with the help of “Neutron” Jack Welch, the former General Electric chairman.
Apparently it doesn’t work. More »
Since Joel Klein’s new schools do not seem likely to take Maxwell’s neediest students, and since all that its current and future self-contained kids are guaranteed is an opportunity to apply, it seems fair to ask whether or not the community might be well-served by keeping the school open and building on its strengths. This is also a question worth asking because Maxwell is only one of fourteen high schools slated for closing, and the situation I am about to describe with Maxwell is typical of what we find when we look at other closing schools.
The DoE has created two accountability measures to determine school quality: Quality Reviews and Progress Reports.
Quality Reviews are on-site 2-day reviews of the school, performed by a different reviewer every year. For the past several years, the DoE has invested huge resources in its Quality Reviews. Though I don’t know the budget amounts, I do know something about what goes into shaping and implementing them. Over multiple meetings, standards of review are debated and fine-tuned every year. Senior instructional people are trained over several days in order to ensure inter-rater reliability. Reviewers, well-steeped in the philosophy and specifics then perform the reviews armed with standards, rubrics, templates, and on-going support.
Basically — ask anyone in the schools — Quality Review is a very big deal. More »
In posts over the past several weeks I have described how the DoE has stacked the deck against students in self-contained special education classes and the schools that serve them.
In terms of the schools, the DoE’s fancy high school Progress Reports are significantly biased against those that serve self-contained students. Making matters worse, when it chose what schools to close the DoE tossed out the results of the expensive and intensive Quality Reviews. The DoE did this even when reviewers found the schools were doing well for three years in a row, and they did it in spite of the fact that the reviews were supposed to play a key role in the DoE accountability standard.
In terms of the students, we know the DoE has not generally admitted self-contained students to the schools that replace the ones that are closing. These schools may serve IEP students with less severe disabilities (for example, students who need speech services or who can succeed in CTT classes), but they do not serve students with the more significant disabilities found in students in self-contained classes. Call it mismanagement, or call it a plan, the result has been to create two separate and unequal school systems within the regular public schools.
To understand how all this plays out, let’s look at just one school: W. H. Maxwell High School in Brooklyn. More »
At the request of a commenter on my recent post, I am posting a second, more detailed chart on the relationship of graduation rates to the percent of self-contained special education students. Graduation Rates decline as the percentages of self-contained students in a school rise. As self-evident as this relationship is to anyone in the schools, Tweed continually points to graduation rates at some of our closing schools and then claims that other schools with similar populations do better. However the DoE peer schools with supposedly similar populations often serve few or no self contained special education students. Graduation rates generally track the rate of self-contained special education in a school: as the population goes up, the graduation rates go down. The same is true for the overall score on the Progress Report. More »
Who briefs Joel Klein over at DOE?
Because what he told NY1 TV’s Mike Scotto on “Inside City Hall” Monday about the 19 closing schools was, “Nobody could make a good case why these schools shouldn’t be closed.”
Has he been away? His deputy chancellors, John White, Santi Taveras and Kathleen Grimm, chaired 20 public hearings over the last two months where parents, teachers and support staff, CEC leaders, Council members, Assembly representatives, grandmothers, local business leaders, students, graduates, principals and advocates testified on why most of the schools on the list should not close. Did the deputies not report back? More »
"You didn't ask WHICH goals."
In the world of Tweed’s top-down directives, issued by apparatchiks who view time spent in real schools with Kurtz’s “the horror, the horror,” more than one good idea has been transformed into its opposite.
In this regard, exhibit number one is the school quality review. In its original conception, the school quality review was founded on the premise that the most important information about a school’s performance came not from decontextualized statistics, but from observations by professional educators. A team of accomplished educator reviewers has a rich knowledge of good teaching and learning practices, so they can recognize in a school the presence — and the absence — of such practices. Just as importantly, they can provide useful feedback to a school on how a school can develop good teaching and learning practices.
But put that idea in the hands of Tweed, and it becomes a virtually unrecognizable caricature of the real thing. More »
In its zeal to close NYC’s high schools, the DoE like to point to the low graduation rates of particular schools. It is a number that plays well to the press. After all, who can argue in favor of, say, a forty-five percent graduation rate? The school down the block has the same kinds of kids, doesn’t it? And it has higher graduation rates. A low grad rate is a great sound bite, and it works.
But a closer look reveals that to a large extent the differences in school graduation rates are a function of a very specific demographic rather than a function of school quality. Joel Klein has concentrated high-need (self contained) special education students in fewer and fewer high schools because — for whatever reason — his new schools generally do not accept them. These are students who require very small classes and intensive academic, behavioral and/or emotional support. Those are just words to folks who do not teach, but to the schools that embrace these kids (and the closing high schools did indeed embrace them) they conjure up a world of challenges. These are the kids whom teachers wake up to worry about at 4 a.m., and sometimes the worry is that no one else will worry. For many teachers the idiosyncratic success of special education kids is deeply meaningful simply because every scrap of it is so hard-won. For many, success with self-contained special education is why they teach.
These students do not, however, tend to graduate with a diploma, on time. More »
This week’s Panel for Education Policy meeting made it clear that the DOE is not serious about including parents in the decision-making process, according to NBC’s Gabe Pressman.
When the Mayor took control of the city’s schools, he promised to make them better.
Whether he kept that promise is debatable. But whether he has made parents part of the improvement process is not. They are definitely excluded. And that’s a shame.
