Bloomberg and Tweed: "Our Standards Mean Nothing"

Leo Casey:

Last Wednesday, the New York City Department of Education (DoE) began holding public meetings for the 33 Transformation and Restart Schools that Mayor Bloomberg announced he would close in his State of the City speech. At the start of each meeting, a Deputy Chancellor reads out a prepared script which purportedly makes the case for closure. For 19 of those 33 schools, nearly 3 in 5, there is a glaring omission in the Orwellian accounts of their "deficiencies": these schools do not meet the DoE's own well-established standards for closure.

When the Scho0l Progress Reports were introduced five years ago, the NYC DoE decreed that the decision on whether or not to close a school would be henceforth be made on the basis of the school's grade. Only those schools which received a "failing grade" -- 'F,' 'D' or three consecutive 'C's -- would be considered for closing. That scale cut a remarkably wide swath, as the Bloomberg-Klein DoE wanted an ample supply of schools to close: where else would consecutive 'C's constitute a failing grade? But whatever else you could say about this policy, it was a fixed and clear standard. Even when the DoE announced that it would grade elementary schools and middle schools on a curve, as too many were scoring 'A's and 'B's, it still held to this standard. (Since 85% of the grades for elementary and middle schools were derived from student scores on New York State's standardized ELA and Math exams, school grades rocketed during the period of grade inflation on those exams.)

Posted by Jim Zellmer at April 4, 2012 2:46 AM
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