NYC gave this school an "A" on its 'school report card' gimmick:

[Smarmie Doofus]

Here's my favorite passsage:

>>>But teachers dispute her description.

“I didn’t teach last year,” Ms. Staples said. “I was a police officer and a baby sitter. You’d write up kids left and right, and then nothing would happen. No one would help you. And the kids would just come right back. After I got hit, the principal’s response was, ‘That’s what happens in middle schools.’”>>>

This is definitely where I want my kid to go. NYC schools are headed by one Joel Klein: former prosecutor, former Clinton admninistration functionary, ardent anti-union enthusiast, and widely rumoured to be at the top of Hillary's list for Sec of Education.

Enjoy.




http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/nyregion/19education.html

How a Middle School Can Be ‘Dangerous’ and Still Get an A

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By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: December 19, 2007

When Shawn Carson taught last year at a middle school named the South Bronx Academy for Applied Media, he entered his room on many days to find a message from his students on the blackboard. In graphic and vulgar language, as he recalled in a recent interview, it described him committing a homosexual act.
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David Suter

On one occasion, Mr. Carson said, he caught his female students breaking open lockers in the room. Some of his pupils, known in the school’s parlance as “scholars,” threw his books and stapler out the window. When he went from desk to desk, offering editing advice on writing assignments, he was often met with profanity.

Mr. Carson was not alone among the school’s faculty members who said they endured such episodes. Michelle L’Eplattenier said a digital camera and a cellphone were stolen from her room. A student in Shannon Staples’s class routinely overturned desks. Ms. Staples was also punched while trying to separate two pupils trading blows.

Because of their experiences, Mr. Carson, Ms. Staples and Ms. L’Eplattenier have all left the school within the past year, part of an exodus that has claimed roughly half the faculty. And their concerns about the school’s climate are echoed by students. In a survey conducted last year by the City Department of Education, 98 percent of Applied Media’s students said there was fighting in the school, 94 percent said there was bullying and 67 percent said they were worried about crime and violence in the school.

Reflecting such realities, the New York State Education Department has placed Applied Media on its list of “persistently dangerous” schools, one of 52 in the state. Applied Media earned the designation after its second year of existence.

Yet when the city’s Education Department recently released its progress reports about public schools, Applied Media received an A.

There are, of course, firm statistical reasons for the grade. While the overall performance of Applied Media on standardized tests falls well below citywide averages, the school raised the scores of its lowest-performing pupils, as well as those in special education and bilingual tracks, which are indeed sensible criteria for appraising a school.

The A grade, though, may also have something to do with the fact that the progress reports weigh all safety factors as only 2.5 percent of a school’s total grade, said James S. Liebman, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer. He has said the department decided not to give safety more consideration because statistics on school violence rely on self-reporting and tend to be deceptive.

For a great many children, parents and teachers, however, the order and security inside a school matter for rather more than 2.5 percent. And so the case of Applied Media and its A is a tale of two schools, the one reflected in the Education Department’s metrics and the one experienced firsthand by many of the teachers.

“This is a school that’s doing remarkably well on the progress side, and ‘remarkably’ isn’t a word I use lightly,” said Mr. Liebman, who is also a law professor at Columbia University, where this reporter is on the journalism faculty.

The principal, Roshone Ault, said she supported teachers in disciplinary matters by bringing in experts in “social-emotional learning” to train the faculty and was offering students incentives like pizza parties for good behavior.

“ON discipline we had a system in place,” she said. “There was a lot of support around it.”

But teachers dispute her description.

“I didn’t teach last year,” Ms. Staples said. “I was a police officer and a baby sitter. You’d write up kids left and right, and then nothing would happen. No one would help you. And the kids would just come right back. After I got hit, the principal’s response was, ‘That’s what happens in middle schools.’”

Mr. Carson similarly described a lack of administrative support and meaningful discipline. “The administration would be telling you that it would all fall into place if you had a better lesson plan or more student engagement or arranged the desks in a U shape,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter how good your lesson plan is if the kids can’t even stay still long enough to write the ‘Aim’ and ‘Do Now’ off the board. There are no repercussions. There is no punishment fitting the infraction.”

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[Sanity Claws]

1. What are your experiences?

Paul,
I know you're a teacher. Are your experiences different? Did the article describe a problem unique to that school?

[Smarmie Doofus]

2. The problem is by *no* means unique to that school.

The schools have regressed tremendously under Bloomberg. The white middle class is blissfully ignorant of how bad public schools are because it DOES NOT USE ( in the overwhelming majority of cases) the public school system.

The school system here bascially "serves"... if you can call it that... the "working poor" and immigrant communities. Common denominator here: relative lack of political sophistication.

I've never seen such political machinations as those that go on inside the schools themselves. Everything is data driven . Example: crime stats . Even Liebman, Bloomberg's 'accountability officer', acknowledges in the article that they, the stats, are not credible because they are not reported accurately since there are negative repercussions for the school ( i.e. the principal) if the rate is high.

Should we have any more confidence in test scores? Let's be honest before we start to pretend. ( I like that line... it's from an old movie; can't quite remember what; Terms of Endearment, perhaps?)

No, is the answer. We should not. Bloomberg' strategy is to cut costs in whatever way he can while freakishly micromanaging the classroom itself, and inflating test scores to justify the micromanaging.

Older, experienced teachers are anathema now... they cost too much. Much easier to harrasss them by burying them in paperwork and/or buy them out with early retirement packages ( this is happening as we speak.) Then there's the new HUAC- type (HUAC? kiddies: look it up on Wiki) committee Chancellor De-Klein put together last month to root-out "bad" teachers ( read "expensive trouble makers"). Mc Carthyism revisited.

The oldsters are replaced by youngsters who work cheap. Often they are very good... teaching is, if nothing else, burnout work.

But, statistically, most won't last long enough to make pension demands on the city. The job just ain't that good. End result: working class gets screwed over again ( Surprise !) by neighborhood schools that are forever in tumult or as the educrats will say ( "transitioning".)