“Everything must be filled out,” yelled my homeroom teacher at Staten Island’s Curtis High School as she passed papers with envelopes down the aisles.
“What’s this?” mumbled some students. Others laughed at the piece of paper, on which we are asked to agree or disagree with statements like, “I feel welcome in my school,” and “I am safe in my classes.”
Some people struggled to answer the questions sincerely. Others would have played garbage basketball with the papers if our teacher hadn’t stopped them.
Though my teacher did not tell my class, the mysterious surveys were part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education reform plan. To collect information from the people most intimate with the ins and outs of New York City schools, the Department of Education gave surveys to 1.8 million teachers, parents and students last May.
“Parents, teachers and students know better than anyone what their school does well and how (it) can improve,” explained DOE spokesman Andrew Jacob in an email.
While that may be the case, some critics think the Department of Education is not asking the right questions. In May, WNYC reported that many parents faulted the survey for ignoring critical issues, such as class size and standardized testing. One parent group, Class Size Matters, in conjunction with the National Center for Schools and Communities at Fordham University, issued its own survey, with questions aimed at determining whether school are overcrowded and have enough resources. The independent survey also asked parents for their opinion of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.
To find out what students thought of the education department’s effort, the staff of New Youth Connections interviewed close to 25 students from high schools around the city who had taken the survey and found that students felt similarly about it as parents.
While many students appreciated having their opinions included in the city’s education reform plans, only two students interviewed thought the survey would actually be effective. The others said the survey process was flawed, and that, as a result, its findings could not be taken seriously.
When asked to fill out the survey, "most students were hysterical" with laughter, said Keeri Joseph, 16, from Freedom Academy High School. Tristan Reginato, 15, of Beacon High School in Manhattan called the survey “pointless,” and Nydia Palaz, who just graduated from Forest Hills High School, said that students in her school felt the surveys were “not effective."
Many students found the questions, which asked how much they agreed or disagreed with various statements about their school, to be vague and silly. When teachers passed out the forms, many did not explain what the survey would be used for, which only heightened student confusion.
When I took the education department survey, I shared many of the feelings of other students interviewed for this article. As my pen started to fill in the circles of “agree” and “disagree,” I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone was actually going to take the time to make sense of my answers.
Last year, the Citizens Committee for Children’s Youth Action, which is made up of New York City public and private school students, gave out its own student survey. The young advocates there were pleased with the insights it provided. They discovered, for example, that most of the schools they surveyed had out-of-date library resources.
Unlike the city’s survey, which was administered by teachers, students handed out the Youth Action survey at their schools and explained clearly what it would be used for. And while the Department of Education had students answer questions on an agree/disagree scale that many students found odd, the Youth Action survey allowed room for personal anecdotes. Students are more likely to be candid when they’re speaking with peers and given room to explain themselves, the Grace Chao of Youth Action said. (Results from the Youth Action survey Youth Weigh In are available online.)
Despite the cynicism on the part of many students, the Department of Education says its surveys are indeed going to be used. The results from students, parents and teachers will account for 10 percent of a school's “grade,” that will also incorporate test scores, attendance, safety and observations by experts who visited the school. The department hopes to have the survey results on the department’s web site by the end of the summer. It also plans to distribute the survey again next spring.
When the city does that, Chao thinks it should adapt some of the methods her group used when conducting their survey. For example, she advises that the department add “youth directed questions” to “get a more comprehensive view from the students’ perspective.” And she suggests the city hold “more youth forums so they can see what is needed most.”
This article by Jill Feigelman, 17, a writer for New Youth Connections, written by and for New York City teens, is adapted from the pages of our partner, Youth Communication.
Â
Like many of her high school classmates, Sharzina Halim, a senior at Curtis High School in Staten Island, will be taking her Regents exams in early June, and she is nervous about them. Her graduation is primarily dependent on her ability to pass the exams in Math, Living Environment, and History, but her native language is Bengali, and she is worried that, despite the extra tutoring she has been getting, she will not be able to understand certain words.
To graduate in New York State, high school students must pass five Regents exams -- in English, math, global history, U.S. history and government, and a science. Of the more than 310,380 high school students in New York City, an estimated 36,867 of them, or 12 percent, are students who are in the process of learning English. The Regents exams present a major hurdle towards graduation for English-language-learner, or ELL, high school youth, a group that already has the highest dropout rate of all students, with more than half of the English language learners in the class of 2001 failing to graduate in seven years. .
Parents and advocates are concerned that students are not being tested in their subject knowledge, and that too often, a student’s low level of English robs them of the chance to score well on their math, science, or social studies exams. Many of these students have a great deal of knowledge in the subject area in which they are being tested (like earth science or math), but because the tests are administered in English, they may score poorly because they do not know English well.
Data from the State Education Department indicate that fewer English-language learners take the Regents exams, those who take the exams are more likely to fail, and those who do pass are more likely to pass the exams with lower scores. Given the dropout crisis facing these students, the challenge for the Department of Education is to ensure that they have a fair shot at passing their Regents and being able to graduate from high school.
