The march to Albany begins! Fighting for the rights of NYC students to receive a fair equitable education

Robert Jackson, lead plaintiff for the CFE lawsuit (credit: Richard Fife)

Today the Alliance for Quality Education, parents and advocates are walking to Albany to demand equitable education state aid for NYC schools and other underfunded districts.   At the kick-off rally at Tweed this morning hundreds of elected officials, advocates, and parents joined them, to give them support.

NYC Kids say to Cuomo: Pay your bills!

This month marks the 10-year anniversary of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision of the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, which concluded that NYC students were denied their constitutional right to a sound basic education by an inequitable school aid formula.

 In 2007, the state began to comply with the court order with a more equitable foundation aid formula, but when the recession hit in 2009, the funding was frozen, ending the four-year phase-in.  The  promises to fully fund NYC and other districts have never been fulfilled, and we are still owed billions in additional aid, in a range estimated from three to five billion dollars more.

Even earlier, in 2003, Robert Jackson, then lead plaintiff of the CFE lawsuit, along with others, walked 150 miles to Albany for the Court of Appeals hearings.  Robert Jackson was there again today and is walking to Albany again.

Tish James, "A dream deferred is a dream denied"

This morning, he insisted that it was no time to give up, and pointed out that two out of the three city's highest officials were at the rally to show their support: Public Advocate Tish James and City Comptroller Scott Stringer.  But Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina were missing; in fact I saw no one there from NYC DOE.

As usual, many of the public officials were very eloquent. Public Advocate Tish James pointed out the justice delayed is justice denied.

Cathy Nolan speaks of overcrowded classrooms and schools.

Zakiyah Ansari of AQE

Comptroller Stringer prepares to march

Cathy Nolan, chair of the NY State Assembly Education Committee,  and Danny Dromm, chair of the NYC Council Education Committee,  denounced the overcrowded conditions and excessive class sizes in our schools that unfairly disadvantage NYC students, and Assemblymember Alicia Hyndman described how too many kids are still crammed into classes of 35.

A high school student from Make the Road by Walking spoke about insufficient counselors and extracurricular programs.   Zakiyah Ansari of AQE explained why the fight for our kids must continue.

If you'd like to join them, it's not too late!  This afternoon, on their way to Albany, Robert Jackson and AQE will join with other parents and allies at 3:30 PM at Juan Pablo Duarte School, PS 132, 185 Wadsworth Ave., in Washington Heights, where the CFE lawsuit began,  in 1993 -- more than 20 years ago.

The march for CFE funds begins from Class Size Matters on Vimeo.

Audit on school overcrowding released today confirms our findings that the crisis is getting worse

Today's Daily News, and no that it not me screaming in facepaint.

Today's audit from the City Comptroller reinforces the findings in our recent report, Space Crunch, showing that DOE continues to put out misleading data to minimize the worsening crisis of overcrowding in our schools, and has no real plans to deal with it.   See the Juan Gonzalez front page story in the Daily News today about the audit.  The unacceptable level of overcrowding was also delineated in a recent study from the Independent Budget Office. 

Overcrowding has a host of negative impacts on students, including excessive class sizes, high rates of disengagement and disciplinary problems, safety issues, and a sense among students that the system doesn’t care enough about their needs.  More than 330,000 students were in classes of 30 or more last year.  We also found that the DOE undercounts the number of students in trailers by many thousands.

Though the audit found that about 1/3 of kids were in overcrowded buildings by looking at the Blue Book’s “historic” 2011-2012 figures, we analyzed more recent “target” figures from 2012-13 and found nearly half of all students were in overcrowded buildings.   

The “target” formula is somewhat more accurate but still underestimates the actual level of overcrowding in schools.  This means more than 480,000 students were in extremely overstuffed buildings last year. The audit found the same trend line as we did– worsening overcrowding, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels.

