Tag Archives: nyc schools

Where are NYC’s Science Talent Winners?

Posted on January 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

Leonie Haimson documents a precipitous drop in NYC’s share of semifinalists in the Intel Science Talent Search program during the Bloomberg/Klein administration.

Let’s see how this one gets spun.

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Posted in Mayoral control, Schools

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Close ’em Down!

Posted on October 30, 2010 | Leave a comment

Sometimes it’s easy to tell a story. Here are the first two items in the October 29th “Rise & Shine” story listing on the education blog GothamSchools.org.

* SUNY wants to try fixing failing charter schools instead of shutting them down. (Post)

* The city says it is considering closing up to 47 schools this year. (GS, Times, Post, WSJ, NY1)

And they say that Albany is dysfunctional?

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NY Media Ignore Major Charter School Study

Posted on July 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

For reasons we can’t explain, a June 29, 2010 study that showed “on average, charter schools had no significant impacts on student achievement in math and reading” drew zero attention from New York media — including education blogs.

The 15-state, 36-school study, funded by the U.S. Department of Education and conducted by the prestigious Princeton-based Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., was announced one day after the New York State Senate passed legislation raising the state’s charter school cap from 200 to 460 — a result of a months-long lobbying campaign by charter advocates.

Until the legislature’s approval, New Yorkers had been bombarded by TV commercials, print ads, and editorials and op-ed pieces in the Daily News, the Post, and the NY Times — all urging legislators to lift the charter cap to improve New York’s chance to win Federal funding in Round 2 of Race to the Top, the Obama administration’s school reform incentive program.

But critics suggested that the RttT eligibility goal was just cover for a well-funded opinion campaign aimed at pressuring legislators to increase the number of charter schools. Ultimately, the legislation incorporated several limitations, including a stipulation that new charters may not be operated by for-profit companies. Continue reading →

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When Schools Battle for Parents’ Hearts and Minds

Posted on March 29, 2010 | 2 comments

P.S. 217 Odyssey photo courtesy Matthew Septimus

Rick Hess, education guru at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that the whole point of giving parents a choice between charters and traditional public schools is to create competition, which forces both to improve. One form this competition takes is in how they recruit new students. Charters don’t seem to have to jump through the same hoops as TPSs do. We witnessed this recently in Flatbush. Continue reading →

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Posted in charter schools

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What Happens When a Charter School Arrives

Posted on March 16, 2010 | 2 comments

Do charter schools raise educational standards? The schools’ proponents say that charters educate more effectively than traditional public schools, and even those that don’t, still create a competitive environment in which traditional public schools are “incentivized” to improve their own teaching methods. Can this logic be disputed?

The pro-charter school argument ignores that charters can hurt overall educational progress by undermining nearby traditional public schools. Charters’ aggressive marketing efforts can force TPSs to expand their own publicity campaigns, diverting money and time that otherwise would have gone to support instruction. A charter’s arrival in a neighborhood also can demoralize a public school’s leadership and parents, who view the interloper as a competitor for space and dollar resources and community support. But it is outside the schoolhouse walls that charters may do their most lasting damage, if they create or exacerbate social divisions in the community. How this plays out depends on the neighborhood, and the quality of its traditional public school. Continue reading →

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Posted in charter schools, Schools

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Charter Schools: The Power of Marketing

Posted on March 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

Wednesday’s New York Times ran a front-page story on some Harlem public schools that are responding to pressure from charters by aggressively marketing themselves. Such marketing typically includes school tours for prospective parents, augmented by postcards and brochures, with most campaigns [amounting] “to less than $500, raised by parents and teachers….”

The Times story tells how prospective parents touring P.S. 125 with its principal, Rafaela Espinal, showed appreciation for the low number of students they saw in each classroom and the school’s impressive physical amenities, which include a rare swimming pool. But some parents, according to the Times, still weighed sending their child elsewhere. Continue reading →

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What’s Happening to NYC’s Middle Class?

Posted on February 9, 2010 | 2 comments

A 2008 Brookings Institution analysis of America’s shrinking middle class showed that between 1970 and 2005, New York lost its middle income group 44% faster than the rest of the nation. Probing this, the NYC-based Center for an Urban Future published a study in February, 2009, which implicated New York’s “sky-high cost of living,” a job mix that had “shifted away from positions that provide middle-income wages and benefits,” the “inferior quality” of the city’s public schools, “long commuting times on public transportation,” and residential development that “seems disturbingly out of scale with existing neighborhoods.”

Do you know a middle class family that has left New York? Was it for any of the reasons CUF mentioned? Do those reasons fully explain why New York’s middle class is vanishing, or are other things driving the middle class out? Write us a comment and share your opinion with our readers.



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Posted in The Middle Class, Uncategorized

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Unbalanced Coverage: NYC School Closings

Posted on February 2, 2010 | 1 comment

WNYC’s Morning Edition ran a four-and-a-half minute story about the lawsuit brought by the UFT and the NAACP against NYC to stop the city from closing 19 underperforming schools. Articulating the NAACP position was NYS NAACP Chair Hazel Dukes, whose sound bite ran for 10 seconds. But the story gave City Hall, in the person of Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, a three-and-a-half minute interview to make the city’s case. No quote from UFT.

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