Typically, schools with low test scores enrolled large numbers of students who are impoverished, are English language learners, and have significant handicaps. Such schools need extra staff and resources. But the vogue today is to threaten them with punishments, to fire the staff, and to hand them over to charter operators.
New York’s new state Commissioner MaryEllen Elia announced that, pursuant to the legislation that Governor Andrew Cuomo tucked into the state’s budget, she will take action against 144 struggling schools.
Cuomo’s “program creates carrots and sticks and sets out the possibility that the poorest performers could in a year’s time end up under outside receivership, that is, they could be taken over by an independent entity, such as a college or even a charter school operator.
There are 144 struggline schools statewide including 20 that are ”persistently struggling.”
For the persistently struggling schools, which includes Albany’s Hackett middle school, Burgard High in Buffalo and a slew in New York City as well as Rochester, an inside receiver, which is mostly likely the superintendent, will take charge this year. That person then has a year to show improvement or accept the outside receiver. The struggling schools have a year to improve or else they then go under the superintendent’s control, with outside takeover the year after that if there is no improvement.
The stick includes some potentially harsh measures, although it’s unclear how they will play out. In persistently struggling schools, for example, a superintendent acting as the local or in district receiver could conceivably fire teachers and administrators regardless of tenure. The superintendent also can change curriculum and institute a longer school day and school year.”
Blogger Perdidostreetschool notes that one of the struggling school was already being closed. He predicts that there will be many more sticks than carrots.
Perdido writes:
The goal of education reform is to slowly but surely privatize the school system, fire the unionized teachers, and replace schools with non-union charters.
That’s what Cuomo devised here with the budget legislation that allows for state receivership of so-called “failing” schools, but as is usual with the incompetents at NYSED, they screw stuff up and threaten to close a school that’s already closing.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Churning is an unethical practice.
The commissioner should be asked what do these schools have in common? After she examines the data, she should be told that we already know that poor minority students don’t perform well on standardized tests. The measure of school should not be based on test scores alone. I wonder if these community committees as part of the charade have an actual voice in the decision about the school, or are they there to give the illusion of a democratic process?
I wonder how many of these schools are also on the NYS list for being underfunded. Maybe Cuomo should have to pay them with interest.
When the charter operator Green Dot executed a sleazy hostile takeover of Locke High School (long story), they had promised a large increase in test scores within three years… as they had previously pointed to the low test scores under LAUSD management as the justification for the takeover.
When no test score increase happened within those three years—the scores were slightly lower—Green Dot then changed their tune, and started saying that test scores should not be the be-all-and-end-all for judging a school’s quality— Wait, what??!! —and then started pointing to other criteria, as in…
“Look at how Green Dot changed the school culture for the better.”
Thus, this vague, nebulous “improved school culture” metric became their new way to tout the Green Dot miracle at Locke… and test scores were no longer mentioned.
I would suspect the same thing may happen after charters take over in New York state.
Remember Michael Johnston, the Colorado State Senator that created the bill that made student “growth” on standardized tests count for 50% of a teacher’s evaluation? Yet when you tag little or no student “growth” to an “excellent principal” (as defined by Johnston) of a charter school, well, I’ll let Gary Rubinstein tell it like it is:
“I wonder how Johnston’s hero feels about these ‘growth’ scores. It is pretty ironic that he seems to blindly follow these sorts of metrics when they contradict his first-hand experience in seeing a person who I don’t doubt is an excellent principal.”
Link: https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/michael-johnstons-education-hero-principal-hammered-by-johnstons-growth-metric/
I think we can put this bit of rheephormish sleight-of-hand [pretty “slight” if you ask me] into the same category as Locke HS: rig the game so your “opponents” can’t score, then change the goalposts when you also fail to score.
And as far as Steve Barr of Green Dot fame: John McDonough High School in New Orleans.
‘Nuff said.
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You know what? Let them take over. Give them enough rope to hang themselves. A lot of good teachers will quit, but it’s time for these idiots to put up or shut up. Cuomo=Epic Fail.
My kids go to a school they love and what Cuomo has done is just beyond evil. Their education does not deserve to be disrupted so HE can profit from charter schools and real estate of charter schools. When will he be held accountable for his abysmal actions?
Sadly, the soonest he can be held accountable is in three years.
