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?

There was detailed oral testimony, reports in writing, PowerPoints, videos and presentations, mining school data and parsing each school’s performance, progress and circumstances. There were probably a dozen newspaper stories over the two months reporting on the hearings, several documenting the cases these speakers made. Independent research by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School confirms much of what the advocates were saying.

On Jan 26-27, Klein attended the 9-hour PEP meeting where the cases were made again, with passion and conviction, by the people who will be most affected. Klein was scanning his Blackberry a lot.

In one telling moment about seven hours into the meeting, someone asked the mayor’s appointees on the panel if they could make the case for closing these schools. None of them did.

So the question can’t be whether the supporters of the targeted schools made a case to keep these schools open: that case was made again and again and again, at meeting after meeting. It’s whether Klein and the DOE have made a case for closing these schools. And the answer is no.

The DOE overrode its own criteria for closing schools in several instances, by closing some schools even when their Progress Report grades were better than the cutoffs, and frequently ignoring proficient Quality Reviews.

“These are schools that have graduation rates in the 40s,” he told Scotto (and has told anyone else who will listen). Forty percent is a figure, not a case. Looking closer, the average four-year rate in the closing high schools is 49 percent. Their six-year graduation rate is much higher at an average 62 percent, as you would expect in schools that serve high numbers of special education students, recent immigrants, transfers and over-the-counter kids.

Defending his record on closing more than 90 schools over eight years, many of them large full-service high schools, Klein told Scotto, “We’re replacing large failing high schools, like Far Rockaway and others with new, smaller, often career and technical, places where parents and children want to go.” Yet the school that took Far Rockaway’s most needy students when it closed was the only other one on the Rockaways peninsula — Beach Channel High School. Now Beach Channel is on the DOE’s closing list, having gone from a 4-year grad rate of about 52 percent (above the citywide average at that time) before Klein, to below 47 percent last year.

In fact, there is something of a pattern in the closing high schools of rising graduation rates before 2002-03 when Klein came in and declining rates in the years that followed. So when Klein says “failing,” as if they were someone else’s mess, it’s fair to ask what he did about them–or didn’t. Those schools were left to die, in the views of parents and teachers who knew them well. Klein cannot make the case that he tried to save them.

Supposedly students do better in the new small schools. By way of proof, Klein told Scotto they have higher graduation rates. He says parents vote with their feet and don’t send their children to the closing schools. He has said the same about his charter schools versus schools in the surrounding neighborhoods.

But there is a reason that parents in some of the closing school neighborhoods are starting to use the S-word (segregation) about Klein’s policies. The small schools, and the charter schools as well, do not serve the same populations as those in the abandoned large high schools. There are distinctions, by level of special education services required, by percentages of students in extreme poverty, by ELL percentages and the numbers of homeless and over-the-counter students. These findings are available and have been presented to Deputy White.

Some people at the PEP meeting said they feared a pattern of closing schools and opening charter schools in their communities was a stealth effort to privatize the management of their local public schools and cream the best students, leaving the most challenging kids in under-resourced or neglected schools. Are they ill-informed? Check this interactive map to see where the closing schools and charters are concentrated.

Klein then told Scotto that the whole PEP meeting was orchestrated by the UFT. “They orchestrated the whole thing, there’s no question, and they had a big rally beforehand to get people whipped up, and of course, you know, their job is to protect jobs. My job is to protect children.” (Yes, he really said that.)

As UFT President Michael Mulgrew told Elizabeth Kaledin on Inside City Hall Wednesday, the parents who came to the rally and PEP meeting on union-provided buses got, well, transportation. What they came to say was their business. To charge that they came to push a UFT agenda is silly and insulting. What they said was that they are seeing a move toward a two-tiered school system. And they are not going to stand for it.

By now, the good news bandwagon has actually gotten a little repetitive.  (And the Mayor’s use of test score and graduation rate gains to flay opponents of mayoral control has gotten a little much.)  But the graduation rates are based on four years of coursework as well as five exit exams, so those gains should truly be celebrated.

