Two city public schools on the state’s most-violent list this year have scored A’s on their first-ever report cards – while the high-performing PS 35 in Staten Island, where 98.3 percent of students achieved proficiency in math last year, got a big fat F.
These are two of the many quirks in the city’s ambitious effort to assign letter grades to more than 1,200 schools. The city yesterday dished out D’s or F’s to 149 schools and A’s to 279.
The majority of schools, 773, scored B’s and C’s.
The grades revealed a wide gap separating schools serving similar populations and among geographic districts, and provided a number of surprises – including the B given to Queens HS for Sciences at York College, one of the city’s nine specialized high schools.
Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said the release of grades and detailed school data was a bid to light a fire under poor-performing schools, to point to best practices at the good schools, and to tell parents what level of education their children are getting.
“No parent wants to hear that his or her [child] is attending an F school, and we know that. And some parents might be upset to learn that their child’s school hasn’t been given an A,” Bloomberg said at PS 19 in Manhattan, which received a B. “Whatever it is, parents have a right to know, and we have a responsibility to tell them.”
Among the best districts, Brooklyn’s 25 and 26 – where not a single school scored below a C – ranked 1 and 2. On the opposite end were Staten Island’s District 31 and Brooklyn’s District 23, which had three or less schools each scoring A’s.
Asked about the consequences for the 50 F-rated schools, Klein said a “nontrivial” number of them could see principal changes or steps toward closure by the end of the school year.
“Is this a wakeup call for the people that work there? You betcha,” Bloomberg said. “And that’s what we’re trying to do.”
The leaders of the principals and teachers unions both expressed reservations about the grading system, citing concerns about the accuracy of the data and of the complex formula that relies heavily on test scores.
Grades were largely determined by student progress and student achievement, with such factors as attendance and safety contributing a small percentage.
Peer comparisons of 40 schools grouped by similarity and the performance of the bottom third of students at each school also weighed heavily in the grading.
Grades were accompanied by ratings on a 100-point scale with extra credit, so that final scores ranged from -.45 to 104.4.
Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernest Logan said he would not endorse the scoring initiative until he could be sure the grades were based on data that was “accurate, equitable, transparent and understandable.”
He said a number of principals had questioned the criteria used to assign their peer groups.
Among her concerns, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said she worried that the scores and data would be used to punish poor-performing schools rather than be used as levers to lift them up.
“If parents and educators and the public don’t have confidence in this measure, it’s not going to be an effective accountability tool or an effective tool to improve student achievement,” she said.
Other critics, who echoed the notion that the rating system relied too heavily on test scores, highlighted grading inconsistencies to demonstrate that the results were skewed at best and at worst, meaningless.
Their findings included:
* Two schools on the state’s list of persistently dangerous schools – MS 296 and MS 298 in The Bronx – scored A’s.
* PS 33 in The Bronx, which was highlighted in 2005 for doubling the number of students reading at grade level, scored a D.
* Klein was quoted in a magazine article in 2005 celebrating a similar turnaround at PS 33 in Manhattan, which this year scored an F.
At schools throughout the city, the grades were received with a mixture of elation, disappointment or indifference.
“The score meant so much because these are the students that are normally the silent majority, the forgotten students,” Principal George Leonard said of Brooklyn’s Bedford Academy HS, which got an A. “We’re one big family here for real.”
Susan Dietrich, president of the Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher Associations, said she attributed the borough’s surprisingly poor performance to the difficulty of bumping up already high-performing students.
“I think a lot of schools that have thought of themselves as well-performing, like PS 30, are going to be very upset with a C,” she said. “But they have so many kids in third grade with a perfect score, so where do you go from there?”
And Tina Pack, whose 12-year-old daughter, Patricia, attends the bottom-ranked American Sign Language middle school in Manhattan, said she wasn’t phased by the marks.
“I don’t think these letter grades will tell me anything,” she said. “Patricia is very happy to be there.”