Here’s what’s coming to those “failing” schools in New York state:
(NOTE how the parents did not even know that these “charter schools” were privately run, and those in charge were not accountable to the public in an anyway, an thus, could opt to close whatever schools they felt like… if it made sense profits-wise.)
In Michigan, Governor Snyder privatized and gave away whole districts to for-profit ed corporations, so they can be in charge of the schools and the money funding them, with everything being outsourced to those for-profit companies.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/08/high-j08.html
In one of those districts, Highland Park, the for-profit ed company in charge, Leona Group, LLC, discovered that running high schools involved higher costs—and lower profits– than running elementary or middle schools.
In response, Leona closed all the high schools, one-by-one, claiming that continuing their operations was “not feasible” financially or profits-wise. When the last public high school recently closed, parents and students were taken aback, not thinking that this was even possible, as the students now had to commute hours on an 2-hours-long, 2-transfer, 3-bus route on public transportation to attend the closest school…. either that, or attend a military charter school, with uniforms, extreme discipline, and all the rest that goes with that.
All of this, and what results from it, is what corporate reformers call “school choice” and “the invisible hand of the free market” at work.
“But wait, my ‘choice’ is to have my children attend a tradition public school in my neighborhood, under the oversight of a democratic school board that my fellow citizens and I elect. Can’t I have THAT choice?”
Nope, not going to happen. The “invisible hand of the free market” says otherwise.
When interviewed, those now-outraged parents and students were not even aware that their school district and its schools were run by this for-profit corporation.
Here’s the story:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/08/high-j08.html
The company, Leona Group LLC, and Governor Snyder, in so many words, told the community that, like it or not, we’re doing this. There’s nothing that your or anyone can do to stop us, so just shut the-hell up and accept it.
That is why we should try to get the power out of the hands of crooked governors, and put it into the hands of the public.
This dropping of high schools is all part of the cherry picking game charters are known for. How can the government justify all this disruption to parents? Maybe parents should sue the state for damages done to their children.
As a parent, I agree. Time to start holding the STATE accountable for these atrocities against our children. I have disabled kids, it’s been a nightmare for them, Common Core isn’t designed for them, and schools don’t want to pay for services they can’t afford.
OMG. Thanks for this horrid information After all, NYC wants to be the playground for the rich. Insanity reigns.
The rheephorm plan for public schools in a nutshell:
1), Starve of resources and support; 2), measure to punish and shame; 3), say in words that you’re firing your way to excellence but privatize every public school and its functions to ensure $tudent $ucce$$ for a few adults.
Caveat: only to be applied to OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN aka the vast majority.
For THEIR OWN CHILDREN: places like Lakeside School. Bill Gates. His children.
Excerpts from a page dated 6-29-2015 and entitled “A busy summer at Lakeside”:
[start]
This summer Lakeside is offering nearly 30 different courses and camps for grades 4-12; 563 students from more than 100 schools are signed up. The summer programs run from June 22 through August 14.
For middle-school age kids, investigative learning camps range from architectural design to debate to computing. At the high-school level, classes include from those that strengthen skills —such as ACT prep, and college essay writing — to academic courses that offer high-school credit, such as biology, precalculus and Big History. Athletics camps range from boys and girls basketball and lacrosse to coed soccer and rowing.
[end]
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=204&nid=985312
Double talk. Double think. Double standards.
Another recap of rheephorm.
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this is re-segregation….not strictly racial, but a significant percentage. It will take a while to fully recognize….the level of financial re segregation.
A good question to ask is why brown and black students are being targeted for all this reform? And… How is this equitable? How can you call a privatized school and public school when they don’t have to live by the same rules as public schools? How can this be forced on students that want access to true public education?
I have thought about that a lot…….I think it is a lot about what is possible politically………KIPP is one thing…..cherry picking and using attrition as a tool, in hopes of getting results…..but the targeting of groups of failing schools for the same company, and knowing that minimal efforts will be necessary to maintain similar levels of failure while making profits…….that is pretty cynical…….And I do not think nearly enough attention is being paid to the consequences for that 16 percent (in failing schools) of the school population that has disabilities of varying degrees.
The ELLs are another fragile group. Many ELLs are from war torn countries or extreme poverty; they may have little to no prior schooling.
ells….do the charters kind of avoid them when possible?
Charters avoid ELLs because they present multiple challenges. There are no magic bullets as a solution, just several years of hard work before they are considered proficient. They are expensive to teach as small groups work best.