The most interesting aspect of the audit involved their asking for documentation of what the DOE Offices of Portfolio Management and Space Planning had done to address the problem of overcrowding:

DOE’s Offices of Space Planning and Portfolio Management lacked any statistical or documentary evidence showing the substantive steps they took to alleviate school overcrowding. This failure constitutes a significant internal control deficiency. The lack of documentation may be partly attributed to the absence of written policies and procedures for either office. Through interviews and discussions with DOE personnel we were able to ascertain that Portfolio Management and Space Planning had some procedures in place and that they had attempted to follow these procedures to alleviate overcrowding. [Like what? They do not say.]

However, no documentation or evidence existed with in these two offices to indicate what these steps were or whether they had been taken….

Portfolio Management staff explained that the process for alleviating overcrowding is “organic,” consisting of “borough teams” that monitor schools monthly and annually, conduct monthly meetings, and hold telephone conversations with principals. According to Portfolio Management and Space Planning staff, written documentation, meeting minutes, and telephone logs of this process were not maintained. Therefore, there is no way to assess whether DOE was in fact, taking steps to alleviate overcrowding and whether those steps were effective.”

The DOE now claims that Portfolio has been abolished and a new office created called District planning, but several people in the know say the office has much the same personnel and apparently the same mission: to cram new co-located schools into existing school buildings which further overcrowds them.

From a footnote in the audit: “Portfolio Management, prior to its dissolution, did not have an organizational chart for its approximately 50 person staff, nor did it maintain a list of school buildings where the office attempted to address problems.”

We estimate that at least 100,000 seats are needed to alleviate the space crunch in our schools—more than double the number in the current capital plan, or else it is likely that NYC kids will be stuffed into even more overcrowded classrooms and substandard trailers for years to come.  It is time that the new administration confronts this ongoing crisis honestly and takes meaningful steps to address it.

NYC Kids PAC Endorses deBlasio for Mayor, James for Public Advocate and Stringer for Comptroller

Mayor: We endorse Bill de Blasio for Mayor. De Blasio has run a courageous campaign and has been outspoken on many of the issues parents care about including privatization, co-locations, testing and the need for more parent input in our public schools. This was not an easy decision for us to make, as John Liu's responses to our survey were the best of all the Democratic candidates, and his record as a City Comptroller has been exemplary.

Yet Liu's candidacy at this point appears to be a long shot, and we believe that electing a Mayor who will reverse the downward spiral that the Bloomberg administration has taken our schools is absolutely vital. All the Mayoral candidates who responded to our survey deserve credit for providing us with thoughtful and revealing responses. We urge parents and others who care about education to take a look.

We want to praise the other frontrunners, including Bill Thompson for being willing to give up the mayoral majority on the Board of Education, and Chris Quinn, for supporting checks and balances to mayoral control through the City Council, as well as some of their other positive stances on the issues that matter. But the positions Quinn has taken in the past in going along with the damaging Bloomberg agenda, and Thompson's relative quiescence over the last twelve years rules them out in our eyes.

Bill de Blasio, we hope and believe, will stop the rampant privatization of our schools and the overemphasis on testing, will listen more closely to the concerns of parents and communities, and will push for new investments in expanding preK, improving classroom conditions and alleviating school overcrowding. He has pledged to charge charter schools for the space and services they now receive for free, and to take personal student information out of inBloom Inc. and refrain from sharing it with third parties without parental consent.

We hope he takes a second, hard look at the governance issue before mayoral control comes up for a vote in 2015, because no matter how benign, no mayor -- indeed, no public official -- should have the unchecked power that the state has given the NYC mayor in running our schools. In the meantime, we are confident that Bill de Blasio will take public education in a far better direction than Bloomberg has during the last 12 years.

Public Advocate: We endorse Letitia James without reservations. In the City Council, Tish James has battled for more transparency in contracting, and has supported public school parents during divisive co-location battles in her district. She has also highlighted and advocated for children as young as five who have been repeatedly suspended and pushed out of charter schools. Her responses to our survey were terrific and show great understanding of the issues.