Without trying to rain on the parades, though, future graduation rates are likely to go down. Over the next three years, the state will phase out “local” diplomas, awarded to students who pass Regents exams with a 55-64, instead of a 65 or better. More than a quarter (28 percent) of the Class of 2008 graduates received local diplomas, and this was not much changed from the year before. So absent some amendment to the policy, we could see state-calculated graduation rates closer to 40 percent in three years, when the local diploma option is up. The 15 or 16 percent of each class (graduates and non-graduates) with local diplomas, who have boosted the city’s graduation rate comfortably past the 50 percent mark for the last two years, are going to disappear.

The Center for New York City Affairs recently highlighted this coming trainwreck in its report, “The New Marketplace.” Using 2007 data, authors Kim Nauer and Clara Hemphill showed that “(I)f students had been required to obtain a Regents diploma in 2007, only 34 schools [out of 269] would have had a graduation rate of 75 percent or higher.” The situation was especially dire in small high schools, they said, where 26 percent of the class (graduates and non-graduates) got local diplomas, compared with 17 percent in the large high schools.

Some groups will be hit harder than others. The new data, for the Class of 2008, show that more than a third (35 percent each) of black and Hispanic graduates got local diplomas. Of the 22.5 percent of students with disabilities who graduated on time, two-thirds got local diplomas. And of the 35.8 percent of English Language Learners who graduated with their class in 2008, more than half did it with local diplomas.

Meanwhile, the Board of Regents, under its tough new Chancellor Merryl Tisch, is not likely to “dumb down” state tests. She recently complained the Grade 3-8 math test was “too easy.” But the Regents are considering whether to extend the phase-out of local diplomas. They are also thinking about using a five-year graduation rate for NCLB accountability purposes. That could give a substantial boost to the most challenged students, and the U.S. Department of Education has suggested that such a change might be approved.

Meanwhile, be prepared for footnotes and asterisks galore if the local diplomas no longer count. The DOE will fall all over itself to clarify any charts or graphs that show an education indicator going downhill. It’s just not in their playbook.

Yet even within these limitations, the data tells some very interesting stories.

We separated out from the list all reports of grades 9-12. This allows us to capture not only the traditional high schools, but also the high school grades of secondary schools [which go from grade 6 to grade 12]. We took only the general education class sizes, since special education class sizes are governed by the students’ Individual Educational Plans [IEPs]. We then sorted the high schools, listing them from the school with the highest student registers to the lowest, so the schools went from the largest to the smallest.*

What becomes stunningly clear is that in New York City public high schools and secondary schools, the larger the school, the larger the class size. In the first quartile of the largest schools, the average class size in the core academic areas is 27.42. In the second quartile, it is 25 and in the third quartile, it is 23.95. In the bottom quartile of the smallest schools, it is 21.8 — nearly six students less [over 20%] than in the largest schools.

To those who have followed the New York City educational scene closely, this is not surprising. In October, the New York City’s Independent Budget Office released a report which found that the disparities in classroom spending among New York City public schools were not due to differences in teacher salaries, as Tweed had been trumpeting, but differences in class size. Small schools were better funded, and had smaller class sizes.

Chancellor Klein and the New York City Department of Education are never reluctant to praise the successes of new small high schools and secondary schools. But nowhere in their narratives do they provide a full, intellectually honest account of the vital differences between the new small schools and the large high schools they replaced. In the past, we have pointed out the crucial differences in the student populations served by the schools. Now, we have powerful evidence that these differences extend to the resources the Department of Education provides to the schools, with the small schools having considerably smaller classes.

When the issue of class size is raised for high schools and secondary schools, Chancellor Klein and the DOE are fond of claiming that lower class size at this level has a minimal effect. But their actions speak louder than their words. When it comes to supplying their prized small high and secondary schools with resources, lower class size leads the list.

It is time to end the DOE’s policy of ‘have’ students and schools and ‘have not’ students and schools. If a class size of 21 is appropriate for small schools and their students, it is every bit as fitting for large schools and their students.

End the class warfare: reduce the class size for all high school and secondary school students.

_____________________________________________

* The student registers provided in the NYC DOE data are not the actual number of students in the school, but the total number of the students registered in the four academic area subjects. This means that the same student is counted a number of times, as many as four times in the lower high school grades when students are taking all four subjects. But since the duplicate counting works the same for all high schools, the register is still an accurate indicator of the size of the school.