What happens when schools go from six hours of in-class time to eight or nine hours with mandatory after school and weekend tutoring and the most challenging students to teach refuse to change their habits? Those habits mean those children are not reading on their own outside of school and often do not cooperate in class no matter who the teacher is.
Oh my, in that case do the opposite, reduce class time to 4 hours a day, give the hard working teachers a break and see if that works. Increasing class time by two hours did not work, may be decreasing it by two hours a day may work. This is better than doing nothing.
Besides, no one else around here has any clue or a solution to the problem other than blaming everything on poverty. Don’t bother to allow a charter school to try something different. Charter school is privatization which is against morality..
Here are some great suggestions from Arthur Camins. His suggestions include changing how we fund schools and supporting families and teachers. He suggests a collaborative model rather than a stack ranking competitive one.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-camins/the-k12-education-speech-_b_7755854.html
Raj, with duty-free lunch and student-free prep periods, New York City teachers are in front of kids only about 4.5 hours a day.
Your comment is based on ignorance, flippant and ridiculous. Reducing or increasing class time for students will not change a student’s study habits—or lack of study habits.
VAM is being used to punish teachers for students who, for a variety of reasons, are not learning and that usually has nothing to do with the quality of teaching. VAM totally ignores the student learning factor and places ALL the blame on teachers when reputable studies repeatedly prove tat teaching represents less than 30% of the factors that lead to learning. The other factors that make up two-thirds of the factors for a child learning take place outside of school in the home/family environment and poverty DOES play a vital role in that factor.
Even the results of the International PISA tests prove that poverty is a major factor, and to make my point, I’m using three different reputable sources.
FIRST: A Stanford report found:
“There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.
“Achievement of U.S. disadvantaged students has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the United States is frequently unfavorably compared – Canada, Finland and Korea, for example – has been falling rapidly.
“U.S. PISA scores are depressed partly because of a sampling flaw resulting in a disproportionate number of students from high-poverty schools among the test-takers. About 40 percent of the PISA sample in the United States was drawn from schools where half or more of the students are eligible for the free lunch program, though only 32 percent of students nationwide attend such schools.”
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
SECOND: The Economic Policy Institute double checked the report out of Stanford and validated it was correct.
http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testing/
In addition, Mel Riddle, the Associate Director for High School Services at NASSP (National Association of Secondary School Principals), also compared the results of the PISA and focused on children who lived in poverty to discvoer that American children living in poverty do better when compared to their socioeconomic peers in other recounts.
“PISA results have provided ample fodder for public school bashers and doomsayers who further their own philosophies and agendas by painting all public schools as failing. For whatever reason, the pundits, many of whom have had little or no actual exposure to public schools, refuse to paint an accurate picture of the state of education.
“A closer look at the data tells a different story. Most notable is the relationship between PISA scores in terms of individual American schools and poverty. While the overall PISA rankings ignore such differences in the tested schools, when groupings based on the rate of free and reduced lunch are created, a direct relationship is established.”
http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2014/02/pisa-its-still-poverty-not-stupid/
Then there is time spent in School. How does the U.S. Compare?
Are students in India and China required to go to school longer than U.S. students?
According to data from the OECD and the World Data on Education, students in China and India are not required to spend more time in school than most U.S. students.
Do other countries require more instructional hours for students than the U.S.?
According to the OECD, the hours of compulsory instruction per year in these countries range from 608 hours in Finland (a top performer) to 926 hours in France (average) at the elementary level, compared to the over 900 hours required in California, New York, Texas, and Massachusetts.
Are U.S. students receiving less instruction?
The data clearly shows that most U.S. schools require at least as much or more instructional time as other countries, even high-performing countries like Finland, Japan, and Korea.
The point should not be lost: the U.S. does not require schools to provide less instructional time than other countries.
Basing policy decisions on this false perception alone could be costly and provide no clear benefits. Providing extra time is only useful if that time is used wisely. As the Center’s report Making Time found, the relationship between time and student learning is not about the amount of time spent in school. Rather, it is how effectively that time is used. And this report has also shown that there is no relationship between simply requiring more time and increased achievement. The data shows that a number of countries that require fewer hours of instruction outperform the U.S., while the U.S. performs as well as or better than some other countries that require more hours of instruction.
http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Organizing-a-school/Time-in-school-How-does-the-US-compare
Raj, poverty really matters for teaching and learning. This is NOT in the US only. Go to southern part of Osaka(Japan), for example. The city has much higher poverty rate than national average. Unlike many people in this country assume about Japan, Osaka is the second last in academic achievement among all. Why? Because the city has a traditional working class family and Asian immigrants/migrants who are living hand to mouth throughout generations. It’s just like having students of low-income family living in poverty stricken districts of NY, DC, LA, or elsewhere in the US.
