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NYC school report gets harsh grade; Parents, educators see flaws in process

This kind of ranking system is what you get when your school system is taken over by corporate America. Wave high that Broad Foundation banner, New York teachers.

by Associated Press

NEW YORK - Thanks to heavy parent involvement and high test scores, Public School 321 in Park Slope, a yuppie neighborhood in Brooklyn, is considered a gem of New York City's public school system.

In the eyes of New York's Department of Education, P.S. 321 deserved just a B in the city's first-ever school report cards, based largely on how students scored on standardized tests.

Such accountability efforts -- widespread since the advent of the federal No Child Left Behind Act -- have raised the hackles of parents and educators.

"It really saddens me that this is how the Department of Education thinks that parents are best served by boiling everything that happens in an entire school to a letter grade," said Lee Solomon, the mother of a 1st grader at a sought-after Brooklyn school that accepts students only by lottery but got a C.

A 2006 survey by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to focus on reading and math.

Jim Devor, the father of a 5th grader at a Brooklyn school that got a D, said students were "strongly invited" to attend Saturday test-prep sessions but have no time to discuss current events.

"I'm appalled at how little my child knows about social studies," he said. "They're all obsessed with test prep."

James Liebman, the district's chief accountability officer, devised the grading system for the city's 1.1 million-pupil school system.

For New York's middle and elementary schools, 85 percent of the grade is based on performance on standardized tests, while high schools are judged on graduation rates, New York State Regents exam scores and other factors.

The school letter grades are based on a complex formula that tracks students' test scores from year to year.

If a school gets a low grade two years in a row and scores poorly on a performance review, the principal's job may be at risk.

— Associated Press
Chicago Tribune
2008-01-22
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/content/education/chi-nyc_22jan22,0,700581.story

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