Thanks to Danny Tirado and Maise McAdoo for crunching the numbers.

We agree with Kahlenberg — and Shanker — that the preeminent purpose of public schools is the education of the next generation of American citizenry. But we do not believe that dual language schools have proven to be any more susceptible to failure at this task than other public schools with different curricular themes and foci, from enterpeneurship and math to social justice and core knowledge. Every public school faces the challenge of teaching students how to think critically, about their own particular history and culture, about the larger American cultural mosaic and its historical evolution, and about our place in world history and culture. Every public school has to figure out how to focus its teaching on our common national purpose — what we Americans hold in common that is the foundation of our collective well-being.

It is important to recall here just what this American common purpose is. The genius of American national identity has been that it was founded not on a particular ethnic culture, but on a democratic civic creed. To be an American is to embrace the precepts of the Declaration of Independence that all men and women are created equal, with inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that government exists to protect those rights and to promote the commonweal. While other nations base citizenship rights upon ethnic blood lines, American citizenship is open to an individual of any background who adopts our common civic creed. As a direct consequence of our common political faith in liberty, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, cultural pluralism — the co-existence and mutual toleration of diverse communities of faith, language and ethnicity in a nation of immigrants — is an important part of the American civic creed. Properly conceived and organized around a culture of democratic teaching and learning, a dual language school is not only consistent with the American civic creed, but an notable expression of its cultural pluralism.

As part of the New Visions school approval process, the UFT had an opportunity to examine the design of and plans for KGIA: our representatives carefully studied an application of scores of pages, and participated in the panel interview of the school planning team. We found that the school’s mission was entirely consistent with the American civic creed, promoting values of non-violence, tolerance and cultural understanding. Based on these findings, we have supported KGIA at every stage in its development.

Our understanding of KGIA’s mission separates us both from the New York tabloid press and from some in the blogosphere who have rushed to criticize our public position on the ‘intifada’ issue. The mere fact that KGIA is a dual language Arabic school provides the tabloids with sufficient cause to label it a fundamentalist madrasa, and in a remarkable symmetry, our critics carelessly describe KGIA as a school dedicated to the promotion of “Islamic culture, history and language.” In fact, KGIA’s namesake Gibran was not even a Muslim. If KGIA was even remotely close to either fact-free description, it would never have received our support. We would not support a public school dedicated to the promotion of the beliefs of any faith community, be it Christian, Jewish, Islamic or another religious creed.

Our blog critics insist that support in such matters must be unconditional, and that the UFT was wrong to criticize the temporizing on the subject of ‘the intifada’ that unnecessarily brought the integrity of KGIA into question. From our vantage point, the very same civic principles which led us to support for KGIA demanded public censure on this question. The original statement did not provide, as has been implausibly claimed, a “historical context” for the term ‘the intifada’; to the contrary, it sought to strip the immediate historical context from the term through a discussion of its etymology. ‘The intifada’ is the name chosen by the authors of a lengthy campaign of violence that has repeatedly employed suicide bombers to describe their own work. It is a term which can not be separated by discussions of ‘root words’ from acts of terror which have targeted indiscriminately masses of civilians as they ate in restaurants and traveled to and from their homes in buses. Since ‘the intifada’ is so clearly and directly connected to suicide bombings, as educators we must separate ourselves from it, and condemn those acts of violence. As a union who understands itself to be in the non-violent social justice tradition of Martin Luther King, silence simply was not an option.

It is time for the work of creating KGIA, of fulfilling the vision of a school dedicated to global citizenship and civic values of non-violence, religious and ethnic tolerance and pluralism, to move ahead. As we have been from the school’s conception, long before this incident, the UFT remains fully committed to those ends. Our insistence upon the consistent application of democratic civic principle has given our support for KGIA a force that can not be easily discounted or dismissed.

With cohorts of less than a hundred students, substantial grants from the Gates Foundation and “coaching/mentoring” from the intermediary organizations that the support the schools (i.e., New Visions for Public Schools, the Urban Assembly, International Partnership Foundation, etc.) one would hope that the schools are doing well. Whether these gains can be sustained when the grants and the intermediary organizations are no longer connected to the schools is the key question.

