Elected officials ask: What happened to the kids who didn’t make it into the new schools? Is “warehousing” of high-needs students at other schools dooming them to fail?

(New York, NY – January 31, 2012) Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Comptroller John Liu, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and former Comptroller Bill Thompson joined together at City Hall today to demand the Bloomberg Administration release data showing where “lost” high-needs students at closed schools ended up following a report which indicated that those populations are over-represented in closing schools, and under-represented in the new schools that replace them.

The elected officials echoed the criticisms of parents and advocates who say the new statistics in a report by the Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ) and New York Communities for Change (NYCC) reveal a major flaw in Mayor Bloomberg’s defense of his closing schools policy, and proof that he has failed to improve education quality equitably.

“The only thing more unfair to students than consigning them to a struggling school is consigning them to a struggling school slated for closure. Students left at these schools are given little to no support by this Mayor. It’s time for to this Administration to come clean about the real outcomes these students face,” said Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. “As a public school parent, I don’t want to hear more spin or doctored numbers. Parents deserve the real facts on what is happening to the thousands of high-needs students abandoned by this Administration.”

“We need a public school system that raises up all of the City’s students, not one that leaves behind those most in need of help,” Comptroller John C. Liu said. “Parents, advocates, and electeds have long suspected that the DOE was replacing long-established schools with new schools that have smaller proportions of special needs students and English language learners. We call on the DOE to provide their analysis of where students displaced by closed schools actually end up.”

“Closing a school should be a last resort, not the easy answer to our City’s educational challenges,” said Manhattan Borough President Stringer. “Year after year, the administration’s bankrupt school closure policy unsettles students and communities. Now, Mayor Bloomberg plans to close nearly 60 schools—many of which were opened under his administration. We are here today to send a clear message to Mayor Bloomberg: closing schools isn’t an easy fix, it’s throwing in the towel on the children of New York City.”

“The Department of Education is playing a dangerous shell game with our schools and our children,” said former Comptroller Bill Thompson. “Closing a school is an unfortunate necessity at times but it should be a last resort and we need to have a sound educational plan for those students. That contrasts with the policy of this Administration to close schools without regard and warehouse our most vulnerable students.”

“For more than a decade the Bloomberg Administration has set our neighborhood schools up to fail and locked parents out of the process,” said NYCC Parent Leader Michelle Chapman. “The people paying the price for these policies are the kids with the highest needs, who are conveniently missing from the DOE’s statistics on small schools. I want to know what is happening to these kids.”

“It is not okay that Mayor Bloomberg is shifting our highest needs students around like a shell game,” said Zakiyah Ansari, Advocacy Director for the Alliance for Quality Education. “The Mayor is responsible for the education of all of our children, and must be held accountable for his failed policies because only 13% of African American and Latino students are ready for college after 10 years of his leadership. We demand to know where the Mayor is warehousing our high-needs students, and, more importantly, what he is going to do to fix the problem.”

High-needs students – self-contained special education, over-age and other historically lower-performing students – make up a smaller percentage of student populations at many of the new schools founded by the administration. The elected officials and advocates demanded DOE show data regarding the concentration of populations of these students, also including homeless, pregnant and parenting students, and students coming out of juvenile detention, in closing schools. State Schools Chancellor Meryl Tisch called the shuffling of these students “warehousing” last year in a sharp rebuke of the mayor’s education policies.

Other student populations – particularly low-income students of color – have also not fared well under the Bloomberg Administration. In fact, parents and students have labeled Mayor Bloomberg as “Mayor 13%” for his administration’s failure to prepare 87 percent of black and Latino students for college. Just one-in-four students overall are prepared for college under Bloomberg, and just 39 percent of public high school graduates last year reported they would be attending four-year colleges the following fall.

De Blasio, Liu, Stringer and Thompson were joined by parents and community members organized by the Coalition for Educational Justice, New York Communities for Change and Alliance for Quality Education, and members of Advocates for Children, special education advocacy group Arise Coalition, the Urban Youth Collaborative and Class Size Matters.