They are angry and violent in school. They don’t trust local/national authority in the first place because of historical neglect. More punishment induces more distrust and chaos.
Tim I find your saying teachers are in front of students “Just” 4.5 hours a day to be horrific.
Managing 30+ students for 45 minutes at a clip and usually for at least one stint of 2 and a quarter hours is actually incredibly difficult.
You have 120+ students in those 4.5 hours, and you have to make phone calls for each of the misbehaviors or failed assignments they didn’t turn in. Let’s say you only call for a 2 minute conversation for every student at some point in the course of a week – you just 4 hours on the phone – not creating a lesson plan, not grading a project, not collaborating with anyone in the building, not scheduling a field trip, not inputting grades into a database, not creating anecdotals for behavior tracking.
Take your 4.5 hour comment and kindly apologize to every hard working teacher in NYC. We are often asked to do way too much with way too little.
We are not handed a script, teach in front of a class carefully reciting information, collecting assignments to be handed off to a machine to be graded, and then going home to spend time with our families.
The assumptions that go behind just teaching 4.5 hours is an indignity to every teaching professional in NYC.
M, I’m sorry that you found my comment to be “horrific,” but there’s certainly nothing for me to apologize for. The UFT contract guarantees that teachers spend 4.5 hours out of an approximately 6 hour school day in the presence of children. It is what it is.
There is more to teaching than direct interactions with students, of course, and I know first-hand that many UFT teachers go above and beyond the requirements. However, two things come to mind.
One, having high school and early elementary teachers on the same general schedule doesn’t make any sense. Unfortunately, I suspect the UFT views customization as a slippery slope.
Two, lots of people like to claim that public schools should adopt the same practices as elite private schools. I assure you that at Dalton, Lakeside, Sidwell, and the like, teachers are spending more than 4.5 hours a day with their students, possibly even eating lunch alongside them and taking them out for recess, and they are routinely asked to perform other “Circular 6”-type duties. There aren’t armies of aides and paras at these schools.
I hope this clarifies my comment.
Tim – did you add in Homeroom, duties, hall monitoring between classes, assisting students before and/or after school? We do get a lunch and prep, but sometimes we eat with the kids or use our prep time to work with individual or small groups of students. Then there are the obligatory weekly grade or subject level meetings and the evening events you are required to attend, plus those monthly faculty meetings. Granted you aren’t actually teaching during those times, but the discussions are specifically about the students and ways to further their progress.
And that 4.5 hours are intense teaching times where you are actually instructing the students.
And you didn’t mention the paperwork – attendance records, phone calls to parents, grading papers, recording these grades, lesson plans, posting those lesson plans online, preparing multimedia extensions, 5 week reports, report cards, preparing assignment packages for absentee/suspended students, etc.
How much work can you squeeze out of a human being?
Now with Common Core there is even more paperwork (and outside training) required, beyond the usual in-services to improve instruction.
4.5+ hours with your students and 4.5+ hours of additional work to get ready to teach those students.
Did I mention running off copies of worksheets on copy machines which are either in use or in need of repair?
Tim – take a walk in our shoes – shadow a teacher for a day – you’d be amazed.
This is for TIm, who doesn’t seem to have a clue except, I suspect, the propaganda cranked out by the ignorant, greedy, fraudulent, lying RheeFormers.
I taught for thirty years and my average work weeks ran 60 to 100 hours—-A WEEK!!!!!!!!
25 of those hours each week, on average, was teaching five periods a day. Those five periods of instructional time generated a lot of work that took place outside of instructional time.
planning lessons, correcting student work and doing grades eats up a lot more time than the average teacher spends in class teaching and working with students.
My day at school often started between 6 – 7 AM but my first class didn’t start until after 8 AM. It takes time to get ready each day for the lesson that was planned. Then after that final bell, all the work the students did, for the children who did the work and learned something, has to be corrected and that work goes home most of the time.
In fact, I often corrected papers three to six hours every night and a few hours during the weekend—that is when I wasn’t planning the lessons and creating support material designed to generate learning for the kids who did the work.
