Brooklyn District To Challenge State's List Of Struggling Schools

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — A Brooklyn school district will consider lending its support to an parent initiative speaking out against a new state list that names 84 New York City schools as in need of improvement.

The initiative, called "Measure This," aims to show the state that schools designated in January as "Comprehensive Support and Improvement Schools" have more to show than the test score and absentee data used to put them there. District 15's council — which had three schools named to the list from its western Brooklyn coverage area — began discussing whether it should lend its support to the initiative in a meeting on Tuesday.

Council member Charles Star, who brought the idea to the group, said he felt supporting Measure This could help stand up against the tendency to measure school success based solely on "bad data," which he said in the case of test scores and absentee numbers can often be tied to external factors like family income.

"A fetish for numbers doesn't help our students or our schools," Star said. "...A system reliant on these factors is destined to keep re-punishing schools and their student bodies for failing to meet benchmarks that are not appropriate evaluation tools. Parents who get together to challenge this -— grassroots movements like Measure This — should be supported."

The council ran out of time in their Tuesday meeting to officially vote on Measure This, but Star and a district staff member said it seems like council members were supportive of the idea. An official vote will be held at a future meeting.

The list of schools designated as "CSI schools" was part of a new accountability model released by the New York State Education Department early this year. The determinations, which NYSED said are part of a federal requirement to create an accountability program, also included a list of "target" districts and schools.

Schools named on the CSI list, 245 total across the state, were those that performed in the bottom 5 percent based on six factors, including achievement on tests, growth on tests, graduation rates, readiness for college, growth of English language learners and chronic absenteeism. The schools are required to undergo on-site evaluations and come up with plans to improve.

The Measure This initiative, though, contends that these factors leave out a host of other elements that may make a school successful.

"What is not measured may be the better question," the website says. "Diversity and inclusion, musical performances, culturally responsive teaching, clinic services offered at community schools and access to a staffed and stocked library are among the measures missing from (New York state's) list of what they look for in a school."

The website includes first-person accounts of what is happening at the schools on the list, including from P.S. 15, which was one of the three in District 15 named a CSI school.

Star contends that this school is an example of the "obsession with quantifying" the complex factors of school success. P.S. 15 has low test scores, he said, but also shows "outstanding evaluations in leadership, pedagogy and trust," based on city Department of Education data.

The district's superintendent, Anita Skop, also discussed P.S. 15 in a previous meeting. She said after examining the school's data she found that it's placement on the list seemed to be an "anomaly," since it was largely because the school had seen a spike in student performance two years ago and has done well, but not as dramatically well, in the years since.

"(They were) penalized because they had previously been successful," she told council members.

Skop also went over the district's two other schools on the list, P.S. 497 and P.S. 676. Red Hook's P.S. 676 is one of the district's smallest schools, she said, meaning each student's scores hold a significant amount of weight. That school has also had three principals in the last nine years, she said.

At P.S. 497, a technical school, the issue was the graduation rate of African-American and Latino students, Skop said. She added that the school has a new principal this year that she is "confident...will turn it around."