By Anna M. Phillips, NY Times

The latest statistic bedeviling Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s efforts to show progress in the city’s public schools during his tenure is a startling, but well-known one: one out of every four students who entered high school in 2007, and graduated four years later, was not ready for college-level work.

Concern about the validity of the city’s increasing graduation rate, which the mayor often points to as one of his greatest accomplishments, grew last year after state education officials revealed that most students were graduating unprepared for college.

City officials followed with their own data, which was just as grim: 75 percent of graduates had Regents and SAT scores low enough to suggest they would need to take remedial classes in college.

On Thursday, the City Council seemed to awaken to these figures. In a joint hearing of the higher education and K-12 education committees, council members asked Department of Education officials how it was possible to assign meaning to an increasing graduation rate if a majority of students remain unprepared for college.

Although the hearing was billed as a time to put difficult questions to city officials, it lost much of its steam after Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents, canceled her plans to speak. Dr. Tisch initially forced the city to confront the college readiness numbers, calling them “useful truths” that would push the city to improve.

City education officials defended their progress in preparing students for college, saying that if the measurement had been in existence in 2005, only 16 percent of students would have been considered college-ready. In 2011, about 25 percent met the standard.

“Everyone is looking at a more rigorous standard they have not looked at before,” said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s chief academic officer. Whereas it was previously considered satisfactory for students to pass the Regents with a score of 65, education officials now believe students need at least a 75 on the English Regents and an 80 on the math to place out of remedial classes.

Mr. Polakow-Suransky said the public schools “are very successful up to a certain point. Getting to the 65 is a powerful accomplishment. Getting to the 75 or 80 is the next step, and they haven’t gotten there yet.”

Deputy Chief Academic Officer Josh Thomases said the city has also formed a partnership with the Goddard Riverside Community Center to train all guidance and college counselors over the next three years in encouraging students to think about and apply to college.

The president of the city’s teachers union, Michael Mulgrew, said the city’s college-ready numbers indicate that the city has not truly ended social promotion, as the mayor has claimed.

“By the time students get to high school, they’re grade levels behind, especially in literacy,” he said. “We now leave back almost no one behind.”

Eric Addams, a member of New York Communities for Change, the community organization formerly known as Acorn, said he was one of those seniors who was not ready for college. A graduate of Frederick Douglass Academy, a public high school in Harlem, he went on to a private college in Massachusetts where he struggled to keep pace in his math courses, he said. He is now a senior at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

“They’re saying they’re going to prepare you for college, so they should prepare you in all ways: academically and socially,” he said. “They weren’t really even preparing us to handle the course load.”

by Rachel Cromida, Gotham Schools

By 2016, the proportion of students who graduate from city high schools ready for college-level work will double, Department of Education officials told skeptical City Council members today.

The ambitious projection, made during a hearing on college and career readiness, would require growth that far outstrips even the most liberal assessments of the Department of Education’s recent record of improvement.

But even then most students would not be considered “college-ready.” In 2010, when the city touted a 61 percent four-year graduation rate, just 21 percent of students who had entered high school in four years earlier met the state’s college-readiness requirements.

A disjuncture has long been visible between what city high schools require for graduation and what the City University of New York expects from new students. Three quarters of the students enrolling in CUNY’s two-year colleges must take remedial math or reading classes, and that number has risen along with college attendance rates in recent years, especially as CUNY has toughened its standards.

Testifying before members of the council’s committees on education and higher education, UFT President Michael Mulgrew accused the city of practicing “social graduation” by giving high school diplomas to students who must repeat high school-level work before starting college classes.

But until recently, high school graduation, not college readiness, was considered the gold standard for success testified Shael Polakow-Suransky, the DOE’s chief academic officer. He said school officials had been adjusting their priorities to meet rising expectations and were confident that initiatives already underway would substantially change the picture.

In particular, he said, new curriculum standards known as the Common Core that are being rolled out this year would push students to develop critical thinking skills required for college-level work.

“It’s not just about getting to a number on a test,” Polakow-Suransky said. ”It’s about resilience, persistence, being able to use your mind well, being able to think critically to solve unfamiliar problems.”