Unfortunately in his rush to herald success the Department is encouraging practices that require close scrutiny.

One of these practices is called “credit recovery.”

Let’s say a kid passes the first two unit tests and fails the next three tests, rather than failing the student the teacher gives the student an “incomplete.” In the summer the student takes a “unique” course: he completes a project that incorporates the three topics that he failed. The project is deemed satisfactory and the “incomplete” is changed to a passing grade.

This may be a totally satisfactory way to complete a course, and it may not. The School Progress Report “grades” schools on a metric – a key is credit accumulation – and the school “grade” is directly tied to the principal’s rating. In Empowerment the Network Leader is “graded” by the principal …

Is it possible that principals are “crossing the line”?

Is someone overseeing “unique” courses? Is “credit recovery” a valid process to make up failed material or a way to grant credits that student didn’t earn?

Unfortunately, I fear the DOE policy is “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

In education, teachers, parents and community organizations often feel like the narrator of Ellison’s great novel — made invisible, simply because the power brokers and educrats refuse to see us.

There is an interesting admission of this problem in the Time Magazine cameo essay on Bill Gates, written on the occasion of his commencement address to the school from which he dropped out thirty years ago, Harvard.

The essay recounts how Gates, in classic technocratic fashion, views social change much like the process of engineering computer software. What’s tough about the work of social engineering, he concedes, is that the people involved refuse to be ‘invisible men’: they demand a full voice in change which involves them.

If there’s a limit to what Gates can do, it’s always going to be found in that human element, the messy, fallible, unquantifiable stuff that doesn’t respond to engineering. His limitations as a technologist will be his limitations as a philanthropist. But he knows he’s not writing software anymore. “There are some [problems], like discovering a vaccine for malaria, that actually are surprisingly similar,” he says. “That is, a bit like a software project. Some things like designing high schools and new high school curricula and the way that you need to have the community and the teachers, particularly their union, feel like they need to participate in that … that’s a very tough thing.”

It may be tough, Bill, but no one ever said that democratic change was easy — just necessary and right.

Hat tip to Small Talk.

In an era of evidence based educational reform, we thought it would be an interesting experiment to put Klein’s Manichean worldview of New York City high schools to an empirical test. Using data from the latest published School Report Cards available at the Department of Education’s own web site, we did side-by-side comparisons of new small schools and the large comprehensive high schools in the buildings where the new small schools had been sited. Five such pairings can be constructed from the available data: the small Bronx Aerospace and the large Evander Childs HS; the small Bronx Guild and the large Adlai Stevenson HS; the small HS for Teaching and the Professions and the large Walton HS; the small Marble Hill HS and the large John F. Kennedy HS; and the small Pelham Prep and the large Columbus HS. The DOE does not provide a school report card for the last year of schools which have completed phasing out, so we were unable to make the same comparisons with regard to the new small schools placed in the South Bronx HS and Morris HS buildings. Nonetheless, this sampling is a large portion of the universe, and the trends are virtually identical in each particular instance. Data tables for each of these pairings are found at the end of this posting.

In every specific comparison between a new small school and a large comprehensive school, the small school took in higher percentages of students meeting standards and ready to do high school work, and lower percentages of students at risk for dropping out. Much larger percentages of the incoming ninth and tenth grade of the new small schools had met or surpassed standards on the 8^th grade New York State English Language Arts [ELA] and Math exams than the incoming class in the large comprehensive schools. Most strikingly, in one instance the small Pelham Prep had five times as many students meeting ELA standards and more than three times as many students meeting Math standards as the large Columbus HS.

The small schools all had lower percentages of Special Education students in their entering classes, and generally had lower percentages of English Language Learners [ELLs]. Nearly 1 in every 5 students entering the large Columbus were Special Education, and nearly 1 in every 4 students was an ELL. By contrast, the small Pelham Prep had no entering Special Education students and only 1% of the class, a single student, was an ELL. Similarly, the large Evander Childs had almost twice as many entering Special Education students as the small Bronx Aerospace; 7% of Evander Childs students fell into the more severely disabled category, while Bronx Aerospace had not a single student in that category. Evander had nearly four times as many entering ELLs as Bronx Aerospace.

