Many city parents reacted with puzzlement, rather than celebration or disappointment, when they saw the newly released school report cards. Instead of taking the grades at face value, discussions have centered on comparisons between expectations and final results. Parents and educators alike seem obsessed with arguing why the grades are wrong and how the Department of Education will misuse them. Hardly a show of confidence for an effort costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Over the years, New Yorkers have seen a lot of seemingly conflicting and confusing information from the department. There have been varying accounts of the high school graduation rate from the state and city and, after years of rising scores on state standardized tests, parents learned in mid-November that student achievement had not improved much at all according to another measure, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
This backlash to the report cards in particular results from the education department's mistaken premise: that the grades mean something to anyone but senior district officials. In fact, and fatally, these school grades symbolize nothing. They have no independent basis outside the factors and weights subjectively built into their design.
This is not true for other "report cards," which evaluate everything from student mastery to hospital mortality rates. There, we understand that the grades refer to some agreed-upon level of performance. As a society, we have a pretty good idea about the degree of acumen reflected by a third grader's "A" paper or what problems might persuade the health department to give a hospital a "D." Certainly we understand their comparative utility: that a "B" paper is worse than an "A" and that, all things being equal, we would rather have surgery at an "A" hospital.
But what are we to make of a school's rating when "environment," with its multiple variables like safety and communication, all rated according to statistically unreliable survey results, constitutes 15 percent of the grade? Or that "student progress" - measured by questionable state test results - is weighted almost twice as much as "student performance"? Where is the social agreement on the measures that add up to school quality? The reports cards' emphasis on improvement over actual achievement has angered and befuddled many. Certainly many parents and students would prefer a "D" school with smart kids and little school-parent communication, despite the taint of that scarlet letter. If a school earns an "A" through an emphasis on test prep, with little emphasis on arts or social studies, is that where I want my child to go to school?
If this is the rubric Chancellor Joel Klein wants to use in grading principals, it is his right. Evaluation must be based on some subjective measures of performance and Mayor Michael Bloomberg chose Klein to exercise this type of managerial judgment. But there is no consensus that the ratings on the report cards indicate what makes a good school, so spare us the judgmental rhetoric!
"These Progress Reports will give educators and parents the clear information they need to make smart decisions," said the chancellor in the press release accompanying release of the reports. "With these Progress Reports, parents no longer have to navigate a maze of statistics to determine how their child's school is doing and how it compares to others," said the mayor.
"Clear information"? No longer "a maze of statistics"? Did they try reading these things? The reports are a hodgepodge of scores, indexes, ranges, and calculations that only a statistician could love.
It is as if a cook prepared a stew. A little beef, maybe some pork, potatoes, tomatoes, whatever suits the taste. The chef thinks, "It's delicious." Fine. But there is no more reason to think this is an "A" stew than another dish, equally satisfying to some, with a different mix of ingredients. Indeed, the federal government with its designations of success ("Blue Ribbon") and failure ("School in Need of Improvement") and New York State's list of low-performing "Schools Under Registration Review" have created stews of their own for parental consumption.
Klein and Bloomberg have arrived at a highly individual definition of a "good school," without any social consensus on that definition. No matter parents are confused. None of them would have mixed the ingredients in just that way were they to evaluate the school. So none of them should rely on the mayor or chancellor to determine where they send their children or how they behave toward poorly (or, for that matter, highly) graded teachers and administrators.
Fair grading requires comparison based on agreed-upon standards. In failing to establish the latter, Chancellor Klein has failed to adequately fulfill his obligation to the former. Rather than providing clarity, the chancellor has further muddied discussion of his and the mayor's success or failure.
David Bloomfield is the author of "American Public Education Law" (Peter Lang, 2007) and a parent member of the Citywide Council on High Schools.
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To many New York City kids, it is part of life in the city. Hold a basketball in one hand, hang on with the other and clamber over a 10-foot tall wire fence. These kids do not want to do anything wrong – all they want is a little fun and exercise.