Officials also said they are optimistic about plans Mayor Bloomberg sketched out in his State of the City speech last week to open more schools that bridge high school and college instruction and expand the city’s career and technical education high schools, which are designed to prepare students to choose between college and entering the workforce.

Since 2008, CUNY and the DOE have swapped data about students in order to learn more about what it takes to prepare high schoolers for success in college. Now, collaboration between the two school systems “is the strongest it’s ever been,” testified John Mogulescu, a dean in charge of CUNY’s relationship with the city schools.

But Mogulescu said the two institutions had also demonstrated a “joint failure” to let students know just how challenging college is, adding that CUNY would soon launch a public awareness campaign to explain college readiness.

“We think it is the responsibility of our admissions folks to work more with the community,” he said. “I am as impatient as you are to make the kinds of changes you are talking about.”

The hearing drew protest from the Urban Youth Collaborative and Coalition for Educational Justice, activists and students who held a press conference to call attention to even lower rates of college readiness among black and Latino students and to demand that the city invest more in college preparation initiatives.

Council members echoed many of the students’ suggestions, championing the College Now program that allows high school students to take CUNY courses before graduating and urging the department to provide more one-on-one counseling about college admissions and financial aid. Some guidance counselors work with as many as 500 students at a time, said Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s education committee.

By Melinda Martinez, Daily News

Over the past few months, parents in my corner of Brooklyn have felt suddenly under assault. Despite having what we consider excellent public schools — and a successful community-based approach to educating our young people — we are fending off an unwanted charter school in Cobble Hill. So far, our concerns seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

Wednesday night, the citywide Panel for Educational Policy is expected to vote to allow the charter school to share the K293 building where my four daughters go to school.

I’m not against parents having options, but I’m against giving valuable space to charter schools in a way that makes life harder for traditional district schools. I fear that is what’s happening here.

In this community, we are proud to have very strong public schools that perform well, mostly aren’t overcrowded and do a better job than most other city schools of teaching black and Latino students on a level that’s closer to their white peers.

It seems to me that if it isn’t broke, you shouldn’t fix it. Yet the city Education Department is paving the way to allow Success Charter Network to put a privately operated public school in the building — in space that was targeted by many in the community for early-childhood education.

According to the Education Department, there are 670 seats available in the building. I don’t know how they could have reached such a high number. I walk through the hallways almost daily, and based on what I see, every classroom is utilized.

The charter’s proposal would take 15 classrooms in the first year, growing to 29 rooms within four years. Where will they come from? Will they come from the new computer lab at the School for Global Studies or the teaching kitchen in the School for International Studies?

According to the Education Department’s own documents, at maximum enrollment for all the schools in the building, including the charter, the site will boast up to 1,750 students. That means we’ll be at 108% capacity by the 2016-17 school year.

But the only school being given room to grow during that period is the charter.

It gets worse. Under the plan, the cafeteria would have to start serving lunch as early as 10:50 a.m., ending as late as 2:30 p.m. Gym class sizes for existing students in middle and high school will explode because the charter’s gym class sizes — for kindergarten through grade 5 — are legally required to be smaller.

Finally, there is a fear among parents that the Success Charter Network in particular will not serve certain types of high-needs students as well as existing schools do. One of my daughters entered International as a struggling special-education student. Four years later, she is an honor roll student looking at Columbia University for college.

I doubt she would have succeeded as well in a Success Charter Network school.

As reported in The New York Times this year, every district public school co-located with one of the Success network’s schools serves a greater proportion of special-education students and English-language learners than does the respective charter.

In fact, all four of my girls went from mediocre students to honor students because they were given the chance to succeed. I know dozens of parents who would tell you the same thing about their kids.

Success Charter Network says it gets great results with kids. I don’t begrudge them their opinion, although I and others question their willingness to teach the highest-needs students. But I don’t want their growth to interfere with our success.

That is why our parents associations, our Community Education Council, our assemblywoman and our City Council members are against the charter proposal.

I urge parents and other city leaders to think very carefully about what’s happening here — and preserve and protect public schools that work.