We are concerned that both Reshma Saujani and Daniel Squadron are too closely linked to the wealthy hedge fund community who want to privatize our public schools - and neither one filled out our surveys, despite repeated requests. Cathy Guerriero deserves praise for her advocacy and her progressive positions on education issues, and we hope she runs for public office again in the future. But Letitia James wins our wholehearted support, not only because of her strong stances, but also because of her track record as a public official for standing up for what is right, both in her community and citywide. We believe that Letitia James will make an excellent Public Advocate.

City Comptroller: We endorse Scott Stringer, because of his laudable record as Manhattan Borough President. Stringer has released a series of excellent reports on school overcrowding and technology, and frequently meets with parents and constituents and listens to our concerns. He has a very able and hard-working policy staff, and deserves credit for appointing and retaining Patrick Sullivan, the best representative on the Panel for Educational Policy that could be imagined. Stringer has allowed Sullivan to argue vociferously with the DOE policies, and vote independently, according to his conscience and his brains. Despite repeated requests to his campaign, Spitzer did not respond to our survey.

While Stringer's positions on school governance are not as strong as we would like, he has a history of working well with parents, has pushed hard to get more schools built both in his borough and citywide, and has put forward some excellent plans for what he would do as Comptroller, including developing a real needs analysis of school capacity to alleviate overcrowding and reduce class size - something the Bloomberg administration has refused to do in 12 years. He also intends to conduct cost-benefit studies of the outsourcing of city contracts, a practice that has been abused by this administration. We believe that Scott Stringer would make an admirable City Comptroller.

NYC Kids Political Action Committee is run by volunteer parents who currently have or recently had children attending NYC public schools. The decision to endorse is based on responses to our survey, the candidates' track record, specific plans and proposals put forth by the candidates and the potential impact on the election. In developing the survey we solicited input from more than 2,000 constituents.

No matter whom you support, please make sure to vote next Tuesday, September 10. 

Thanks, Shino, Mario, Isaac, Lisa, Leonie, Andy, Karen and Tesa for NYC Kids PAC 

PS We're quoted in today's Daily News about the fact that Chris Quinn is the only major Democratic candidate who has not pledged to take our personal student data out of inBloom Inc. as soon as possible. Take a look!

Manhattan Borough President Stringer Explains Vote Against School Capital Plan

May 6, 2009

Dear Manhattan Public School Parent:

As you all know, our City, and especially the borough of Manhattan, is facing a severe public school overcrowding crisis, with overcrowded classrooms affecting educational quality and parents being told that there may no longer be room for their child at their zoned public school or pre-K of choice.

Last Monday evening, the Panel for Educational Policy voted on the 2010-2014 School Capital Plan, which spells out the Department of Education’s plans for new school construction and repair over the next five years. As some of you may already be aware, my appointee to the Panel for Educational Policy, Patrick Sullivan, voted against approving the proposed Five-Year Capital Plan. Although the plan was passed by the Panel and will therefore now be voted on by the City Council, I thought it important to share with you the reasons that Patrick and I felt this was not the right plan to recommend to the Council.

We all understand the seriousness of the fiscal crisis facing our city. Getting through these tough times will require shared sacrifice, and our school system will have to shoulder its fair share of the costs. However, even with this understood, the proposed capital plan is unacceptably inadequate to meet our obligations to our children’s futures. Building schools is an investment in our future that we can’t afford not to make.

In 2008, I issued two reports, Crowded Out, and Still Crowded Out, which documented how, during the building boom, residential construction in many Manhattan neighborhoods far outpaced school capacity growth. This planning failure set the stage for the crisis we are in today. In early October, I joined with most of your elected representatives, as well as parents, educators, and advocates across the city, to launch the Campaign for A Better Capital Plan, an effort to persuade the Department of Education to provide the capital investment our public school children need. Our campaign appealed to the Mayor and Chancellor for three fundamental reforms, the ABC’s of A Better Capital Plan.

