to my knowledge there are no zoned high schools in the Bronx.

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

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

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

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.