Third Turn of the Screw: The DOE and Closing Schools
by Jackie Bennett, March 29, 2011
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Which Schools Close? Most New Yorkers who follow these things know that the DoE has targeted for closure four high schools with a C on their annual high-stakes Progress Reports even though schools with a D or F have not been targeted. The DoE might argue that this is proof that they take a nuanced look at each school’s quality, but the evidence suggests something different. These “C” schools have higher — and unacknowledged — concentrations of high-need students then the D schools that they outperformed. And, when the DoE chose which schools with Ds to close, again chose the schools with higher concentrations of very high need students, all the while saying that the difference was the quality of the school.

It is not as if it did this with intent to get the students with the highest needs more quickly into the newest schools. For all its focus on numbers, these concentrations have been ignored by the DoE in their reams and reams of justification about why they chose the schools they did. What’s more, our newer schools tend not to serve the high need students who would have attended the older schools but have been scattered by their closure.

A little background, and then some charts. First, the high needs I am referring to here are the needs of students who arrive at a school overage for their grade, a condition that has a huge impact on whether or not a student is apt to graduate on time or even at all. Overage students can have significant learning disabilities, low academic scores, limited English language proficiency or interrupted education. In many cases, with or without academic challenges, their private lives are careening out of control. Any one of these issues represents a challenge, and many students are struggling with all or most of them at the same time. In all, only 19% of overage students wind up graduating or getting a GED. Their needs impact the school as a whole and this single characteristic (being overage for the grade level) has been identified by the DoE and its consultants as about the most significant predictor of a student’s, and a school’s, success.

The DoE knows about the challenge, but its policies, by design or otherwise, seem to be taking a major challenge and making it much worse. In the first turn of the screw, the admissions and transfer policies seem to have concentrated overage students into a few schools in every neighborhood, thus creating large disparities in local populations. Next, the DoE created Progress Reports that punished the schools that had these concentrations, even though the Reports were supposed to be demographically neutral, measuring the quality of the programs rather than the high needs of the kids. A chart from my post last week compares schools that received As to schools that received Ds in the neighborhoods (districts) of closing schools. In 8 out of 11 neighborhoods, the schools graded as D or F work with at least twice the proportion of overage students as the A schools. In some neighborhoods the difference is eight-fold. In most of the closing schools themselves (not charted there) one out of four, and sometimes one out of three, students arrive over age.

So, first the DoE policies concentrate the high-need students. Next the DoE creates Progress Reports that give failing grades to the schools with higher concentrations. But then comes the third turn of the screw. The DoE moves in to shutter even the high-concentration schools that avoid a failing grade.

The whole thing is bizarre.

Here again is a summary of the concentrations of overage students in the closing high schools, compared to all other high schools that received a C or D/F. This chart is followed by comparisons within the individual neighborhoods.

Which Schools Close?

While non-closing C, D and F schools had high concentrations of incoming overage students, all except one of the closing schools had more. Look at Robeson on the right where one out of every three students enters over age. Only three high schools citywide received performance bonuses this year and two of them were closing schools. Robeson, with its incredibly high need population was one of them. But none of that has stopped the hell-bent DoE in its zeal to shut it down.

It is also worth noting also that three of the four closing schools with the lowest concentrations are new schools. The difficulties these schools have had even without the same concentrations may attest to the struggles that can affect a newer school.

That’s the summary. But the disparities become more glaring when we compare the closing schools to schools in their own neighborhoods. Here are four closing schools that had higher concentrations than the other neighborhood Ds (red, center) as well as the As (blue). Note again that two of the closing schools with high concentrations got Cs.

Closing schools and their districts

Here are five more closing schools that did not have any other D or F schools in their neighborhoods. These charts compare the percentage of overage students in A schools (blue) to the closing schools (red).

Closing schools and their districts

For me, these charts are very troubling. Each represents incredible disparities in populations among schools right in the same neighborhood. Each also represents disparities in how the schools were graded.

But they represent something else as well. In the service of “bolder, faster change” DoE seems to have embraced a course of action that is as heedless as it is reckless. It is possible that the DoE doesn’t realize what it is doing, and it is possible that it knows and does not care. But it is not possible that it did not notice that in community after community, New Yorkers have been asking the DoE to look again at these schools because something in the DoE’s calculations isn’t adding up. Why they have not listened well enough to take another look, I do not know.

Source: 2009-2010 DoE Progress Reports and the CEP Reports on each school’s DoE website. All can be found at schools.nyc.gov

Programmed to Fail: The Parthenon Report and Closing Schools
by Jackie Bennett, Mar 9, 2011
Filed under: Education

In New York City, virtually all schools serve high need students. But some schools serve students with very high needs, and serve them in astounding concentrations that have been rising over the past few years. That’s troubling enough, but what is more troubling is the prospect that the DoE implemented policies that led to the concentrations, even though DoE knew that such high concentrations were highly likely to overwhelm those schools. [1] Then when the schools were indeed overwhelmed, the DoE failed to give them the support required, labeled those schools failures, and then moved in to shut them down.