And then there’s everything flos56 said in her comment.
And then there was the seven years I taught four periods of English and one period of high school journalism—that one journalism class that produced the monthly high school newspaper often had me at school at 6 AM when the gates were being unlocked and still there at 10 PM—-16 HOURS LATER—when the custodians came to the room to tell us we had to lave because the alarms were being turned on.
And I had to be back to the school between 6 – 7 AM the next day to start over.
Lloyd – I know you aren’t exaggerating because I spent long hours in the building as well, often being kicked out when the custodians left. One of the reasons I retired was because I just couldn’t keep up that pace. I, too, was involved in the school paper – an incredible amount of work.
And I was the librarian. You think an easy job, but I had two buildings, scheduled classes, and both collections to maintain. Those books don’t order themselves and pop onto the shelf or display case on their own.
I knew our HS librarian and she put in a lot of hours and was there early and stayed late because of after school tutoring for all those students who often never arrived but the tutors were there waiting. She taught classes on how to use the library. The HS’s computer lab was in the library and she was the tech for that to make sure it was always operational. The AV equipment was also there and that had to be kept up and checked out and in.
Thanks for the comments, flos56, and for the ad hominem, Lloyd, but neither of you have worked in or sent a child to NYC DOE schools, which have very specific work conditions–your suggestions that I don’t know what I’m talking about are off the mark. I don’t think that you read very carefully, either: my comment had nothing to do with prep time.
You are welcome, but when is an ad hominem an ad hominem when it is based on facts? Read the evidence and follow the links I provided to support what you call an ad hominem.
I’m sure there is valid evidence for the NYC DOE schools not being perfect—who is perfect—but even you can’t know what happens to every child and teacher in a system that works with more than one million children.
And something must be working because there are about 594,000 university students in New York City attending around 110 universities and colleges. Enrollment in New York State is led by New York City, which is home to more university students than any other city in the United States.
“New York City’s high school graduation rates have improved substantially, with 70 percent of students who entered high school in 2008 graduating within four years, up from 58 percent for those starting high school in 2002. Concurrently, rates of immediate college enrollment have also gone up: 45 percent of students who entered high school in 2008 enrolled in a two- or four-year college right after graduation, up from 35 percent among those starting high school in 2002.”
It is arguable from the facts in the previous paragraph that New York’s public schools are doing their job. Now, how can I make that claim? Easy. “Only 27 percent of jobs in the U.S. require at least an associate degree and the ranks of under and unemployed college graduates are likely to grow over the next ten years. (but) the U.S. Census Bureau shows that 47 percent of workers have an associate degree or higher. … According to BLS, the economy will create 50.6 million job openings by 2022 and only 27.1 percent will require college degrees. That’s a projected increase of only 2.1 percentage points since 1996.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/many-college-grads/
So let me SHOUT this question: Why does the United States NEED 100% of 17/18 years olds college and career ready?
Here are a few facts to help you with the answer: 26% of about a 100-million jobs in the private sector do not require even a HS degree, but the United States is ranked 4th or 5th in the world for the most college educated citizens with about three for every job that requires a college education.
Only 3% of the jobs requires a doctoral or professional degree
2% require a master’s degree
18% require a BA
4% require at last an AA or AS two years college degree
40% required a HS degree or its equivalent.
Click to access ep_edtrain_outlook.pdf
Who is responsible to teach?
Who is responsible to learn?
Who is responsible to support teachers and students so teachers can teach and children learn?
How many jobs in the United States do not require even a high school degree?
If a child chooses not to read outside of school for whatever reason, is that the teacher’s FAULT?
No matter how competent a teacher is, teachers do not do the learning. That responsibility belongs to the children.
Then we switch to “residential public charter” schools, staffed by TFA temps, supplied by amplify ed, surrounded with 15ft razor wire fencing. No worries about the out of school academic behavior of those most challenging students if there is no “out of school”. You can even have the Microsoft tech-support cubicle training to labor wing built right onto the Bunks/dining wing. Easy fix, economically speaking.
There might even be some prototype schools like you described out there already.
One of those “failing schools” is in my school district. The school has a 90% free/reduced lunch rate and is the only consistent thing in many of the students’ lives. We are suing the state for failure to pay after the CFE decision, we are owed over 45 million dollars in foundation aid alone, and they still haven’t calculated how much we are owed due to the GEA. We are burdened with mandates on top of mandates, most unfunded.