[The mission of the small Marble Hill is the education of ELLs, and it has an unusually high percentage of entering ELLs for a small school. This is a detail worth mentioning, and not simply because Marble Hill deserves credit for educating a high needs student population. Klein and the DOE attempt to mask the reality of the ELLs in the new small schools by using aggregate statistics: a small minority of small schools – Marble Hill and the International High Schools – are dedicated to the education of ELLs, and they skew the average numbers, obscuring the low numbers in the great majority of new small schools. The scandalous reality here is that DOE policy exempts new small schools from having to accept ELLs and Special Education students in the first two years of their existence.]

The small schools had a higher percentage of the students with the demographic profile that generally predicts a successful completion of high school. The entering classes of the small schools had better 8^th grade attendance records than the classes at the large schools. Many fewer of their incoming students were overage for their grade – a sign that they had either been left back or had their education disrupted.

As a general rule, therefore, the DOE had created enormous concentrations of the highest needs students in the large, comprehensive schools. The large school Walton has only 1 in 20 incoming students meeting ELA standards, for example. By contrast, the small schools have much more diverse student populations, with much smaller numbers of the most at risk students. One might think that the large schools would then receive greater resources, especially given the legislative and regulatory mandates governing Special Education and English Language Learning. But amazingly, it is the new small schools which receive the greatest support from the DOE. The small Bronx Aerospace spends 55% more on direct services for its students – the bulk of which is instruction — than the large school Evander Childs spends on direct services for its students. The Bronx Aerospace classes are much smaller: the ratio of students to teachers in the large Evander Childs – 19 to 1 – is 70% greater than the ratio in the small Bronx Aerospace – 11 to 1. And the large Evander Childs is overcrowded at 124% capacity, while Bronx Aerospace is not even at full capacity, at 84%.

Indeed, Bronx Aerospace has the highest spending of all schools, large and small, examined in this sampling; it spends 31% more than the nearest small school. It also has the highest graduation rate for its first graduating class, 93%. A graduation rate this high is an accomplishment for any school, and an extraordinary credit to the hard work of the Bronx Aerospace teachers and students.

But when Chancellor Klein and others at Tweed praise the Bronx Aerospace graduation rate, they inevitably compare it to the graduation rate of the phasing out Evander Childs, 31%. They never disclose how the DOE has concentrated the highest needs, most at risk students in Evander Childs and other large schools, or that it has given greater supports and resources to Bronx Aerospace and other new small schools. Having created a competition in which one school runs on a flat surface and the other school runs up the steepest of hills, Tweed pretends in an intellectually dishonest fashion that they are running the same race.

The problem here is NOT Bronx Aerospace or the other small schools. Every school, large and small, should receive the funding and supports that Bronx Aerospace receives. Every student should have the lower class sizes that Bronx Aerospace students enjoy. All schools should have diverse student populations, rather than some schools facing enormous concentrations of the highest needs students.

The problem is that Chancellor Klein and the DOE provide the necessary conditions and supports for success to some schools, those small schools they can claim as the product of their “reforms,” but not to all. There is a massive failure of stewardship and leadership at Tweed, on the part of a Chancellor that has had many opportunities to improve all schools and treat all schools equitably, given the longest tenure of a New York City public schools chancellor in decades. Tweed pretends that Bronx Aerospace and Evander Childs are running the same race because an honest assessment would lead to the inescapable conclusion that a great deal of the responsibility for Evander Childs’ low graduation rate resides with those occupying the offices of DOE headquarters in the old Boss Tweed courthouse.

These days Chancellor Klein has taken up the language of the long and hard struggle for educational justice, presenting himself as the new champion of equity. But rhetorical posturing is no substitute for real action. With an historic opportunity to bring a measure of this equity to New York City public schools that will not be seen again for many years, Chancellor Klein is resisting the expenditure of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity funds on such proven programs such as reducing class size for all, including the large comprehensive high schools. Better, he says, that it fund his effort to engineer school funding formulas.