In a city with courts, playing fields, open space and greenery in short supply, the government has long ignored one key resource: its school playgrounds. Many school playgrounds are locked after school hours and so unavailable late afternoons and on weekends. Too many are used for parking, bleak asphalt wastelands without friendly play space or equipment. And too many school children never get to see trees and shrubs in their daily environment, or take advantage of their shade and the wildlife they attract.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s long-term sustainability plan calls for opening up school playgrounds for community use to help meet the goal of putting every New Yorker within a 10-minute walk of a park by the year 2030. But is the city using short-term stopgap measures instead of long-term strategies, creating play areas that may not last for even a decade? And will these areas really meet the needs of their communities?
In 2006, some 746 school playgrounds stayed padlocked weekends and during the summer, according to numbers compiled by City Councilmember Gale Brewer. All together, these areas totaled 948 acres of unused public land, an area larger than Central Park. (Another 257 were already open last year.) While no one argued New Yorkers would not benefit from the open space, the schoolyards seemed caught in a kind of limbo between the Department of Education and the Department of Parks ad Recreation.
That has apparently changed.
The mayor’s Schoolyards to Playgrounds plan unveiled earlier this year calls for eventually opening 290 schoolyards for use from 8 a.m. to sundown and on weekends. To finance this, the mayor put $3.5 million in the 2008-2009 budget and proposed another $107.3 million in capital spending over a period of eight years. While the playgrounds are maintained by the Department of Education, private and non-profit sponsors can contribute to improvements and support recreation programs.
A key partner for the city in all this is the Trust for Public Land. On October 10, the city inaugurated a renovated playground at PS 64 in the Bronx, one of 24 to be developed through a partnership with the non-profit trust. The organization, working with the education department, hopes to turn 25 schoolyards into new community playgrounds over the next five years. Money will come from the city, the trust, individuals, corporations and foundations.
The one clear step forward of Schoolyards to Playgrounds is that it will help meet the city’s enormous deficit in public open space. PlaNYC2030 identifies many pockets of city-owned property that are now only minimally accessible to the public. The city’s Department of Transportation, through its Office of Planning & Sustainability, is taking a hard look at the enormous asphalt jungle under its jurisdiction to see where there is potential for new public spaces. Large expanses of city roadway are underutilized, monopolized by small numbers of private vehicles and turned over to car owners for free parking.
The Bloomberg administration says that the opening of the schoolyards alone will allow more than 400,000 children and their families to be within a 10-minute walk of a park or playground by 2030.
But what will be in those parks? Sixty-nine of the playgrounds have opened without any major improvements. Another 185 were slated for physical improvements
Many of the new parks will have artificial turf instead of grass. According to the advocacy group New Yorkers for Parks, the city’s parks department is one of the biggest consumers of artificial turf in the nation. Two products, Field Turf and Astro Play, may be found throughout the city’s parkland.
By using manufactured turf on many these new parks, greater doses of capital funding are likely to be required to repair them long before the year 2030 comes around. And without clear evidence that the artificial materials being used will have no long-term negative health and environmental effects, the program could undermine PlaNYC2030’s promise of a healthier and greener New York
The city accepts industry claims that the manufactured products are safe for children and claims that they are cheaper than natural grass. A 2006 parks department report, “A New Turf War,” claimed that although it costs $675,000 more to install artificial turf, annual maintenance is $14,000 less than natural grass. Over the 23-year period of the 2030 plan, the city would thus save $332,000 on maintenance.
Most turf manufacturers, though, only warranty their product for eight years, and no one can say for sure how long it will last. With natural grass, regular maintenance means that it is continuously replaced and, in the end, this will probably cost less.
One big advantage of artificial turf is that it can be used year round and almost continuously. It is ready for use shortly after a rainfall, whereas natural areas need time to drain and dry out. It requires no use of polluting industrial fertilizers and pesticides.