We have put some of our very best teachers and administrators in that building to do what they can and it may destroy their careers. In an attempt to ‘get off the list’, the district will in all likelihood redirect funds from our other schools, thereby pushing them over the edge as well.
Ours is not a ‘failing school’. It is a failed funding system, a failure of social safety nets and failed government services and a triumph of avarice, beauracracy, and greed.
I’m familiar with a handful of the struggling/persistently struggling schools that are located in New York City. Suffice it to say, neither Diane nor any commenter here would ever in a million years send their own child or a loved one’s child to any of them. Funding isn’t the issue: they receive $25,000+ in per-pupil spending. They have not-atypical numbers of special ed, FRPL-eligible, and ELL children, and they aren’t even located in the most impoverished or crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city. There are scores of district schools that endure and succeed in the face of similar or even worse circumstances.
Whether it was due to bad management or just bad luck, the culture at these schools is broken and likely beyond repair. There are some instances where closing a school is an unfortunate but sensible solution.
I could be wrong, but I believe that in the past Diane and many commenters have basically dared a charter operator to take over a struggling district school lock, stock, and barrel–no admissions lotteries, no starting with just K/1, but taking over a fully operating school and and all of its students. This hasn’t ever happened in New York City that I’m aware of. It seems like a pretty good opportunity to tell the charters to put up or shut up, no?
Has free lunch been disaggregated from reduced lunch at these schools? Jersey Jazzman makes this point repeatedly in regards to New Jersey schools. Charters there claim that they serve equal numbers of free/reduced lunch kids, but when you break it down between the two, it turns out (surprise!) that public schools serve significantly higher percentages of free lunch, while charters have more reduced lunch. In a place where nearly all the kids are quite poor, merely being reduced lunch is quite an advantage over free lunch. I’m guessing these schools you mention serve higher percentages of kids in extreme, deep, generational poverty, as opposed to the merely poor.
I’m well-versed in the differences between reduced-price and free: in New York City, reduced price kids score about a grade level higher than free on NAEP. But that wasn’t the point of my comparison, nor was it to compare these schools to charter schools.
My point is that there are many traditional district NYC DOE schools that are doing a far better job of maintaining a safe, orderly, and productive culture, all while educating comparable or even greater numbers of at-risk kids. As a matter of fact, three of the four schools I’m thinking of here are <85% free/reduced, none are so-called "apartheid" schools, and one is actually "only" 78% black + Latino, which, sad as the case may be, means it is actually quite well integrated by New York City standards. These are schools that for whatever reason went over a tipping point and (imo) nothing is going to pull them back.
The idea of a charter operator taking over a full district is a pipe dream. But handing over the keys to one of these schools to a charter operator — fully populated district schools with a non-self-selected population, a higher proportion of SWDs/ELLs, and years and years of disciplinary issues — might yield results that would reframe the charter school discussion.
The proof is in the pudding.
The original concept of charter schools was exciting, but the implementation has been, for the most part, a disaster. The charter schools in Buffalo that get better results have a larger percentage of white children. Even then, these results are not stellar. The neighborhood charter schools with 99% minority and all free and reduced lunch get the same results as the public schools with the same clientele. Several have been closed by the state.
Even though the Buffalo News is pro charter and gives selective statistics that make those charters seem better than they are, the reality is that the main result of charters in Buffalo has been a return to segregation.
I have not seen the amazing results you profess.
“could be wrong, but I believe that in the past Diane and many commenters have basically dared a charter operator to take over a struggling district school lock, stock, and barrel”
It was an entire district, not just one district school.
:O
(if it doesn’t render, that is supposed to be the “shocked” emoji)
Welcome back.
I think I’m on probationary status, subject to good behavior. 🙂
I have taught at two of the schools on New York State’s “struggling” list. Both have very high percentages of new immigrant/refugee students. These students enter the schools with little or no English and often have missed out on years of schooling due to poverty and upheaval in their countries. Most work hard and do make progress — just not in the unrealistic time frame that New York State demands. I believe that my district’s goal is to turn these schools into charters.
The charters will be likely to refuse to enroll these English Language Learners and replace them cherry-picked students from other schools who will be more likely to score well. Then, when test scores improve, NYSED and the charters will crow about how they have improved student achievement.
