State, city: conflicting measures of ‘progress’
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Yesterday, the New York State Education Department released its 2009 list of Schools Under Registration Review — institutions that, based on test-measured, annual yearly progress (AYP) criteria, risk potential closure. No school wants to be a SURR school and the city is to be commended for reducing its share of the SURR list by about two-thirds since the early days of mayoral control. (Cynics might look at the DOE’s penchant for closing struggling schools as a pre-SURR ambush strategy. In fact, three schools that would have been placed on the state’s watch list are being closed now by the city, effectively removing them from the state’s roll of deeply troubled schools.) Four city schools were added to the SURR list; each serve high-need students predominantly from African-American and Hispanic communities.
Elissa Gootman notes in the Times that two of the schools new to the state’s list are, in fact, young schools created as part of the DOE’s small-schools initiative: The New Explorers High School in the Bronx and the West Bronx Academy for the Future.
The state’s actions are tied to No Child Left Behind mandates, which require AYP in particular categories. The city uses different measures — both of the schools above got passing grades, a B and a C, on their current progress reports. The variations on the ‘progress’ theme reflect a frequent disconnect between city and state counters of things that matter: The state counts high-school credits differently than the city, for example, and for years, the state and the city calibrated the high-school graduation rate using different metrics. (That particular gap was addressed this year; the DOE now uses the state’s calculation method and its’ own, for — no kidding — two sets of numbers.)
In broad strokes, that there are fewer city schools on the state’s watch list is very good news. But this year’s SURR list prompts a few questions that could become more persistent as the 200+ Bloomberg-Klein small schools mature: Should the results of isolated metrics determine a school’s fate? And what does a school’s place on the watch list mean to the kids, teachers and administrators who are the human fabric of the school’s community? Does SURR status translate to “we’re looking out for your best interests” or “we’re giving up on this school — and, by extension, giving up on you” ?
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