hand delivery of G and T letters: more waste by DOE

After all the fiascos and late arrivals of preK and middle school admissions, there are lots of comments on Insideschools blog that the Gifted and Talented letters have finally arrived – hand-delivered on Saturday and Sunday to parents throughout all parts of the city -- by drivers in vans!

As one commented, “No postage; totally WEIRD!!! I appreciate the care in sending it, but the cost has to be INSANE!!”

I hope some reporters are looking into this…what a way to run a school system.

Update: see this follow-up article by Eliz. Green in the NY Sun.

Please nominate Tweed's greatest foul-ups! from Diane Ravitch

Six years into mayoral control, it is time for an accounting.

For the sake of history and memory, can we begin to compile a Directory of Tweed's Greatest Foul-Ups? Parents and others; please contribute your nominees for this distinction by posting them on the comment section of this blog.

Here is a start:

1. The re-routing of bus routes in January 2007, leaving thousands of kids in the cold.

2. The centralization of Pre-K admissions in June 2008, leaving many children without seats.

3. The centralization of middle school admissions in June 2008, leaving many students not knowing where they would be going to school.

4. The revision of admission to Gifted programs, reducing access to these programs in many communities.

More? Criteria:

Describe the snafu. What year? Explain why it mattered. Not more than a couple of paragraphs.

The decision of the judge will be final, and the full list of nominations will be posted on the NYC education news list-serve and this blog.

The winner receives an autographed copy of "The Great School Wars: A History of Public Education in NYC."

-- Diane Ravitch

On how DOE's preK fiasco disadvantages poor kids the most

Note: If you are a parent who applied for a preK seat for your child, please take this online survey.

More evidence of the massive screw-up in preK admissions, compounding the serial fiascos of middle school admissions, Gifted and Talented, principal bonuses, and nearly every other program that DOE has insisted on taking control over in recent months.

Despite the fact that there are 23,000 available preK slots for the next school year, 3,000 out of 20,000 applicants received not a single seat: From the DOE website:

Applications for the second round of the pre-Kindergarten admissions process will be available at borough enrollment offices and online beginning June 23. Anyone who did not receive a match in the first round will automatically receive an application in the mail. In the first round, 17,000 of 20,000 applicants received an offer to a pre-K program, and 15,000 received an offer to their first-choice school.

Up till now, the media has featured mostly middle school parents who are justifiably angry at being denied seats despite sibling preferences that DOE assured them would guarantee their child a seat -- or others who had been locked out of their zoned elementary school when out-of-zone applicants received offers.

Another problem, not as widely reported, is how the new centralized process worked against parents whose kids need preK the most. According to a teacher in a Title one school in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, usually by this time her school has filled up three classes of preK with neighborhood children; but this year they received enough applicants to fill up only one class. Why?

Before this year, neighborhood parents logically went to their local school to apply; this year they were not allowed to do so but were diverted to borough enrollment centers blocks away or were forced to fill out application forms online. The standardization and centralization of the process is inherently inequitable to those parents who do not have internet access or the time to travel long distances to sign up.

This is yet another instance in which the Chancellor’s peculiar notion of equity works against real equity, as Eduwonkette and others have pointed out.

As teacher Lisa North reported on our NYC education list serv:

My school, PS 3 in Brooklyn, has had 3 pre-k classes for the last 2 years. Parents would come to the school to register. Now they have to go downtown Brooklyn first. Our parents DO NOT do that! At this time we only have enough students for ONE class. Why can't parents register directly in the school?

We are also in danger of losing our "gifted and talented" program – one of the few in Bedford-Stuyvesant, because of the new DOE testing.

On top of that, the charter schools are beginning to take a number of our level 3/4 students (as well as some of the others), but especially students whose families are more involved with their education. The DOE is wreaking havoc with our school!

Despite the fact that it is usually the middle class parents who protest loudest, in this case, as in the DOE's utter refusal to reduce class size, their expansion of small schools initiative, and nearly everything else that they do, the poor and neediest kids lose out the most.

Pre K screw- up; but don't worry -- it only affects current public school parents!

Lots of news on DOE's mismanagement of the preK application process, which Tweed insisted on taking complete control of this year. Despite the headline on the NY Times, it's not that the process was "confusing to parents," it is that the DOE and their private contractor in Penn. screwed up by not honoring their agreement to give sibling preferences – so much so that many parents who have already have a child in the system got no preK placement at all.

Parents of the 20,000 children who applied for 23,000 pre-kindergarten slots began receiving letters over the weekend from the Department of Education regarding their child's placement. Many of those letters informed parents that none of the schools they had chosen were available, Ms. Gotbaum said, even in cases where there was no obvious reason for the rejection. For instance, she said, children were rejected from programs where their older siblings are enrolled, although the new process is supposed to give them priority…

In January, Mr. Klein announced that he was scrapping the patchwork of pre-kindergarten enrollment procedures, calling them "confusing, unfair and difficult to navigate," and said he would replace them with a "single, simple, fair process."

Rather than submitting applications to a single school as they had done in the past, parents this year were required to submit a single application, which was sent to a data processing center in Willow Brook, Pa.

But as the DOE spokesperson said, "the problem appeared to be affecting only families who had a child enrolled in a public school."

So obviously this is a minor problem – clearly public school parents must be used to being unfairly treated; or if they aren't by now, they should get used to it fast!

Once again, the total incompetence of this administration to get anything right cannot be underestimated.

For more on this, see the Daily News, the NY Post and especially the inside schools blog -- in which the DOE is actually trying to get away with blaming parents for filling out the forms incorrectly!