And yet all they will have done is just shuffle students around the district, stacking the charter schools with higher-scoring students. They will conveniently disregard the cost to the schools’ original students, who will have been taken out of their neighborhood school and sent to a new school, further from home, where they won’t know their new teachers and classmates.
It’s playing games with numbers….and children’s lives, for profit and political glory.
I must have missed something. Help me understand. Who gets the carrots and who gets the sticks?
I’ve worked up a lot of data on the 178 schools on Cuomo’s “hit list” of “failing schools.” They are, on average 93% minority, in contrast to 54% statewide minority.
They enroll on average 86% economically disadvantaged students, in comparison to 53% statewide.
On average 16% of their students are English language learners. State average is 8% (charter average is 5%).
On average, 23% of their students have disabilities, compared to an average of 16% statewide and only 14% in the state’s charter schools.
These schools are intensely segregated and, in dozens of cases reflect “apartheid segregation” (99%-100% minority). [I am uncertain of the origin of the term apartheid segregation–I know Jonathan Kozol uses it, but it may have been initiated by Gary Orfield.]
The schools serve tens of thousands of very high need students, including high school students who just can’t finish 22 credits and five exams in four years because they are enrolled in non-credit bearing classes like beginning English and Resource Room. When they graduate in 5 or 6 years it doesn’t matter . . . because only the four year graduation rate counts.
The state assessments in 3-8 ELA and math discriminate against these students. The number and percent of minority, economically disadvantaged, ELL and SWD students scoring at level 1 and 2 are disproportionate and the most recent changes in tests and scoring (beginning in 2013) profoundly exacerbated these gaps.
I would argue that the explosion of achievement gaps is in fact discriminatory and unconstitutional. Are there any good lawyers out that who can help me put together an argument that it is unconstitutional to 1) perpetuate intense and apartheid segregation in NY schools 2) assess children and hold schools accountable according to measures that can be demonstrated to have discriminatory impact 3) having isolated and targeted these schools and communities in a discriminatory fashion, now subject the schools to harsh measures including (if they are converted to charters) removing them from the democratic control of their communities? And making the institution of “school” itself nothing but a grand money laundering scheme to convert public, taxpayer dollars into private profit???
It is unconscionable that children, families, educators and communities must now suffer the “beating” that will come with the “carrot and stick” part of state intervention.
Thanks for the data. For anyone who is truly data driven, this is not a pretty situation.
From the National Park Service,
On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren, in a unanimous decision from the court, declared that, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
When Diane first published the scores, I scrolled through the low scores. It is mostly the districts with the poorest students, and many of these students are also minority. I agree that minorities are unfairly “chosen” to lose their public schools and have a cheap charter chain take over. Success Academy won’t want them as it will mess up their scorecard unless they can figure out a way to skim the cream.
Civil Rights lawyers or perhaps the Southern Poverty Law Center or some other agency should get figure out a strategy to fight back. This has been done in many urban districts before. New Orleans is the best example. The citizens of these schools should march on Albany and protest. This will turn up the heat on Cuomo and make him look more like the fascist power that he is. The big problem is that many of these students have barely functional parents that are more worried about feeding their families and probably can’t afford the time or money to protest. I would like to know how Regent Judy Johnson will respond as she was superintendent of Poughkeepsie.
In the Buffalo Public Schools, students apply to high school. The better students get into schools such as City Honors, Olmsted, Hutch Tech, and DaVinci. The “leftovers” go to schools such as Burgard, a vocational school with “the bottom of the barrel”. You have to be tough to survive – and I’m talking about the teachers, not just the students.
Another school, Bennett, which was once the flagship school of the city back when my mother attended its competitor (Kensington), is one of those schools in trouble. There was a charter school which wanted to take it over (Bennett is the proud owner of All High Stadium that was recently renovated). It got leaked out that this charter school just wanted the building and would not admit any of the Bennett students into their program.
The Superintendent (Ogilvie) offered some options for these “failing” schools, but being taken over by a charter was dismissed as unfeasible. A man with integrity, Ogilvie came up with some common sense solutions – or at least stop gaps. Unfortunately, the plans that the teachers presented, although applauded (it actually dealt with the issues the kids were facing) was dismissed as too costly.
One board member, Carl Paladino (remember him, he ran against Cuomo for Governor on the Republican ticket) lambasted Ogilvie for not implementing the Charter School option. It seems Olgilvie was not the lackey that Paladino thought he had hired. Paladino is a pro-Charter school champion (and financially benefits by purchasing and renting out facilities).