Large school students, who remain the great majority of New York City public high school students, deserve better than that. The small schools, which began as part of a profoundly democratic movement in American education, building inclusive learning communities that embraced all students, deserve better than that. English Language Learners, Special Education students and students living in poverty deserve better than that. Students of color deserve better than that. Chancellor Klein is failing them all.

A “hat tip” to Daniel Tirado and Maisie McAdoo for assistance with the data compilation.

BRONX AEROSPACE [SMALL SCHOOL] AND EVANDER CHILDS [LARGE SCHOOL]

BRONX GUILD [SMALL SCHOOL] AND ADLAI STEVENSON [LARGE SCHOOL]

* This is a highly questionable figure, and almost certainly unreflective of the school population. In the previous year’s report card, the school reported a free lunch rate of 84.1%. It is statistically impossible for a school to drop 40% from the turnover of only one year – approximately 25% of its student body.

HS FOR TEACHING AND THE PROFESSIONS [SMALL SCHOOL] AND WALTON [LARGE SCHOOL]

MARBLE HILL [SMALL SCHOOL] AND JOHN F. KENNEDY [LARGE SCHOOL]

PELHAM PREP [SMALL SCHOOL] AND COLUMBUS [LARGE SCHOOL]

* This is a highly questionable figure, and most likely unreflective of the school population. In the previous year’s report card, the school reported a free lunch rate of 63.8%. It seems unlikely that the figure would drop so dramatically in one year, especially given the general profile of the student body.

]]> http://www.edwize.org/tales-of-two-schools-large-and-small/feed 7 http://www.edwize.org/closing-a-proficient-schoolwho-is-failing-klein-or-tilden http://www.edwize.org/closing-a-proficient-schoolwho-is-failing-klein-or-tilden#comments Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:28:29 +0000 Peter Goodman http://edwize.org/closing-a-proficient-schoolwho-is-failing-klein-or-tilden The Department of Ed has announced the closing of five high schools, two small schools in Manhattan and three large high schools in Brooklyn.

The NYSun reports that one of schools slated for closing, Tilden High School, has been designated as “proficient” by the Department as part of the School Quality Review process. So, on one hand the Brits who are visiting and evaluating schools find Tilden “proficient,” and the denizens at Tweed decide to empty out the building.

Tilden is clearly a struggling school.

The School Report Card reports that student suspension rates are far above the average for similar schools: 163% for 2004 and 261% for 2005. Average daily attendance to date is 64%.

On the other hand the Department sends students well below standard: 50.1% of the 2005 entering class were overage and only 15.2% of the entering class met ELA standards and 16.5% Math standards. 14% of the students are Special Education.

Most disturbing is the school received $2,739 less per pupil than similar schools.

I don’t know whether Tilden should be closed. The Principal, in her second year is popular among the staff and students.

Klein is quick to laud some of the new small high schools. He raves about Bronx Aerospace – a small Empowerment High School in the Bronx. The School Report Card reports that only 17.4% enter the school overaged, 27.2% enter having met ELA standards and 38.1% Math standards. In addition the small high schools that are part of the Gates funded New Century High School project receive $1,000 per student in additional funding each of their first four years and substantial professional and operation support from the “intermediaries,” the not-for-profits who are the recipients of the Gates funding.

This is not a plea to keep Tilden open – I don’t really know enough – I do know when you send extremely needy kids to a school, and underfund the school you have created a recipe for failure.

Will the hundreds of small high schools survive and prosper as the years go by? What will happen when the Gates dollars end? Will Empowerment Schools have the capacity to meet the needs of their student and staffs? Especially with almost no external supports?

When Klein’s intellectual beau, Sir Michael Barber, addressed prospective Empowerment Principals last spring he urged Klein to make changes as rapidly as possible, and to make them “irrevocable.”

I don’t see a galaxy of 400 small high schools, divided into networks and “managed,” under performance contracts, by a revolving array of “educational management organizations” as the kind of “irrevocable” change that will benefit public children.

What I do see is a growing coalition: parents, teachers, unions, community activists and elected officials who question the “fad of the moment,” who question “experimenting” with the educational future of their children.

The imperial Bloomberg/Klein administration doesn’t take the time to “create” policies with input from all stakeholders. They “rule” by ukase and determined, focused press campaigns. The Klein High School Admissions program is a prime example.