But there are some big questions about the long-term environmental and health effects of manufactured turf. Artificial turf increases surface temperatures dramatically, not only contributing to global warming and the local “heat island” effect but possibly affecting the health of children using the fields. Reducing global warming is a major goal of PlaNYC2030. And the fake grass increases groundwater runoff into the city’s overburdened sewer system. The long-term effects on soil quality and underground water remain unknown.
Some studies show that the materials used in artificial turf, including recycled rubber, release volatile organic compounds, chemicals that are known carcinogens. In the absence of research examining the long-term health effects, many schools systems and governments have chosen not to use these products. Artificial turf may also increase the risk of certain types of injuries. There is an ailment called “turf toe,” a sprain where the big toe meets the rest of the foot, that, according to NYU medical center, is caused by “playing sports on artificial turf.”
The Trust for the Public Land’s model for school playgrounds involving community-based partners opens up many possibilities for change in city where neighborhoods often have little say in what goes on in their midst. At P.S.64, the trust worked with students from the school and residents and staff from the nearby New Settlement Apartments to plan the new playground. The space, which opened last month, features a track, sports field, basketball court, swings, play equipment, maps, trees and benches. The trust also got money to turn a blighted vacant lot adjacent to the playground into an outdoor classroom and garden.
The group has plans for 24 model playgrounds such as the one at P.S. 64. But, while it anticipates providing design workshops for people involved in developing the 161 other playgrounds, they will not necessarily have the same close collaboration that P.S. 64 enjoyed. The partner—in P.S. 64’s case, the New Settlement Apartments -- is responsible for organizing after-school programs. Without programming, the schoolyards could easily lapse into disuse and disrepair.
The development of the playgrounds could strengthen the role of schools in communities and encourage neighborhood involvement. This would be a welcome change for a Department of Education that does not usually embrace the idea of community schools.
Because schools are one of the few city facilities in every neighborhood, they could become models and training grounds for ecological citizenship. In other words, they could be a lot greener than artificial turf. This is happening in school systems throughout the nation and there is no reason why it can’t happen here.
New York City schools could become recycling and compost centers. Drinking fountains could be fixed so that the schools could junk all those machines selling sweetened water and juices. The schools could have green roofs and develop on-site recycling of brown water (from rest rooms). They could have a farmer’s market and community garden producing fresh produce.
While PlaNYC2030 commendably continues the city’s commitment to replace aging school boilers, there is a long way to go before each building is retrofitted to maximize energy efficiency and the use of natural sunlight. We can also imagine solar panels instead of the ancient 20th century technology that relies on fossil fuels. And if schools become true centers for community activity, they could also generate more employment for community residents – including people to maintain the grass and landscaped areas.
In New York City, lots of kids never have the sheer thrill of tumbling in dirt or mud during a soccer game. That is as important as preserving handball and stickball wherever there is asphalt or concrete. The Schoolyards to Playgrounds initiative is a step in the right direction, but it could become the first step in something far more ambitious and exciting.
Shira Siegel contributed research for this article, and is working on a longer working paper for Sustainability Watch about the school playground program.
Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.Â
NYU's Web site proudly proclaims its location in the center of Greenwich Village, "long famous for its contributions to the fine arts, literature, and drama and its personalized, smaller scale, European style of living." But starting this semester, some graduate students who enroll at NYU find themselves living not in the Village but across the river in Brooklyn. Once the residence for Jehovah's Witnesses, a narrow building at 67 Livingston Street now houses NYU graduate students.
Many predict that in the not too distant future more NYU students may live in dormitories "off borough." NYU is booming, and it wants more space.
NYU's situation reflects the reality facing many colleges and universities in the city. To the delight of economic development officials and the Bloomberg administration, higher education is thriving in New York City. But while the schools would like to grow, they cannot find the room to do it. That real estate crunch has led to a variety of expansion plans -- and to conflicts between the universities and the communities that surround them.
