After reading in the Sunday NY Times about the bad grade that IS 289 was going to be getting in the controversial new report cards issued by New York City’s Department of Education, my dad got on the phone from out in suburbia and inquired whether that was the middle school my oldest son attends.
It isn’t, but I thought the question was interesting. When people out in the ‘burbs are starting to keep tabs on individual school performance, it’s gotta mean we’re in for an unprecedented round of self-relection/self-flagellation as a city about what is really going on in our 1,400 schools. Success will no doubt be applauded, but what about failure? Are we going to have the guts to get real about what we do with schools that we know haven’t been getting the job done for years? Will Mayor Bloomberg have the guts, or will he cave to the kind of unproductive political pressure which lets failure simmer for as long as possible?
For what it’s worth, my son’s elementary school got a ‘C,’ which is tremendous considering just a few years ago it couldn’t have possibly deserved a passing grade. It took an outright revolt on the part of parents and teachers to get a very nice but very ineffective principal out of the school. There’s a long way to go, but there is hope that we all will be leaving that school in better shape for the next generation of kids than we found it. But it could still use some tough love.
My older son’s middle school got an A, but it is hard to do cartwheels over that since it requires top test scores in order for a child to enroll. If it didn’t get an A, something would be seriously wrong with its ability to effectively cream!
Interesting note: My oldest son in the A school has struggled academically since the day he stepped foot in the place. He breezed his way through the other C elementary school (which, as I said, should have been a D or F back when he was there) but was significantly underprepared for the challenges of middle school. Meanwhile, my youngest son is breezing his way through the C school.
I almost think we should send the kids to private schools at night, just so that we can survive the city’s public schools by day.
UPDATE: The early NY Times story notes that 50 schools got F’s.
UPDATE II: Regarding my night school idea for my kids, a former NYC teacher commenting on Eduwonk suggests online learning as a way to deal with the substandard education kids are getting. I suppose that’s one idea.
UPDATE III: NY Sun also has an early version of this story here.