When the BOE morphed into the DOE one aspect of the reorganization that received little examination was (OSEPO), the Office of Student Enrollment and Placement Operations.
The major “piece” of OSEPO is the 8th to 9th grade student articulation, the high school application process. By early December, each 8th grade student, must submit a high school application with up to twelve choices of high schools. Parents receive a high school directory, an encyclopedia sized description of the over 400 high schools and high school programs.
Over 80% of 8th grade students receive placements in the first round that is announced in April. Additional rounds place most of the remaining students. Students who are new to the system or have been discharged from schools are placed through what is referred to as “over-the-counter,” students are, beginning in mid August, directed to placement centers (there were 14 scattered throughout the city this year) and the centers, staffed mostly by retired counselors and school secretaries, interview parents and assign their kids school to a school.
Unfortunately the system has struggled.
Capacity is a key issue … OSEPO makes a determination as to “available” seats from afar and assigns students … In too many instances students are assigned to “invisible” seats and class size spirals upwards.
Special Ed students are assigned to schools that don’t have classes to fit the category of the handicapped kids.
There is no appeal at the school from a decision by OSEPO. Principals must simply accept the kids.
Principals have no one to call, to complain to … OSEPO is not part of any Region, not part of Empowerment, it functions as a quasi-independent agency, responsible to the Chancellor.
To make matters worse the Office of New Schools continues to “close” schools and “deflect” students to other schools, creating overcrowding.
The UFT Task Force on Small High Schools chastised the DOE process – closing schools and “deflecting” kids into already overcrowded schools and in some instances creating newly overcrowded schools.
The lack of transparency continues to be a core issue at Tweed.
Does the DOE have a deflection plan for the closing and opening of schools? Why does the DOE continue to create new schools without sites? How can you assign kids to schools that have no available seats? How can you assign Special Ed kids to schools without appropriate programs?
The offspring of Tweed, the Office of New Schools (ONS) and OSEP0 appear to operate in a vacuum, deaf to the crises that their decisions create.
In September, 07 the 5th to 6th grade articulation process will be an OSEPO responsibiity and newspapers report the Chancellor intends to create a system that mirrors the high school application system.
We need a public discussion and the creation of a transparent plan that addresses student placement, school creation, school capacity and the issue of oversize classes and the appropriate placement of special education and English language learners.
5 Comments:
1 Chaz
· Oct 16, 2006 at 6:37 pm
Peter:
Wonderful article. In our large high school it appears that OSEPO dumped many ex-felons into the school. When we found out the number through the ATS system, we realized that many of them never went to our school and didn’t live in our zoned area.
Our principal was shocked to hear this and has tried to find out why, to no avail. We are checking further to see why they were sent to our school and what action we can proceed with.
Hopefully, once we trace this back to the person(s) involved with this travesty, we will publize it.
2 leoniehaimson
· Oct 17, 2006 at 11:42 am
Thanks for this, Peter.
The way in which Tweed effectively controls the enrollment and register of high schools through the Office of Student Enrollment and Placement Operations really puts the lie to the whole concept of the empowerment zone.
Now OSEPO will be put in charge of middle school placements as well. Tweed argues this will improve equity, but this is far from what has occurred in the case of our high schools, where there are widely varying levels of overcrowding and class size.
If a principal can’t control enrollment, there’s no way he or she can control class size; and there’s nothing more important in terms of improving the learning environment.
Charter schools have an even greater advantage in this regard. See for example the Future Leaders Institute Charter School, which shares a building w/ other schools in Harlem. According to InsideSchools,
“The school, begun as an ordinary public school, converted to charter status in 2005 after quarrels with Department of Education about everything from class size to special education….in years past, the DOE had assigned many children to the school mid-year, forcing class size to balloon to 35.”
Now that the school has charter status, administrators have complete control over enrollment, allowing class sizes to be kept at 20 for grades K-5, and at 25 for 5-8 grades.
This is the best argument for charter schools I can think of. But in a system whose physical capacity is severely overcrowded, and where charter schools are placed in existing public school buildings, for every child at a charter school who is provided w/ smaller classes, there’s another at a traditional public school whose classroom conditions will worsen.
The only solution is to provide all children with the class sizes they need to succeed – by ensuring that the CFE funds are spent to sufficiently enlarge the physical capacity of the system as a whole. Unfortunately, this is not what the Mayor currently plans to do.
Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters
3 jd2718
· Oct 18, 2006 at 7:26 pm
The new high school application process seems to cause much more headache than the old one (I think I am distinguishing between degrees of lousy here).
Part of what has gone wrong is the loss of the zoned school, the default option, for many students.
Now the application process is for everyone, whether they want to wade into that pool, or not.
Also, with all the talk about “building community,” it is ironic that schools built on actual communities, those are no longer application options for many of our 8th graders.
Jonathan
4 Peter Goodman
· Oct 18, 2006 at 8:46 pm
Jonathan:
Zone high schools still exist, although in the Bronx there are only a handful of high schools that haven’t been redesigned. If a student selects a zone school (designated in the Directory) as # 1 on their application the student will be assigned to that school. If a school chooses a zoned school lower down the list they will be assigned to the zoned school if they are not assigned to one of the higher selected schools.
Many Principals don’t like the system because it is almost impossible to circumvent …
Peter
5 jd2718
· Oct 19, 2006 at 6:15 am
Peter,
to my knowledge there are no zoned high schools in the Bronx.
Jonathan