While New York City does not have an image as a college town, it does have 113 colleges and universities. More than 200,000 students attend independent, or private, colleges in New York City, according to a report by the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities. Another 226,000 are enrolled in degree programs at the City University of New York, with thousands more taking adult or continuing education classes at one of CUNY's campuses.
Students who leave their home states to attend college are more likely to come to New York than any other state. Of the 10 colleges ranked highest by the Princeton Review for being in a "great college town, four are in New York City and one -- Eugene Lang -- placed number one on the list.
All of this has a major impact on the city and state economy. The payrolls of private schools alone in New York City amounted to almost $8 million for the 2004-2005 academic year. Employment in higher education has been rising throughout the nation and the state, but according to Crain's New York, the city "is seeing the sharpest growth," led by the City University. CUNY, Crain's reports, has hired about 800 faculty members this year as part of its effort to replace adjunct professors with full-time staff and to improve its academic standards.
City officials would welcome that many jobs in any field that's legal, but economic development experts see university employment and spending as particularly desirable. For one, colleges and universities draw talented people to the city and lend the city an intellectual energy it might not have otherwise have. More concretely, the research done at universities can help industry and lead to the creation of jobs in such cutting edge areas as biotechnology and high technology.
Despite the large number of college and universities in the five boroughs, New York has been seen as lagging in such industrial spinoffs behind the Route 128 corridor around Boston and California's Silicon Valley. Though New York City's major universities capture and receive an enormous amount of federal research and development funding, the city has gotten "a relatively small return, in business development terms, from that federal investment," economic development consultant David Hochman wrote for the Center for an Urban Future.
Many experts see the increased prominence of universities as part of an overall shift in the city's economy from an emphasis on FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) to one centered on ICE (Intellectual, Culture and Educational area).
State employment trends give this some credence. Employment in manufacturing in New York State dropped by 40 percent between 1995 and 2005, according to the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities. It fell by 9 percent in the FIRE sector. But employment in the so-called ICE area rose by 17 percent.
This idea of an ICE economy has been championed by NYU President John Sexton. A decline in the finance, insurance and real estate jobs that have long driven the New York economy seems inevitable, he has written. "Cyberspace increasingly will deny oxygen to New York's FIRE sector; today's chief executives can conduct business from Aspen or make deals from the Caribbean." But the ICE sector needs the talent and intellectual ferment best found in an urban setting, particularly in New York.
While universities reap the benefits of New York, they cannot escape its problems. And so, colleges grapple with the high cost of living, particularly for real estate, and a shortage of space at any price. That dilemma has led to ambitious plans and persistent conflict, particularly at the city's two most prominent private universities.
In the mid 1970s, with New York City declining and private education ailing, New York University seemed in danger of extinction. To raise money and trim costs, it disbanded its engineering school and sold its Bronx campus -- an imposing tract of land featuring the Hall of Fame of Great Americans -- to the City University of New York. Today it serves as the campus of Bronx Community College.
In the ensuing decades, though, NYU would see a great change in its fortunes. In 2004, it announced plans to add 125 faculty to its 625 member arts and science faculty. "The ambition here is to live out what it means to be a first-class university," Sexton said at the time.
As part of that, the university has decided it needs an engineering school after all. "The absence of a school of engineering and applied science has been felt keenly in a world increasingly reliant on technology," Sexton and David McLaughlin said in a memo to the NYU community in August.
"They realized that, as far as being a major research presence, they need an engineering school," said Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future.
With that its mind, it has announced plans to merge with Brooklyn Polytechnic University, which describes itself as America's second oldest private engineering school. Approval of the plan seems virtually assured.
Polytechnic's 3,000 graduate and undergraduate students attend classes in buildings on the Metro Tech development in downtown Brooklyn. For Polytechnic, the move will enable it to offer more opportunities to its students, an effort that has been hampered by its relatively small size. The school also has reportedly long struggled with financial problems.