He goes on to write:
It’s easy to understand the frustration and anger of the parents. But they are learning a practical lesson in how a supposedly democratic process can be distorted to suppress opposition.
The Mayor himself could benefit from some education. He could use a crash course in the values of democracy. The educational policy panel is not there just to ratify decisions already made.
Read the entire piece at NBC New York.
Yesterday I said that High School Progress Reports were driven to a significant extent by a buried demographic: the populations of high-need/self contained Special Education students. Some schools took on these challenging students when other schools did not. Now, instead of being supported for it, they are being punished with low grades and threat of closure.
What follows are some charts I did not have time to post yesterday.
As we know, a school’s grade is largely determined by its performance relative to its peer group’s performance. Each dot on the chart below represents one of the schools in the peer groups of closing High Schools. Along the side of the chart is the percent of high-need Special Education students within the Special Education population. More »
Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and the UFT are co-sponsoring a rally outside the Bronx Supreme Court today, Monday, Jan. 25, at 4 p.m., to protest the DOE’s unjustified proposal to close seven Bronx schools. Parents, educators, students, alumni and community activists will be coming out to keep the pressure on the Department of Education.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew appeared on NY1’s “Inside City Hall” on Jan. 7. He spoke about charter schools, the Race to the Top application, this week’s class size lawsuit, and other issues.
Part 1:
Part 2 after the jump. More »
We already know that the DoE generally ignored its own accountability standard in choosing what schools it wants to close. This is especially troubling since the schools that made the list tend to serve the city’s most vulnerable students, students whose academic lives are already in freefall, and who arrive in need of intensive services if they are to be successful.
We see this right in the DoE data. Let’s compare the chosen high schools (mostly the DoE is closing high schools) to high schools citywide, and also to high schools with comparable accountability grades that will not close. What we see is that it does not seem to be the quality of the schools that drove the decision; it was the kids.
This seems true whether we compare these three groups according to the proportion of the population that needs Special Education services…
…or by the 8th grade scores of the incoming students: More »
Today, a coalition of civil rights organizations, educational advocacy groups and the UFT filed a law suit against the NYC Department of Education and Joel Klein for failure to comply with New York State law under the Contract for Excellence and lower class size in New York City public schools. The lawsuit charges that despite a decline in overall student enrollment and the injection of more than $760 million in dedicated state funds from school years 2007-08 through 2009-10, class sizes have actually increased in city schools.
Joining with the UFT in the lawsuit are the New York State Conference of the NAACP, the Hispanic Federation, Class Size Matters, the Alliance for Quality Education and parents of NYC public school students. Appearing in support of the law suit today were New York City Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, New York NAACP President Hazel Dukes and Hispanic Federation President Lillian Rodríguez López.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, “New York City promised in writing that it would use specific funds to reduce class size. It then turned around and ignored its promise, saying that school principals who supposedly work for the DOE simply decided to spend the money on other things — among them, to replace funds lost to city budget cuts. The result has been that class sizes have actually increased over 2007 in every grade.”
“Three-quarters of a billion dollars later, tens of thousands of New York City students are packed into classes that are higher than anywhere else in the state. Who is managing — or should I say mismanaging — this process?” More »
Responding to the UFT’s proposals for reform of the charter school law, the New York City Department of Education public relations flack David Cantor goes all Chad Ochocinco on us.
Cantor:
Once again the union is standing up for its members rather than kids by creating roadblocks and obstacles to the growth of charter schools, which definitive independent research, President Obama and the Regents have all said are crucial to our children’s future. The union’s proposal to constrain charters risks undermining New York’s shot at winning hundreds of millions of Race to the Top dollars while thwarting the efforts of thousands of parents who are demanding these innovative schools for their children. The ultimate aim of the union’s proposal is to destroy or unionize all charters.
To borrow a felicitous turn of phrase from New York Times sportswriter Mike Tanier, Cantor’s Ochocinco impersonation is dumbing down trash talk.
And like Ochocinco’s performance last night, Cantor is ‘0’ for the game. He doesn’t even pretend to address the main issues raised in the UFT’s report — the failure of charter schools to educate their far share of the neediest students, the profiteering off public funds which should be going to the classroom, the lack of transparency and accountability, the need to fix the broken charter funding formula. No, in a completely transparent way, it’s all about Tweed’s agenda to make sure that charter schools are not union schools.
Perhaps it was all because of an injury to Cantor’s typing fingers, and we should be praying for his quick recovery.
As I wrote earlier this week, Joel Klein’s DoE ignored its own accountability system — Progress Reports and Quality Reviews — when it made its list of schools to close. That system has cost our schools vast resources in time, money, and talent. DoE created the system and it created the “closing standard.” Then it tossed it out.
The spurned closing-school standard reads as follows:
Schools that receive an overall grade of D or F on the Progress Report [or three C’s in a row] and a score below Proficient on the Quality Review are subject to school improvement measures. If no significant progress is made over time, a leadership change (subject to contractual obligations), restructuring, or closure is possible.
Schools that fail do not automatically close, of course. DoE lists other factors it will examine. But it is the Progress Reports and Quality Reviews that trigger a closer examination of the school.
As I pointed out in the earlier entry, fourteen of the twenty schools DoE wants to close have not “failed” the accountability standards laid out by the DoE. In my previous entry I wrote about the School for Community Research and Learning. Today, let’s look at another: Beach Channel High School. More »