In the seventies the BOE created a complex high school zoning pattern. Neighborhood schools could create educational option programs, basically schools within schools to attract youngsters from outside of their zones. Other schools also created theme programs to keep students who lived within their zones. It turned into an entrepreneurial system: some schools did it well and received thousands of applicants while others attracted few applicants.

Unfortunately it was a “leaky” system, the BOE didn’t monitor it closely, “deals” were made, and, High School Superintendents were allowed to “dump” low achieving and/or discipline problems into “less favored” schools.

We now have 200 small high schools with another 200 in the pipeline. The encyclopedic High School Directory is virtually incomprehensible. The High School Fairs are bazaars with each school flacking it’s wares.

The Klein High School admissions system is based on the premise that kids should be able to chose the school that they want to attend: a noble goal, however, there is no advantage to local parents. The system does allow parents to “rank” schools, however, the plan is a lottery. If you live across the street from a school you have no advantage, you have to take your chances with everyone else. The small high schools are limited to entering classes of 100 students.

If a parent calls their local City Council person and asks whether they can help them to get into a local school the answer they get is: “The DOE doesn’t acknowledge the existence of local legislators.”

The new admissions plan could have carved out seats for local kids, but the plutocracy at Tweed knows better, and, they are deaf to the lessons of history.

When Morrow high School opened after over a decade of parent advocacy the school had a creative three-tiered zoning plan. Kids who lived in a small area around the school had first priority, the school district that surrounded the school had the next priority and then kids from the borough. It was the result of many meetings with the stakeholder community and was accepted by all the “players.”

Democracy is a lengthy and ofttimes fractious process, (I can show you my scars!) but it’s worth the effort. Crafting policy from the bottom up builds constituency. For Tweed it’s a lot easier to hire “experts,” aka consultants, and release the “policy” with fanfare and a well designed public relations campaign.

The anger is bubbling in homes around the city. Parents are increasingly angry. Elected officials are tired about being “taken for granted.”

It will be fascinating to see whether the emperor realizes that for many parents, he has no clothes.

Freedman, who says he is not a “doctrinaire opponent” of small schools, makes some of the same criticisms the UFT and Edwize [see here and here] have made of the DOE’s implementation of the small schools initiative.

There was an earlier generation of small schools that were created with a lot more deliberation, they were opened a lot more gradually, they had a much more thought-through pedagogical center or core academic area. It’s not surprising that they have been successful.

The problem is that you have this tail of this big grant from the Gates Foundation wagging this policy dog at the Department of Ed. Because Gates has a big priority to start small schools, the Department of Education is jumpstarting 50 a year, year after year. It’s just impossible to have quality opening up schools in that kind of frenetic way.

Siegel has many valuable things to say about education generally from the perspective of a classroom teacher, including the paramount importance of small classes.

In Saturday’s New York Times, Steven Greenhouse has a good piece on the business offensive against ‘card check’ union recognition, now that they have figured out that it does not provide them the opportunities to deny the right to organize and bargain collectively they enjoy under labor law and a NLRB with an overwhelming anti-worker bias.

And this post at the Daily Kos, Reflections on a Four Year Strike, is a heart rending story of a coal mine company’s campaign to bust a union, and the four year strike that followed, from the point of view of a daughter of a leading union miner.

UPDATE:

And here’s one that just came in which will put quite a few noses out of joint in the highly politicized and deeply ideological world of private ‘think tanks’ which publish reports on educational policy issues. The Educational Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University has inaugurated a Think Tank Review Project which will review, from the viewpoint of the quality of social science, such reports. The first three reports are out, a University of Illinois Professor Christopher Lubienski review of a Cato Institue report on vouchers in Washington D.C. schools; a University of Colorado Professor Ed Wiley review of a Manhattan Institute report on Florida’s program to end social promotion; and a University of Vermont Adjunct Professor William Mathis review of a Wisconsin Policy Research Institute report on the achievement gap in Wisconsin’s high schools. Read the reviews: the examples of poor social science they expose are quite revealing.

Look for some push back on this issue. Outfits like the Cato Institute and the Manhattan Institute have a greal deal invested in having the conclusions of their reports taken at face value, and they will not go down without a fight.