While our campaign raised critical awareness of school overcrowding issues, and accomplished some important reforms to the planning process, ultimately the plan brought to the Panel for Educational Policy for approval failed to fully encompass these important reforms:

A. Address existing overcrowding and reduce class size

When released in 2004, the current Five-Year Capital Plan promised to: 1) end the reliance on Transportable Classroom Units (TCUs) and mini-schools over twenty years old; 2) implement class-size reduction in 100% of Kindergarten – Grade 3 classes (to a target of twenty seats); and 3) alleviate high school overcrowding and split sessions.

None of these goals have been achieved in Manhattan. The new plan also does not align with class size reduction targets submitted to the State Education Department under the Contracts for Excellence regulations.

The need for new capacity is acute and obvious in many parts of Manhattan. No new seats are proposed for District 6 in Northern Manhattan, and the 600 in the pipeline from the previous plan are well short of the 940 needed to replace TCUs, the 866 needed to bring K-3 class size to 20, and the 540 needed to reduce class sizes to DOE targets. A district that needs thousands of seats will get none.

Waitlists for Kindergarten seats have spread to many Manhattan elementary schools in District 2 and 3 with hundreds of children still without a school. Upper East Side elementary schools are collectively 1,070 students over capacity with no new schools scheduled for construction. This disturbing reality is compounded by DOE’s own demographic projections which show an 18.5% increase in the number of children for District 2 from 2005 to 2015.

These are just a few specific examples – similar problems exist in Greenwich Village and Chelsea, the Upper West Side, Lower Manhattan, East Midtown and the Flatiron, and parts of Harlem, to name just a few areas.

The proposed capital plan proposes no new high schools anywhere in Manhattan, and many growing neighborhoods throughout the borough will apparently go without any new schools of any kind. Only one of the borough’s six school districts will see new school construction, and even that will occur at a level that is inadequate to meet existing overcrowding conditions, to say nothing of planning for future growth.

The 3,296 seats of new capacity proposed in the Capital Plan for Manhattan represent a nearly 40% reduction from the amount proposed in the previous capital plan. This falls far short of what is necessary to address the chronic overcrowding found across Manhattan. The DOE should propose an amount of school construction necessary to eliminate existing overcrowding, reduce class sizes to the numbers agreed to in Contracts for Excellence, and plan for ongoing growth.

B. Be ready for growth and plan at the neighborhood level

One of the central elements of my reform proposals is that we must start looking at school planning from the perspective of urban planners and development analysts. DOE and SCA should work with their colleagues at City Planning and HPD, as well as other planning experts and communities, to establish a clear, transparent procedure for projecting future growth from new development. The Capital Plan should include a projection of the number of new housing units expected next year, and disclose the estimated impact on local schools, at the neighborhood level, not just at the level of School Districts, because New Yorkers have a reasonable expectation that there will be a school in their neighborhood for their young children to attend.

On this, there is some good news. For the first time, DOE acknowledged our request to project demand at the neighborhood level rather than simply at the district level, as had been their practice in the past. This is an important reform that should yield far better planning in the future.

However, despite repeated requests from Patrick and other members of the PEP, the DOE has not provided a detailed needs analysis at any geographic level. While the new plan proposes amounts of seats for some specific District 2 neighborhoods, there is no demonstration of how the various drivers of demand – new housing, alleviation of overcrowding, class size reduction, recovery of cluster spaces or removal of TCUs – combine into a number of seats we need to provide. And the DOE could not quantify the growth of charter schools in DOE facilities.

The DOE should openly and transparently estimate demand, then spell out the amount of new construction required to meet its basic educational goals. Capital funding can then be allocated rationally and the City can prioritize appropriately.

C. Correct the faulty capacity estimates

The Capital Plan’s assumptions about the current state of school overcrowding are based on the City’s current capacity statistics as reported in the DOE’s “Blue Book”. But according to principals, teachers, parents – and even the State’s highest court, in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision – these official estimates overstate the true capacity of neighborhood schools.