And that’s why the UFT has recently asked the State Attorney General to determine whether or not DoE is failing to meet its legal obligation to provide “educational equity.”

A few details of the situation in New York are worth knowing.

Back in 2006, the DoE received a report it had commissioned, called the Parthenon Report. In it the researchers showed, clearly, that concentrating students with high needs in a single school generally leads to dramatically lower graduation rates. In fact, the researchers actually predicted the graduation rate of different schools based upon the intensity of the concentration. They also pointed out that the effect on concentrations was not limited to the influence they would have on at-risk students. For example, the chances that an average student would graduate could swing 30 percentage points (from 55% to 85%) depending on the concentrations of high-need students, and to a much lesser extent, the size of the school.

No surprise to teachers, of course, but DoE needed a fancy formula to figure it out.

Yet having made this discovery, DoE policy people do not seem to have done much to address it. Just the opposite: DoE seems to have created a web of policies that concentrated the kids most at risk in the schools they did not create. For example, DoE excluded students who needed special classes (self-contained students) from some schools, which meant others had higher concentrations. And it apparently sent high school students who showed up at the student placement office (new to the country or the system, or in need of transfer from other schools or penal institutions) to older schools– even when there were empty seats in the newer local schools. Sometimes, the newer schools were (and are) right in the same building.

These policies – and a high school selection process that allows new schools to favor students “known to the school” — seem to have a concomitant effect of concentrating at risk students and because of the concentration lowering their chances of success.

A few highlights of the results:

* Brooklyn: one out of every three of Robeson’s students enter the school overage, but at the 9 new neighborhood schools that replaced Erasmus Hall and Prospect Heights only one in seven enter overage. Yet, DoE documents show the newer schools had more physical spaceand they also had seats available in most of them in most grades.
* Bronx: at Christopher Columbus, the test scores of incoming students are in the bottom 10% of all City schools. Two of the new schools located in the same building serve students with the highest scores in its district.
* Queens: Jamaica, Beach Channel, Far Rockaway and Springfield Gardens are four high schools the DOE has closed or is planning to close in Queens. All have served large numbers of students who require self-contained classes. But 8 of the 9 new schools that are replacing them serve none of these students and the 9th serves only a small percentage. This includes two separate schools housed in right in the same buildings as Jamaica and Beach Channel High Schools. In other words, in the 2009-2010 school year, even as Jamaica and Beach Channel worked with about 150 self-contained students between them, the schools co-located in their building served none at all.

There is hardly a public school in New York City that doesn’t serve some high need students. And in all of them – big or small, new or old – our teachers work with passion because that is the nature of teaching: the kids themselves and dynamics of the classroom inspire our work in ways that merit-pay advocates and teacher-haters have never understood. But the fact remains that the highest needs are concentrated in particular schools, and more and more that seems to be by design. Then, when the school “fails,” the DoE moves in to shut it down. And, DoE is aided in that by the school Progress Reports they created. The Reports fail to account for key demographic factors and make differences in school results appear to have come about because of the Herculean efforts of some staffs, but not others.

The Parthenon Report has wide-ranging implications. For example:

The odds of beating the odds are very slim. Of course, the real question is why the DoE would raise the odds in the first place when there were other options. To put it another way, why build a mountain when you could have created a more level playing field? But more importantly, there comes a point at which the mountain gets too high. Parthenon – which is partly about how some schools beat the odds – defines perhaps 10% of schools as beat-the-odds schools. Yet a close look at the schools they highlight shows their needs are not as high as the schools that “fail.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t great schools doing great things with challenging populations. Our international schools – which serve very recent immigrants– have programs that are by all accounts highly successful. But by the nature of their demographics, these schools are able to focus very specifically on a defined need. And because they consistently beat the odds – there may very well be a socio-economic (demographic) factor at work within the recent-immigrant population that is unaccounted for in the usual formulas DoE uses to give us evidence of school success. Which brings us to the second point.

Most differences between school performance seem to be driven by factors that have been ignored. The “failing schools” movement (from Duncan to Klein, to a whole lot of people in between) makes its case for shutting some schools by exalting others. “These schools are similar,” they say, “and yet this one here has beaten the odds – and that one there has failed.” But once we account for the hidden demographic factors that influence success and are routinely excluded from accountability, (such as incoming, overage students) the picture becomes much different.