The Department of Education says dozens of schools are failing, but on Tuesday, outside the DOE headquarters in Downtown Manhattan, protesting parents said education officials have failed the struggling schools.

Chanting “Go get your F! Go get your F,” the parents said the 47 schools named in late September for being in danger of closing for poor performance deserve a second chance.

“We’re devastated that our school’s on the list of at-risk for closing,” said one parent.

“We’re asking the DOE as parents to give our school a chance,” said another.

Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the schools, 117 have been closed for poor performance and 528 new schools have replaced them.

The practice draws controversy every year, but in the end, the final decision is up to the Panel for Educational Policy, which is also controlled by the mayor.

So this year, parents are protesting before the final list comes out, to try to stop the process before it officially starts. They have held almost a dozen rallies so far.

“It’s not that the school is failing. The school was set up to fail,” said a protesting parent.

“They want to hold the school accountable, but at the same time they don’t want to provide the resources,” said another protesting parent. “They don’t provide parent training, they don’t provide parent support to help us help our children get the education they need.”

“This is my daughter. I want her to succeed, just like any other parent wants their daughter to succeed. I want to let her have a chance,” said a third protesting parent.

There is still a chance some of these schools will not be shuttered, as next month, officials release the final closure list.

Last year, about half the schools marked “in danger” ended up closed.

In a statement, DOE official Marc Sternberg said the department has been holding meetings to try to understand why each of the 47 schools is struggling.

Sternberg said, “Ultimately, a new school environment may be the best option for some communities, and we won’t hesitate to pursue a strategy that has raised graduation rates and changed thousands of lives over the past nine years.”

Parents argue the best strategy would be for the DOE to help the existing schools, and not replace them.

By Erin E. Evans, NY Times

Holding up an oversize report card on the steps of the Tweed Courthouse on Chambers Street, parents and elected officials on Tuesday gave an F to the city’s Department of Education in a protest to prevent the possible closing of several schools.

“This F represents the failure of this administration,” said City Councilwoman Letitia James of Brooklyn. “We have come here to the streets to say, ‘Mr. Mayor, you get an F on education.’ ”

Students and parents from the city’s most underserved communities have been holding weekly protests, accusing the Education Department of abandoning their schools by cutting budgets. The parents also object to the city’s policy of merging charter schools into their buildings.

“This is not about failing schools,” said Noah E. Gotbaum, president of Community Education Council District 3. “It’s purely about politics.” Frederick Douglass Academy II, which is a traditional public school in his district, now shares its building with two charters, Harlem Success Academy 1 and Harlem Success Academy 4.

The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has encouraged the opening of schools to provide parents with choices, particularly in areas where the existing public schools have been failing to educate students. The city has also been closing schools that it decides are not capable of improving.
Any day now, the city is expected to announce its decision on which of the 47 schools on its “struggling schools” list it plans to shut.

At Public School 256 Benjamin Banneker in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, which is one of the schools vulnerable to closing, parents said last month that they believed the Education Department wanted to push out the struggling schools to make room for more charter schools.

Sue Hackshaw, a parent at General D. Chappie James Elementary School of Science, said she was willing to go all the way to the state to ensure that her child’s school did not close. And she hopes more parents will join her.

“We need more parent empowerment around this issue,” Ms. Hackshaw said. “We have to ring the alarm, because it seems like an attack on poor people. And an injustice for one is an injustice for all.”

Parents from schools the city has deemed failing issued their own grade to the Department of Education today: an F.

About three dozen parents from schools the department might close gathered on the steps of Tweed Courthouse to decry the department’s policy of shuttering schools instead of offering them additional aid. They said the department has failed at everything from providing resources to struggling schools to engaging parents — even to showing compassion to schools and families working under difficult conditions to help children.

As protesters chanted “Come get your F,” two members of the Chancellor’s Strategic Response Group emerged from Tweed’s front doors to accept the large red F mounted on posterboard and offer a receipt bearing Chancellor Dennis Walcott’s signature.

The protesters came from several schools where organizers with the Coalition for Educational Justice have been assisting parents in pushing back against potential closure. Rallies have taken place at about a dozen schools, often in conjunction with “early engagement” meetings that the department holds to discuss why the schools are struggling and how they might be helped.