Art and music rooms, science laboratories, special education services, and libraries are all central to the well-rounded education our children deserve. As Patrick pointed out on Monday, the DOE Office of Portfolio Development instructs administrators to use an outdated method of allocating cluster spaces which allows fewer art and science rooms for each school than what is correct under the current formula. As a result, schools rated at 100% of capacity are forced to close art and music rooms while those rooms closed years ago remain pressed into service as classroom space.

And, again, the Capital Plan is based on capacity numbers which assume higher class sizes than the City’s official target numbers at higher grades. To provide an appropriate frame of reference, the City should also measure school capacity based on the City’s official class size reduction targets. These were the promises that were made pursuant to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit and we must, at the very least, show how far we are from keeping them, and what progress is being made towards meeting the targets.

Conclusion

In the long run, as the Mayor has said, failing to invest in infrastructure like schools only makes tough times tougher. We can’t repeat the mistakes of the 1970s, when the City stopped investing in its future, families fled New York and took their tax base with them. In fact, new construction could be one of the best ways to encourage private sector growth and stimulate our economy.

In the “Crowded Out” reports, and in the work I have done with my Overcrowding Task Force, and as part of Campaign for A Better Capital Plan, I have made the case for reforms to the capital planning process. The Capital Plan should include a straightforward accounting of what it would take to reduce overcrowding and reduce class size. Then, we as a City need to make tough choices on how much we spend towards meeting that goal within the context of the City’s overall budget. We must have that debate as a City, and we must not shortchange the discussion by underestimating our needs from the start.

Patrick and I felt our public school children deserve better than the current capital plan. We hope you will continue working with us to keep fighting for the new school seats Manhattan children need to learn and grow.

I have no illusions about how difficult these challenges will be, but failing to rise to meet them is not an option.

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact Verena Arnabal, my education policy analyst, at varnabal@manhattanbp.org, or 212-669-4513.

Sincerely,

Scott M. Stringer

Manhattan Borough President

Rally to demand A Better Capital Plan

Thanks so much to all of you who were able to attend our rally on school overcrowding on Friday morning.

We filled the steps of City Hall, nearly 300 impassioned parents, advocates, children and elected officials.

Among those who spoke included Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, Cathy Nolan of Queens, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, Assembly member Deborah Glick, Council Members Robert Jackson, chair of the City Council Education committee, Jessica Lappin, chair of the subcommittee on public siting, and David Yassky of Brooklyn. Rich Farkas, the VP of the UFT also spoke, as well as Manhattan BP Scott Stringer, who orchestrated the entire proceedings with his usual flair.

Special thanks to the 5th graders at PS 3 who brought wonderful signs, including, “Sardines have more room” and “Bloomberg: give kids more room to bloom!”

Here are just some of the news clips: NYC schools are packed beyond capacity (WABC- TV): New York City schools suffer massive overcrowding, statistics show (Daily News); Parents: NYC School Overcrowding A 'Crisis' (WCBS - TV); NY schools are packed beyond capacity (AP) New York City Parents Sound Off on Crowded Classrooms (WNYC radio); School overcrowding to go under microscope (Staten Island Advance); For Downtown Primary Schools, Ever Less Wiggle Room (NY Times); Parents, elected officials urge better education capital planning (Gotham schools).

Gotham Schools has photos of the rally and I have uploaded more here.

It was a day of both highs and lows, since the Council hearings that followed featured the usual DOE spin. Deputy Mayor Walcott, Deputy Chancellor Grimm, Garth Harries, and Liz Sciabarra were out to convince skeptical Council members that everything was rosy.

They kept on droning about “pocket” overcrowding, as though this problem was limited to isolated neighborhoods – rather than the systemic crisis revealed by their own data – showing that more half of million students are in classes exceeding the targets in their class size reduction plan, and according to the DOE "Blue book", 38 percent of NYC students attend overcrowded schools Not to mention that according to our survey, half of all principals say that the capacity figures for their own schools are inaccurate, and understates the extent of overcrowding at their schools.