The upshot is that Ogilvie (an interim Superintendent intending to remain for two years) graciously finished out his first year and left. Oglivie was the retired head of Erie I BOCES and was doing a public service for the community by taking on an impossible job. He got kicked in the teeth for his efforts.
Now we have a new Interim Superintendent. Let’s see if he has integrity or is a rubber stamper in Paladino’s pocket. It will be extremely difficult to find a Superintendent (or even an Assistant Superintendent) who is willing to work with the current school board (the dynamics of this elected board of education is something even a fiction writer would say is unbelievable).
So the situation at Burgard is more complex than meets the eye. It goes beyond poverty and a high percentage of minority, ESL, and special ed. These identified schools are a part of a political tug of war which ignores the true issues. The losers are not just the staff who may be out of a job, but the students who are pawns in the battle being fought.
And if you play chess, you know that the pawns are expendable.
I’m sure these schools will surely begin to turn around and attract students without severe issues by receiving such labels.
Basically, find a way to deal with students living in dire poverty and overcome a bad reputation purely by teaching better and with nothing that will meaningfully alleviate the issues students face.
Oh, and do it within a year or 2.
Why even give them a year? It’s not a realistic time frame for the type of cultural change they demand.
I get that in the eyes of the state “it must stop immediately because it is harming children” is the party line, but, sometimes doing nothing IS better than doing “anything”.
What kind of harm will these kids endure if they bounce from school to school and community to community being told at each they are not wanted? Having classmates that constantly churn schools? Going to schools whose friends live farther than their parents can take them regularly? Who need to travel on public transportation at ever-younger ages for increasingly longer periods of time?
These are positives for children? It is better to move slower and have well considered, researched, and meaningful solutions rather than turning it over to the lowest bidder willing to take on the problem and see if they somehow do better or if those children will be victimized equally or even worse than they were before.
I agree with you. The idea that you need to blow up the system and start over is another business strategy applied to education. Most successful school changes evolve over time. It’s not a revolution because the you need to establish trust and confidence in the staff. I went through such as change, and it took a decade to get the collaborative spirit that is essential. I don’t know if it can be done in a school with so much poverty. We had about 1/3 poverty, but integration is a solution strategy. If the poor are educated with the middle class, there are tremendous benefits to the poor. I saw this in action in my school where I was an ESL teacher. My students were 93% free lunch, not reduced. My ELLs got to go to a safe,clean well funded school. They learned aspiration, organization, love of learning from other students and teachers. Most of them achieved, and many went to college or community college. http://sitool.ascd.org/Default.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2f
Could someone who knows please outline the consequences for teachers in these schools under this new plan? Is this also a sideways swipe at tenure? The evaluation being linked to test scores will be eventually dismantled, imho, when districts/state get sued for the harm these policies cause and the unreliability of the method is exposed in court documents.
Seriously, what will happen to the teachers- will NY schools go the way of the RI school where everyone got fired to jubilant glee from Duncan and POTUS? It would be a great way to have admins do a fly in, get rid of those teacher likely to earn pensions, and replace them with TFA flybynights who won’t. Anyone in the know, please lay out the consequences to the teachers. States with right to work statutes live and die by the legal precedents set up in the states with a nominal union- legal challenges won’t get you fired in those states, yet.
Yes. When the governors take over a school, they can often fire the staff. Receivership is a direct assault on due process rights in local contracts.
They’re finding that the identify persistently failing schools and trying to get communities to buy into charters won’t work in non-urban areas.
Gubernatorial control is a way to try to finish off privatizing urban education as quickly as possible, while putting in place the levers for governors to swoop into suburbs and make similar changes.
Basically, they want anyone who wants to be able to start a charter to do so and have the leeway to create the space in any community. Even the best schools will start trending down once funds start being diverted and diluted while the district remains saddled with teacher pension/health/building costs they can’t change.
All they have to do is tweak their VAM nonsense to achieve the desired level of destruction. Then, they can invade like fascists.
I am one of those teachers. We don’t even know what “demonstrable improvement” is yet. No one has said exactly what has to happen to get off the list. My feeling is that no school on this list will ever “improve” enough. Each year more schools will be added until Cuomo becomes master of the universe.
Cuomo will hand the title of master to the universe of K-12 education to Wall Street hedge funds.