Many observers see the merger as addressing a key shortcoming in New York's university offerings: the absence of a large, top engineering school. While City College and Columbia, along with Poly, offer engineering programs, none of them receives substantial federal research funds, according to Hochman. Columbia conducts about $30 million a year in engineering research and development, while Georgia Tech, the nation's leader, does some $286 million.
Over the years, some experts have cited the absence of a major engineering school as one reason New York does not fare better in creating jobs from developments at universities. "The mixture of engineering and science can provide an important spark for the invention, commercial applications and the economic growth opportunities that result," said Hochman.
In their memo Sexton and McLaughlin cited Polytechnic's location as one of its assets. "Wouldn't this location in Brooklyn - so vibrant and so near our own location in Manhattan - be a wonderful neighborhood of which to be a part in the future?" they asked rhetorically.
Given NYU's history, that could give some residents of downtown Brooklyn pause. As the university has sought to create faciltities for tens of thousands of students, it has transformed its neighborhood, alienating many of its neighbors. "NYU has deep pockets, a wandering eye and a shocking lack of aesthetic ingenuity when it comes to building new structures," Lenora Todaro wrote in the Village Voice in 1999.
NYU has said it needs as much as 6 million square feet of additional space over the next 25 years, and some question whether all, or even some of it can be around the Washingtn Square campus. "We've more than reached the tipping point, and they really need to start planning toward future growth being absorbed by places outside the nighborhood," said Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Historic Preservation Society, which has often opposed NYU's actions in the neighborhood.
Now, though NYU, with a toehold at Polytechnic, could expand in Brooklyn.
The borough "is a wonderful location to build other programs," Sexton told the Brooklyn Paper.
Reaction in Brooklyn seems mixed. An influx of students would have a positive effect on downtown Brooklyn, according to Ian O'Connell of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, an economc development group. The NYU-Polytechnic merger, he said, is "very positive for downtown Brooklyn. There's nothing negative."
As for NYU's new dormitory in Brooklyn Heights, that too seems to have attracted little concern. "We tend to focus on planning and zoning issues in terms of height density," said Judy Stanton of the Brooklyn Heights Association. "More NYU students would be welcome in the community, but not at the expense of tall buildings."
And some express delight at NYU's venture across the river. "I'm hoping the neighborhood will turn into something like 3rd [Avenue] below 14th [Street], so I can stop going out there for my reckless partying entertainment," a reader commented on the Brownstoner blog. "If these college students bring more bars and, dare I say it, some genuine clubs out by here, I for one would be a very happy camper."
In the annals of town-gown disputes, Columbia University's battles have been the stuff of legend, spawning one of the major campus revolts of 1968.
In 1968, essentially all Columbia sought to build in the surrounding community was a gymnasium. Now it wants to construct a whole new campus covering 17 acres and extending as far north as 134th Street. The 6.8 million square feet of new space would include a science center, facilities for the school of the arts and an academic conference center among other things.
The main impetus for the proposal, according to Columbia, is that the university is running out of room. As evidence, it notes it has far less space than any of its fellow Ivy League institutions, with half the space per student as the next most cramped Ivy, Harvard.
The university’s vision to deal with this has won plenty of praise. “The plan is gorgeous and enumerates many of today's fashionable planning principles,” Julio Vitullo-Martin of the Manhattan Institute wrote in 2004. “The buildings will have transparent ground floor sections, to create a light and airy, seamless transition from building interiors to outdoor spaces. The now narrow sidewalks will be widened. Streets will be lined with trees to encourage pedestrians.”
On the other hand, the neighborhood now, with its low-rise apartment buildings, small businesses such as auto repair shops and storefront churches, has been derided as all but a wasteland. Not surprisingly, those who live and work in the area disagree. The plan will directly eliminate 132 apartments – not a huge amount for New York City but still significant in a real estate market where any affordable home has become precious. Many also fear that the Columbia expansion will accelerate the gentrification of West Harlem.