Council members repeatedly tried to get real answers – or at least get them to concede that a serious problem existed, but no such luck.

Deputy Mayor Walcott testified that because of past mismanagement, 20,000 seats out of 60,000 seats in the previous five year capital plan were never built. He omitted the fact that nearly half of the 63,000 seats in the current capital plan will probably not be completed when this plan concludes in June.

When Garth Harries, Chief Portfolio Officer, was asked when they would be able to reduce class size to 20 in grades K-3 in all elementary schools – more than 60% of whom are still in classes of 21 or more -- as the city originally promised would occur by June 2009, he responded that he was unable to say.

When Kathleen Grimm was asked when they would be able to eliminate trailers and TCUs, another goal they originally promised would occur by June, she replied that many principals like their trailers and didn’t want them removed. (!!) She also said that overcrowding at District 2 schools like Salk and Clinton middle schools were the result of their being too popular with parents– as though nearly every other middle school in D2 wasn’t severely overcrowded as well.

When Dennis Walcott was asked how many additional seats would be needed to meet the city’s goals in their state-mandated Contract for Excellence plan, (20 students per grade in K-3 and 23 in all other grades), he responded that this “depended on one’s mindset.”

When Walcott was asked about the results of our principal’s survey, which showed that 86% of NYC principals said that they were unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes, and that 50% reported that overcrowding made it unsafe for students or staff, he shrugged this off, and responded that of course, all principals would like to have more room.

It was a typical administration performance, full of obfuscation and excuses, an attempt to define the problem away or blame others rather than confront the problems directly or provide any real answers.

Following several hours of this, MBP Scott Stringer finally got a chance to testify, as did State Sen. Liz Krueger, both of whom gave strong statements about the need to build more schools and reform the planning process.

Other speakers included Prof. Emily Horowitz, who summarized the results of our principal’s survey, and Doug Israel of the Center for Arts Education, who spoke about the need for more art and music rooms. I had to leave at 2 PM before the hearings were completed so I don’t have a complete list, but I know that other parent leaders testified as well.

Meanwhile, please see the press release along with the ABC letter, with its impressive list of signers -- including prominent advocates and elected officials from the city, state, and federal levels.

Here is also an updated copy of our principal survey report, as well as the CSM testimony, complete with charts.

Don’t forget to send a fax to the Mayor, demanding a better capital plan; just go to the UFT website today!

Manhattan President Scott Stringer -- Letter on PEP Budget Vote

THE CITY OF NEW YORK
OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT
BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN

SCOTT M. STRINGER
BOROUGH PRESIDENT

June 26th, 2008

Dear Manhattan Public School Parents:

On Monday, June 23rd, the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) voted
on the executive budget for New York City public schools. As may
already know, my appointee to the PEP, Patrick Sullivan, voted
against the proposed budget, and I am writing to share with you the
reasons that Patrick and I felt it necessary to vote no.

The state law is clear from my perspective. The PEP is
supposed to "approve an estimate of the total sum of money deemed
necessary for school operations in the next fiscal year." The
budget presented by the Chancellor of the Department of Education
(DOE) would require cuts to all schools, some ranging from five
percent or higher. The proposed budget with these cuts would, in my
view, not be sufficient to fund school operations. Consequently,
pursuant to the PEP's duties as outlined in state law, Patrick and I
felt he simply could not approve of the proposed budget.
Furthermore, rather than propose an estimated budget that sets forth
the funding to meet schools' needs, it appears that the Chancellor's
budget instead starts with the funding provided by the Mayor and
reduces expenditures until a balance is achieved. This is not the
way state law dictates the budget should be presented to the PEP,
the Mayor and the City Council for approval.

My concern is that the proposed budget will require cuts to
essential programs such as academic intervention and tutoring,
including programs for those students at risk of being held back
under the third, fifth, seventh, and eighth grade retention
policies, arts, music, sports, enrichment programs, advanced
placement courses, after school programs, professional development,
technology, libraries, and classroom supplies. Many schools facing
the deepest cuts would likely lose teaching staff as well.

