Teachers Say de Blasio and Carranza Helped Spread Coronavirus

In addition to exposure before the schools were closed, most teachers were still going into work last week for training and prep for online learning. Among the schools mentioned in the article is the Grand Street Campus (former Eastern District HS at Grand and Bushwick).

DOE Says School Will Be Built Near Greenpoint Toxic Site

The Department of Education has told Laura Hanrahan at the Greenpoint Post that they are moving ahead with plans to construct a K-5 school at part of the Greenpoint Landing site that sits next to a Superfund spill at the NuHart Plastics factory. This comes as news to CM Steve Levin and local advocates who have working to find a less potentially toxic place for a grade school.

What the article doesn’t make clear is that the developer of the NuHart site has no plans to clean up the part of the spill that sits under the intersection of Franklin Street and Dupont Street. That part of the plume has been slowly migrating towards the school site, and based on the most recent data is now within a few feet of the school site.

English is Absent and Math Doesn’t Count at Brooklyn’s Biggest Yeshivas

What the situation amounts to, Alpert and others say, is a school system bigger than Boston’s operating virtually without oversight, making it easily the largest unregulated school system in America.

Bigger than Boston’s? Turns out Boston’s school system is relatively small, but still.

Locals Blast Charter School’s Proposed Co-Location in Williamsburg

Another year, another charter school to fight over. With the local public elementary schools improving greatly, and a host of charter schools already online or approved, at what point do we actually assess the need for yet another elementary school?

Williamsburg Charter High Gets a Reprieve; Cheating at PS 31?

05/23/2012 | Comment

The saga of Williamsburg Charter High School’s closing continues. Yesterday, a judge refused the city’s request to move forward with a lottery to relocate the current students at the school. Unfortunately, this decision doesn’t necessarily help the students at WCH, as they may still need to scramble to find a new school between now and September. From the looks of it, neither the city nor the leadership of the school (which is fighting to stay open) have done right by the students in this process.

Elsewhere in the Eastern District, two highly-ranked elementary schools are being investigated for cheating on standardized tests. P.S. 31 in Greenpoint and East Williamsburg’s P.S. 257 – the two top-ranked elementary schools in the entire city based on the Department of Education’s report card system – are under investigation for helping their students excel on the standardized tests that make up a big part of the report card ranking.

The cheating was suspected after many of the students from the two schools performed worse than expected on subsequent testing at I.S. 318. The gaming of the testing system also reveals a particularly nasty side effect for the teachers at the middle school:

At I.S. 318, nearly 60 percent of teachers were rated below average or low [on DOE’s new teacher report cards]. The Daily News singled out the school for its poor performance, and many news media outlets, including The New York Times, published teachers’ ratings online. The sixth-grade teachers’ scores, which depended on the progress students made from fifth to sixth grade, were particularly poor.

New Public School at Roberto Clemente

02/24/2012 | 2 Comments

A Child Grows in Brooklyn has details on the new public school that is opening in place of the former PS 19 Roberto Clemente school on South 3rd between Keap and Rodney. The new school will be the Brooklyn Arbor School (I think DOE was calling it PS 114) at the Roberto Clemente Campus (hopefully this means the Clemente is staying, not being phased out).

According to ACGiB, the Arbor school will be a magnet school, open to students citywide, but with a preference for students from District 14 (PS 84 is a magnet school too). Enrollment has been extended through 16 March.

How Long Have You Lived Here?

Greg Hanlon has a lengthy and thoughtful piece on the controversy over co-locating a Success charter school in JHS 50, and last week’s hearing on the same subject. As I said a few days ago, there are strong and passionate arguments on both sides of the debate, and they deserve to be well-reported. Hanlon (as usual) does that – delving into the issues and motivations on both sides of the issue.