Despite their huge differences, though, in the past several months, the two sides have moved closer together. Over the summer Columbia promised it would not use eminent domain to force out residents in the area of the new campus, although it did not rule eminent domain out for commercial tenants. In September, the university announced it had obtained a site where it could construct a building with apartments for some of those facing displacement.
Also in September, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Columbia reached agreement on a wide-ranging plan. Stringer came out in favor of Columbia’s move north. For its part, the school said it would create a $20 million affordable housing plan, try to create and improve open space in the area, use environmentally sustainable construction practices and provide information of job opportunities to community residents. At the same time, Stringer and the city planning department said an area adjacent to the new Manhattanville campus would be rezoned “to put in place protections of mitigate secondary displacement impacts the Columbia expansion could potentially cause.”
Opposition persists, however. The local community board, whose role is purely advisory, had already come out against the expansion. It drafted its own community plan, in conjunction with the Pratt Center for Community Development. That plan puts greater emphasis on preserving and creating affordable housing than Columbia’s.
Officially the Manhattanville campus is not a done deal – the expansion still needs an official OK from the city planning department and City Council. But with the backing of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and many council members, that seems almost certain.
To meet its need for additional space, Fordham University has decided not to spread out but to build up. While the plan has not yet begun the official land use approval process, it has already attracted some opposition.
Fordham’s main campus is in the Bronx, but the school opened a law school near Lincoln Center in 1961. Over the years, it has added more offerings – and students – to the Manhattan campus. Today, more than 8,000 students attend a Lincoln Center campus that the university says was intended for 3,500. “We don’t have enough dormitory space, we don’t have enough classroom space, and we woefully lack office space,” Fordham president Joseph McShane has said.
Fordham’s plan essentially calls for putting more buildings and taller buildings on its current campus – a so-called super block bounded by Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues and West 60th and West 62nd Streets. This will include a new 16-story law school and a campus center with five floors, along with hundreds of additional parking spaces.
To finance all this Fordham, which says “has relatively modest endowment resources compared to other major research universities,” envisions tall, luxury apartment buildings on the super block. Residents charge that all the high-rise development will be out of touch with the area's character and will cut Fordham off from the rest of the community. “We’ll be living in a fortress if Fordham gets what they want,” Doreen Moresco, who lives at the Alfred, an existing luxury building in the area, reportedly said at a recent public hearing. Representative Jerold Nadler and several members of the state legislature have opposed the plan in its current version.
Community Board 7 has not yet taken a final position on the plan – it expects to hold hearing on it as the proposal goes through the approval process. The board has, however, submitted a response to Fordham’s scope of Fordham’s draft environmental impact statement. In that, the board expressed an array of concern, such as buildings that are “too tall and bulky,” too many parking spaces and “large fortress-like walls along the streets.”
To help win over its community, Fordham recently launched a “Neighbors” site on its Web site. On it, the university points to its “broader effort to engage the community in conversation about the redevelopment of our Lincoln Center Campus.” With the long approval process for the plan just starting, it remains to be seen whether the conversation will be a dialogue or a shouting match.
The space problem at New York's colleges is not limited to a few private universities. More than 100 of the city's institutions of higher learning project they will need a total of 20 million square feet of additional space over the next few years, the New York Sun reported recently. With real estate in the five boroughs expensive and hard to come by, city officials fear the colleges will move some of their operations beyond the city limits.
With that in mind, the city would like to create facilities for groups of colleges in relatively low-rent areas, such as Long Island City, the South Bronx or even Governor's Island.
Colleges, that sell their brand to students and parents (for as much as $45,000 a year) might resist the idea. But Teresa Vasquez of the Economic Development Commission told the Sun, university administrators should give it careful consideration. "Twenty million square feet is not something easy to come by," she said.
Sarah Johnson contributed reporting to this article.Â