The lack of disclosure and transparency also made it extremely
difficult to assess the sufficiency of the budgeted funding. DOE
refused to provide budget code level detail (which would provide
information about the cuts or lack of cuts taking place at the
central level) or respond in writing to Patrick's questions about
cost increases.

What we do know about DOE's itemized $963 million in cost increases,
however, is cause for concern. DOE has embarked upon a series of
initiatives that are all extremely expensive including the retention
of thousands of students, the ramp-up in standardized testing and
test prep, the creation of charter schools, the expansion of
collaborative team teaching (CTT) classes, and the restructuring of
large high schools into small high schools. While some of these
programs are clearly beneficial and the efficacy of others is
subject to debate, the fact is that each one alone costs hundreds of
millions of dollars annually. The decision to proceed
simultaneously with many expensive initiatives while the mayor has
asked DOE to reduce its budget by $428 million raises questions
about the fiscal management of the school system. While we are
fortunate to have an additional $608 million in state funding, our
oversight of finances must be rigorous if we are to avoid harmful
cuts to the classroom.

My hope is that the Mayor and City Council can work together to
achieve an education budget that does not affect the quality of
education provided to Manhattan's children. I will join parents in
asking that the final budget restore the cuts and thus the City's
commitment to its children.

Very truly yours,
Scott M. Stringer

Manhattan Borough President

MUNICIPAL BUILDING
1 CENTRE STREET
NEW YORK, NY 10007
PHONE (212) 669-8300
FAX (212) 669-4305
www.mbpo.org
bp@manhattanbp. org

Crowded out: report on city's failure to plan for new schools

Read Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s important new report on school overcrowding, “Crowded Out.”

Here in NYC we are in the midst of an unprecedented development boom. In four Manhattan neighborhoods alone, the city has approved enough new buildings to add up to 2,300 new public school students in grades K-8, while increasing total school capacity by only 143 seats.

Every day, we fall further behind. Kindergarten classes are already 28 students in some schools, high rises continue to spring up around us, and rate of new residential construction is not likely to let up anytime soon.

As more and more schools become overcrowded, there are few prospects for alleviating these conditions, no less reducing class size. In all, this administration’s record on school construction and planning for the future has been an abject failure.

The recommendations of this report? The city needs to improve its planning to make sure that enough schools are built along with new housing, and adopt a transparent process for projecting population growth; they must plan for new schools at the neighborhood level where the overcrowding is most intense, rather than at the school district level; and the next capital plan must be far more aggressive if there are going to be enough schools to eliminate overcrowding and reduce class size.

See also this letter from elected officials, including Rep. Carolyn Maloney, to Joel Klein about the administration's failure to site and build enough schools.

Check out the media coverage of this report on NY1, WCBS, and the NY Daily News.

Gifted and Talented Admissions Revised

At an emergency 8:00 AM meeting Thursday morning, the Panel for Educational Policy voted to expand G&T admissions to all kids meeting the 90th percentile on the two standardized tests required for entrance. The Panel had previously approved the 95th percentile as the standard in the fall.

Contrary to some reports that notifications will be mailed on April 18th, the DOE explained that parents will be told how their children score starting at the end of the month. Originally, notifications were to be mailed at the end of March. The G&T admissions process has become notorious for confusion and delay under the current administration.

For Manhattan districts, here are the number of children who passed the 90th percentile cutoff and will be guaranteed a seat: D1: 51, D2: 371, D3: 370, D4: 8, D5: 37, D6: 50. In D6 the current number of children enrolled in the entry Kindergarten class is 80 compared with 50 who qualify for next year suggesting the number of seats may shrink there. Otherwise, all Manhattan districts had more children who qualify than seats filled this year.