Huge Turnout Over New Williamsburg Charter School

I started to write a quick link to this Times SchoolBook article last Friday, but got distracted. Since then, there have been 26 comments posted, almost all of them thoughtful and passionate on the subject of co-locating a Success Charter school at JHS 50 on South 3rd Street. And almost of all of them opposed to the idea. What’s interesting about the comments is that they run about 10 to 1 against the co-location, which, as I started to write on Friday, is about the ratio of locals against and for the co-location at last Thursday’s DOE hearing on the issue.

The problem is, you wouldn’t know that from reading the article – and you particularly wouldn’t know it from looking at the photo accompanying the article, which shows a group of Success supporters bedecked in orange T-shirts. Nowhere does the article mention that most of the supporters were brought in by bus from Harlem and the Upper East Side1. Nowhere does the article mention the ratio of supporters to opposition (3 or 4 to 1; an order of magnitude or two higher if you just count local residents). Nowhere does the article mention that the opposition included many parents from the Northside, Greenpoint and elsewhere in the broader community (who, if they took a bus to get there, paid the MTA for the ride).

As I started to write on Friday – and as the comments to the article since then make abundantly clear – there are good arguments on both sides of this issue. But you wouldn’t know that from reading this article.

1. In the comments, a Times editor says that the paper asked a Success spokesperson about the busing in of supporters – the spokesperson “could not say how many buses Success used”. Sorry, NYT, but that is just lame.↩

Williamsburg Charter High School on Probation

09/19/2011 | Comment

NY1 [via Brownstoner] is reporting that the Williamsburg Charter High School has been put on probation by the Department of Education “for a string of violations”, including “illicit spending” and “misallocating funds”, all of which has left the school with $4 million in debt. According to the Times’ SchoolBook site, which originally broke the story (and whose post includes the DOE probation letter in full), the school was already under investigation by State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

The financial problems seem to be a combination of overspending and under enrollment. WCHS – which has been in operation for seven years – is part of the Believe High Schools Network, which also operates the Southside Charter High School and the Northside Charter High School (both of which are located in on the Ericsson J.H.S. Campus in Greenpoint). According to Gotham Schools, all three schools spent about 30% more per student than they brought in through state funding, a gap that was not covered by private fundraising. In the case of WCHS, the school needed an enrollment of 1,000 students in order to cover its $2.3 million annual rent, but was only able to enroll 850 students. Another big issue in the DOE review is the relationship between the Believe network – which received $2.34 million in management fees from WCHS last year – and the school. Half of the school’s 6-member board is employed by Believe or other schools in its network.

To compensate for the missed rent and loan payments, the school has apparently cut back on the number of teachers.

WCHS is located on Varet Street in East Williamsburg. The school’s landlord received a number of variances in order to allow the conversion of a former factory building for a school use. After the school fell behind on rent, the landlord put the property on the market for $30 million. (That price tag seems a bit steep, given that the property is zoned for manufacturing and subject to a variance [Word document] that specifically allows Williamsburg Charter to occupy the building, but requires BSA approval for any change in school operator.)

For its part, the school says that the DOE charges contain “many inaccuracies and misstatements of fact” that the school has “challenged time and time again”. WCHS doesn’t have any specific response to the DOE allegations, but promises to post “links to a series of documents that outline the concerns that the City and State have addressed us on and our responses to them. In addition, [we will post] relevant timelines and information regarding the school’s attempt to set the record of facts straight over the course of time”.

PS 84 Revisited

04/11/2011 | Comment

I am way behind on a lot of things, but high on the list is linking to this excellent Capital NY piece on the past and future of P.S. 84. Written by Greg Hanlon (an article Matt Chaban called the “first good article [he’s] read about gentrification in a while“. It covers old ground – the academic problems at 84, chronic under enrollment and the ethnic divisions behind past efforts at improvement. But it looks at these old issues anew and smartly delves into what the future might hold.

In a recent tour of the school, we were very impressed with the improvements that had been made under the newest principal. The change in attitude from our last tour two or three years ago was immediately apparent. So hopefully the school is turning the corner. P.S. 84 has probably the best physical plant of any elementary school in the neighborhood – the community deserves to have a quality school there.