Over the last two months, DOE officials have met with community members at 47 schools that met the city’s criteria for closure. Within weeks, the department will whittle down the list and announce which schools it will try to close.

Last year, the department held “early engagement” meetings at 55 schools and ultimately moved to close 25 of them.

The DOE official in charge of school closures, Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg, said in a statement that the department would take the parents’ points into account when deciding which schools to close. But he said closure might well be the course the department selects for at least some of the schools.

“For the last two months, we’ve held discussions with members of 47 school communities to understand why these schools continue to struggle year after year,” he said in the statement. “We’ve listened to community feedback on every campus, and will consider it in our final proposals next month. Ultimately, a new school environment may be the best option for some communities.”

NY1 VIDEO: A special panel joined Inside City Hall to discuss “Parent Power: Education Organizing in NYC,” a new film which documents a 15-year journey by a group of parents and advocates who built a citywide coalition to improve the public.

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If it seems that the protests to prevent the closing of struggling schools are becoming a regular thing — that is because they are, GothamSchools reported on Tuesday.

Julian Vinocur of the Alliance for Quality Education told Gotham that more school protests are planned for this fall, as part of a strategy to prevent any school closings.

As Gotham reports, the Alliance for Quality Education and the Coalition of Educational Justice, two advocacy groups, have been saying for years that “struggling schools would be better served by additional resources,” rather than the city’s policy of closing ones that are deemed too flawed to prop up.

This year, 20 schools were identified for possible closing. The City Department of Education said it was holding discussions with those schools to determine their needs and whether they could be saved.

The Gotham report followed another protest Tuesday at a school on the struggling schools list: Public School 137 John L. Bernstein on the Lower East Side, which received an F on its latest school progress report.

Last week, a similar protest by parents and staff members was held at P.S. 256 Benjamin Banneker in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, another school on the Education Department’s list.

By Erin E. Evans, NY Times

Students, parents and staff from Public School 256 Benjamin Banneker in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on Tuesday protested the Department of Education’s recent failing grade for their elementary school.

Jerry Jones, a school aide, gave a speech to approximately 80 protesters just before they marched around the block chanting: “Fix our school! Do not close it!” Students on nearby basketball courts joined the protest; onlookers honked their horns in support.

P.S. 256 is on the city’s endangered list of 20 schools that may be closed down. Parents argued that because the school’s budget has been cut by $427,000 in the last three years, it does not have enough resources to provide support for students who need the most help. Their signs said they were “giving the D.O.E. an F in supporting our school.”

“We have lost an art teacher, our reading intervention teacher, a school employee, a kindergarten teacher, our Saturday Academy — how can our school perform well under these circumstances?” said Marquese Paige, whose daughter, Ayame, is in the second grade. He says his son, Ankhier, is doing well in the seventh grade because of his good teachers at P.S. 256.

The school’s building also houses Community Partnership Charter, a middle school that located there last year. Some parents, including Jimmy Dinkins, the vice president of the school’s P.T.A., said they believed that the Department of Education wanted to shut P.S. 256 to expand the charter school.

“They say charter schools are the new ‘it,’ ” Mr. Jones told the crowd. “I don’t even think so. P.S. 256 is the new ‘it.’ ”

But according to New York City’s annual school progress report, P.S. 256 is failing its students. It is one of 32 New York City schools that received an F on its annual school progress report this year.

Last year, it received a C, and in 2009, it received an A. After New York State raised the bar for proficiency on standardized tests last year, the number of students who were proficient in English and math dropped to fewer than half.

“Raising standards without raising support is not going to work,” said Julian Vinocur, an organizer with the Alliance for Quality Education, who helped the P.T.A. plan the protest. “If you ask any parent here, they want their school to be fixed, not closed.”

Mr. Jones said the protest, which was held after school, was just one tactic in a campaign to keep the school open.

“After this we’re going to write, e-mail, call and let them know that this is our school, and we need to be here,” he said. “Our children go here. And we went here. We are holding on to this piece of property. This is ours.”