The low number of children qualifying in lower income districts suggests the DOE has not met its goal of expanding the reach of G&T programs. While the expansion of the cutoff is welcome, all of the criticisms leveled when Manhattan Borough President Stringer and I voted to oppose the new policy remain. This is the fourth or fifth year the Bloomberg administration has changed the admission process. Its efforts would clearly be better spent working on building programs and outreach in historically underserved communities.

See news reports from NY1 here , the NY Times here, NY Post here and Daily News here.

Update: Admissions stats by district here in Excel.

Gifted and Talented Admissions -- Confusion and Delay?

UPDATE (April 9th): As reported, the PEP will hold an emergency vote on April 10th to lower the cutoff to 90% for district G&T programs. Notification letters to be mailed "sometime this month".

In today's Daily News, Erin Einhorn reports DOE is rethinking where to set the cutoff for G&T admissions. The policy to set the bar at 95% cutoff on the two standardized tests , the OLSAT and BSRA was set in November.

At the time, many parents tried to convince the DOE that they were making a mistake. The District 3 CEC passed a resolution in opposition to the revised policy. In our letter to Manhattan parents explaining our vote against the G&T policy when presented to the Panel for Educational Policy, Manhattan Borough President Stringer and I raised the concern: "this higher cutoff score for admissions raises the very real possibility that a number of current programs will not be filled to capacity and will therefore be closed, leaving parents with fewer programming options".

Let's hope the DOE refrains from shuttering successful programs. Meanwhile, notifications have not been sent out, putting the whole process behind schedule, which was already pushed too far out into the spring.

8th Grade Retention Vote at March 17th Panel for Educational Policy

On Monday, the Panel for Educational Policy voted to approve the Chancellor's plan to hold back children in the 8th grade based on standardized test scores. I voted against the policy and ended up being the lone dissenting voice. The statement released prior to the vote by Manhattan Borough President Stringer, who has appointed me to the Panel can be found here.

Like most people, I don't think we should push unprepared kids into high school. I don't support social promotion. Yet the proposal that Chancellor Klein put forward for approval had no plan to provide services to the retained children, let alone deal with the pervasive problems of middle schools. Panel members were asked to put faith in the "forthcoming" plan that DOE is developing to turn around middle schools. The end of the administration strikes me as an odd time to start working on a plan for the weakest part of the system, especially when federal NAEP tests have shown no progress in 8th grade under the current administration.

I've looked closely at all the research on these programs to hold kids back based on test scores and pretty much across the board the research says they don't work. A very comprehensive study in the Chicago school system showed that the retained children had higher drop out rates and overall the program did not help despite costing hundreds of millions to fund another year of school.

The DOE has contracted with a research and consulting firm, RAND, to study the implementation and success of its program yet no findings have been released to the public. I have been fighting over the last two months to have results released to Panel for Educational Policy members but we were only given the 479 pages of reports late Saturday, without sufficient time to review them prior to the vote. The DOE will not release any findings until August 2009 despite the fact that much of the information is complete and would be highly valuable to the various efforts focused on improving the middle schools.

As I've come to expect, the Chancellor's plan lacks any semblance of implementation planning. DOE believes somewhere between 5,000 - 18,000 additional kids will repeat 8th grade. Tweed has not explained where they'll put these kids in middle schools that are already overcrowded. We have severe overcrowding in many parts of Manhattan, especially in Districts 6 and 2 and increasingly 3. Class sizes of 29 or higher are already typical in 8th grade in contrast to 20-22 in the rest of the state.

Like many debates about school policy, the administration has framed it in terms of false choices: social promotion vs. retention. But social promotion is not the only alternative to the Chancellor's policy of test-driven retention. What we've been saying is to instead find these kids early and provide the remediation instead of waiting for them to fail. DOE has an $80 million dollar student achievement database and the most extensively tested student body in the free world yet they can't figure out which kids need help and give it to them?

Instead of paying to simply repeat 8th grade, we should invest in creating middle school environments that are more attractive for both students and teachers -- small classes, enrichment programs, the arts, sports, after-school programs and proactive interventions for struggling students.