Questions about Bill de Blasio's remedies for turning around struggling schools

photo credit: Isaac Carmignani

1.     This morning, Bill de Blasio gave an eloquent speech on his solution for struggling schools. The list  of 93 schools to get additional supports is here.  The primary reform offered,  extended instructional time, has been tried before many times, with negligible impact. It was one of the options that the feds allowed and that many NYC schools adopted as part of their “School Improvement grant” program  -- with disappointing results.  

 As Gene Glass, noted education researcher has put it, “Within reason, the productivity of the schools is not a matter of the time allocated to them. Rather it is a matter of how they use the time they already have.”  Only if the extra time is devoted to something different – like small group instruction or tutoring – will this likely help. When I looked at the class sizes last year at Boys and Girls HS in Brooklyn, another school on the list that has struggled for years, I was horrified to see many classes at 34, and a student/teacher ratio (including special ed classes) extremely high at 20.1. 

The other policy option that will be offered by the Mayor, community schools –i.e. adding social and medical services  – may help, but many of the struggling schools on the list are already so overcrowded that it’s not clear where the space for these programs will  be.  Already many of these schools are providing mandated services to their special needs students in hallways and in closets.  Without a real plan to alleviate overcrowding and reduce class size, it’s not clear that these schools will be given a significant chance to improve.  .

There is also is a substantial overlap between this list of schools and the 75 schools that the DOE promised last year to reduce class size as part of their state-funded Contracts for Excellence plan.  Unfortunately, we found that despite $600M in annual C4E funds that could have been used for this purpose, no extra funding to reduce class size was provided these schools, none of them made their class size targets, and in about half of them, class sizes actually increased.   Bill de Blasio also spoke a lot in his speech about treating parents as partners.  However, if he refuses to listen to what most parents think would most help their school improve  --lowering class size, for the last eight years the top parent priority on the DOE’s own surveys -- it’s not clear what this partnership really means.  

School closing hearings at John Ericsson JHS and Grover Cleveland HS

The following is by Pat Dobosz, a teacher and a graduate of John Ericsson MS 126:

On Wednesday, April 4 we attended the closing hearing at John Ericsson MS 126 in Brooklyn. This was a "restart" school that is now becoming a "turnaround" school. This euphemism means it will close, lose 50% of its staff and get a new number and name. We heard many pleas from students, teachers, parents and politicians to give this school a chance. It has a new principal that everyone respects, and was just put under the restart model in September. Assemblyman Joe Lentol said that it was an insult to the new principal to switch gears now.  This school has 40% of its students receiving special education services, compared to 15.64% citywide. 25% of its student body are English Language Learners, several of whom spoke passionately about the education and services they were receiving at 126.

John Ericsson has suffered neglect for many years because of poor administrators that were allowed to bring it down. The DOE has a moral obligation to give support so that it  can once again be a model middle school as it was when I went there as a student.  These hearings are heartbreaking as the school communities speak on behalf of their second "families." It is outrageous that NY State, Bloomberg and The DOE/PEP turn a deaf ear to public outcry.

My school past will be only captured in yearbooks. My elementary school is now co-located with Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy charter, my high school has been closed, and now they want to close my Junior High School. The wonderful education and memories I had at each of these schools will be only that, memories. My future grandchildren and friends' children will not have the pleasure of saying they went to the school their parents went to.

Below are videos of the  emotional Grover Cleveland HS "turnaround" hearings on April 2. 

Francis Lewis HS' dynamic  chapter leader and teacher Arthur Goldstein asks: How would you rate Mayor Bloomberg based on his record on overcrowding and class size?  Highly effective, effective, developing, or ineffective?  Based on his failed record, perhaps it is Tweed, not Grover Cleveland, that needs to be closed.

Grover Cleveland teacher: Mayor Bloomberg, shame on you! We will not let you hurt our students!