Take for example, the comments of DoE’s Marc Sternberg at a recent hearing at City Council. Sternberg compared closing schools to the six small schools on the Bronx Evander Childs campus where he said the average graduation rate was 80.3 percent. What he did not point out was the hidden demographic differences between these schools and the typical closing schools, like Columbus High School down the block. Last year, the six Evander schools had average incoming scores of 2.7. The percent of self-contained students in these schools was 3%, and the percent entering overage for all grades was 15%. Sternberg particularly highlighted the school he led on the campus (Bronx Lab). That school served virtually no self contained students ( .2% ) only 11% overage, and average incoming scores of 2.8. Compare all this to Columbus in the same neighborhood where the average incoming scores are much lower (2.4) and the needs insanely higher (self contained 12%, overage 28%).

And it is not just Sternberg’s comments. Santi Taveras said pretty much the same thing last year, referencing other schools. Even that 10% of schools designated as “beat the odd” schools in the Parthenon Report actually have different, and lower concentrations of high-need students. Ultimately, it is extremely tricky to draw any conclusions about differences in performance until we know for sure about the different levels of challenges our schools face.

The DoE must start talking honestly about the nature of the problem. Or to put it another way, if they know it, why not just say it? Maybe Sternberg and Taveras were misinformed about their comparisons. But how could they possibly be blind to what their organization’s policies have wrought. And even under the most benign of constructions – that it was all just a big and unintended mistake – we have to wonder why DoE has not been up front about that big mistake. DoE needs to say – honestly and forthrightly – that the odds are stacked against these schools, and that there is no good that can come of underestimating what these needs are. Step one of recovery is admitting you have a problem, yet there is Cathie Black on NY1 telling the public that the only difference between closing schools and others is the “level of commitment” of the staff. And while Cathie Black couldn’t be expected to know about Parthenon, every one in her policy department certainly does.

Forget MDRC and lottery-in/lottery out research. Or, at the very least, read this kind of research with a different eye. DoE touts MDRC and other school-quality research that is designed around comparing students who apply through lottery-like admissions policies to small (and charter) schools. Basically, they match similar students who get in with those who don’t and examine their academic progress. If the accepted students have better outcomes (and that is not always the case) the researchers make claims about how the new school did a better job. This research is then used – by DoE and others – to hasten the shuttering of schools.

Lottery in/out research is often considered the “gold standard” of school research. What we see now, however, is that to the extent there are differences, a major driver of those differences is the effect of concentration on the school as a whole. Instead of pointing to studies like the MDRC in order to justify their closing school strategy, they ought to take the actions that would be implied by differences, such as focusing real support and resources to the schools in which they have concentrated students[2], and focusing on the policies that led to concentration in the first place.

But that’s not happening. Between narrow ideologies and brutal politics, DoE has created a system that sinks some boats and raises others. But the “sinking” is not based on the failure of the captain and the crew, but rather manipulation of numbers, policies, and ultimately, our students’ lives.

Isn’t it time to look honestly at the challenges in these schools? And raise all boats?

(1) To teachers and principals the challenges brought about by concentrations of high need students are obvious. Besides the significant influence of peer effect, there are the challenges of providing appropriate programming and support – especially given the limited resources with which they have to do it. How does a school program a student who is hearing impaired and needs special “pull-out” services but who also has limited English proficiency in English, and has limited literacy skills in his own language and can’t afford to miss a class. Not as rare as you might think. Ultimately, when many students have high needs, schools are simply overwhelmed.

(2) It’s worth pointing out, by the way, that MDRC itself partly attributes success at these schools to another DoE policy that protects these schools – reduced teacher load.

Tagged: Bronx, Brooklyn, graduation rate, Queens, school closings

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5 Comments:

1 Christine Rowland
· Mar 10, 2011 at 8:33 am

Great work Jackie! I attended a District 11 Town Hall Meeting with the Chancellor yesterday evening. In response to some young people from Brothers and Sisters United who spoke out against closing schools the Chancellor started to use Evander and their new small schools grad rates to show why the schools were being closed, and how their replacements were better. I really think she didn’t know the facts – she’s just been fed the official line.

From the audience their were calls of ‘not the same kids’, and a network leader jumped in to take her place at the mike. The Chancellor was wisked out to another engagement (which has been announced at the beginning of the meeting).

Using data to mislead happened again later in last night’s meeting after the Chancellor had left, as you report it happened at the City Council hearing. The problem was that this time it was by people who DO know better. Individuals who are in positions of authority and respect are knowingly not telling the truth about the populations in schools. These aren’t issues of opinion, they are facts.

Is there no accountability anywhere? If this goes unchallenged the DoE will continue to systematically fail thousands of students in dozens of schools in this system each year.

What is happening with the Schneiderman letter? Will there ever be justice for our communities?