Dmytro Fedkowskyj, Queens appointee to the Panel for Educational Policy, and an alumnus of Grover Cleveland HS, who asks people to attend the PEP meeting of April 26: "The battle to keep this school open is not over."



Assemblymember Cathy Nolan, chair of the NYS Assembly Education member, also a proud graduate of Grover Cleveland HS.  "There is something to be said for a large, neighborhood comprehensive high school.  It was Cleveland that helped give me a wide variety of experiences, and gave me an opportunity to help me learn who I was.  Grover Cleveland is a part of me." The question is, is anyone in the Mayor's office or DOE listening?

The impeccable logic of Turnaround schools

Check out the new TV campaign on "Turnaround" schools produced by Last Stand for Children First.  Though the campaign is focused on Chicago's efforts , the same strategies are being used here in NYC and in many of the major urban centers around the country where there are struggling schools.

The formula is very simple; just watch the videos and you will see.  Our thanks to Last Stand for Children First, for showing us the way, and please see their website for more brilliant insights on how education reform must happen -- for the sake of the kids.

Arne Duncan and the Chicago "turnaround" schools

In today’s Christian Science Monitor , an unusually skeptical article points out that Arne Duncan made his reputation on the so-called “turnaround schools” in Chicago – schools that were provided to private managers or charter school operators to restaff and restructure – but supposedly improved results dramatically, while keeping their original student body intact.

“The district closed, replaced, or overhauled the management at more than 60 low-performing schools. But … only a small percentage of students displaced by school closings ended up at the new and improved schools. Many landed at other schools that were on academic probation."

Obama made the announcement this week about Duncan’s appointment while standing in one such Chicago school, the Renaissance Dodge Academy that has been much praised by Obama and others for improvements in test scores. In fact, the principal was invited to testify before the House education Committee in May 2007, presumably because the school had the largest test gains of any school in Illinois in 2006.

See this 2007 letter that Julie Woestehoff of PURE sent to Rep. George Miller, chair of the House Education committee:

It’s important to know that the Dodge Renaissance Academy provides three instructors in every classroom, an expensive luxury made possible only by generous private funding that is not available to traditional schools. In addition, the Chicago Public Schools’ own data show that only 12 students who attended Dodge in 2002 (the year CPS closed the school) were still enrolled at the restructured Dodge in 2005.

The new school is essentially serving a completely different student body. It simply does not operate on a level playing field with other schools, and its results should be considered in that context. (emphasis added.)

AUSL (for Academy for Urban School Leadership) , which is the management group that took over the Dodge Renaissance Academy, subsequently took over another Chicago school and renamed it “Sherman School of Excellence”.

Sherman’s improved performance has been hyped in the same fashion as Dodge’s was previously. In general, this trend has prompted growing complaints from parents and students, as reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, that many of these turnaround schools are "destroying'' neighborhood schools by luring away high-scoring kids, or flooding them all their low-performers.

According to a recent post by Julie, here is a summary of the stats at Sherman since AUSL took it over:

· The enrollment dropped from 617 in 2007 to 493 in 2008.

· The percent of low-income students dropped 10% in one year, from 94% in 2007 to 84.2% in 2008. (In 2005, the poverty rate was even higher, 98.5%.)

· The mobility rate rose from 43.5% in 2007 to 52.2% in 2008.

Her analysis echoes Eduwonkette’s who has argued (for example here and here) that the new NYC small schools have far different student bodies than the large, failing schools that they replaced – with fewer special ed, ELL and other high needs kids.

At the same time, the small schools offer smaller classes and more personal attention. Why should anyone be surprised that if you take higher-achieving kids, and put them in smaller classes, they will do better than high-needs kids in overcrowded classes?

Not to honk my own horn, but I made these points more than three years ago, in a brief report presented to the Panel on Educational Policy in November 2005, and later in testimony before the City Council.

Should Arne Duncan or Joel Klein be lauded for such accomplishments? Especially when Klein resists with every bone in his being from offering the same opportunities to students in the rest of our schools? What do you think?