To address this challenge and to give these English-language learners a better chance at passing the state’s exams in math, science, and social studies, New York State permits test site accommodations to ensure that they are tested on their knowledge of the particular subject, not their English proficiency. There is no uniform system or standard across the state, but in most cases, they may be entitled to more time, separate accommodations, and the use of bilingual dictionaries or glossaries while taking the test. Only dictionaries and glossaries that give direct translations are allowed; those that give definitions of words are not permitted, as they may give the child an unfair advantage.
In some cases, students may be entitled to take the test in their native language or have an interpreter read them the questions in their native language. Those students whose native language is Chinese, Russian, Haitian-Creole, Spanish, or Korean, can have access to tests translated into these languages. Translated Regents tests include Math A, Global Studies, U.S. History, Earth Science, and Living Environment. Oral interpretation can be made available for students who speak a language not covered by the translated tests. In either case, these students may have the option of writing responses in their native language.
While test site accommodations can go a long way toward helping students like Sharzina, parents and advocates are concerned about the lack of information regarding the types of accommodations available throughout the state and inconsistencies in administering these accommodations. There also are serious concerns about the quality of the translated Regents tests available.
While the subject-content Regents exams are not intended to gauge English proficiency, the English Language Arts exam is intended to ensure that a student has achieved a certain level in reading and writing English. The English Regents constitutes perhaps the greatest hurdle to graduating high school for ELL students. In 2001, English-language learners in New York City scored 20 percentage points below mainstream students in the English Regents Exam. In 2003, only 33 percent of those English-language learners who took the exam passed the English Regents.
Immigrant students, parents, and community leaders have been advocating for the Board of Regents, the Governor, and the State Legislature to address the dropout crisis by establishing an alternative English proficiency test for late-arriving students to be able to graduate. One proposed alternative is to use a native language arts exam in combination with the State English as a Second Language Achievement Test (NYSESLAT) – an exam that English-language learners already must take each year to gauge their English proficiency and progress in ESL or bilingual classes.
Opponents of this idea say that creating different standards for English-language learners does them a disservice by not preparing them as well as those students who are native English-speakers. Advocates of the alternative test counter that an alternative exam would set an appropriately high standard that reflects the background and experiences of recently-arrived students. They argue that requiring recently-arrived students to take an English Regents exam designed for native speakers who have grown up speaking, reading, and writing English unfairly sets up these students to fail and drop out.
State legislation (A.4313), introduced by Assemblyman Peter Rivera and approved by the State Assembly Education Committee, is currently pending that would permit recently-arrived English-language learners to pass a native language arts exam and English proficiency test as an alternative to passing the English Regents exam.
Advocates are urging the city to help students prepare for the Regents by increasing funding to provide much-needed additional quality instruction for them and by creating an English-language learner dropout prevention initiative that would substantially increase funds for those at risk in high school to receive more English and subject-content instruction and test preparation.
Deycy Avitia works on education reform for The New York Immigration CoalitionÂ
Calculus class at Stuyvesant
Luis Rosario just completed fifth grade but he already thinks about attending an Ivy League college. And he would seem to be on his way. He won first prize in his district’s fifth grade science fair, scored high on the state math test, gets straight A’s and is fascinated by robotic sciences.
His mother, Judith Pena, wanted to get him into a program to prepare him for one of the city’s specialized high schools. Then she learned about the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering. ”This is even better,” she said. And so, next month Luis Rosario will join the first sixth grade class of Columbia Secondary, a new select school in upper Manhattan.
Columbia Secondary is aimed at top students like Luis, students who one would expect to attend an elite public high school. But over the years the so-called specialized schools have not attracted a large number of gifted black and Hispanic students. In fact, over the past decade, the percentage of students from the city’s large black and Hispanic population who attend these select schools has decreased significantly.
Under the banner “strength in diversity,” Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering will try to change that. The school, a partnership of the Department of Education and Columbia University, is aggressively recruiting black and Hispanic students and plans to try out new methods to achieve a more equitable racial balance.
Every fall, eighth graders across all five boroughs compete to gain admission to New York City’s elite select schools, officially known as specialized schools. Admission is based solely on a student’s score on the specialized schools exam. In recent years, the longstanding triumvirate– Bronx Science, Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech – has acquired five newcomers, bringing the total number of select high schools to eight. (The Department of Education considers LaGuardia, an art school, as a specialized school but students are admitted on the basis of auditions, portfolios and their records – and do not take the specialized high school test.) Nevertheless, of the 28,000 students who applied to the freshman classes of these schools in 2006, only some 5,500 got in, and an increasing number of them are white or Asian.
Meanwhile, the percentage of black students at these schools -- never high -- fell between 1994 and 2005. At Bronx Science only five percent of the students are black, at Brooklyn Technical High 15 percent, and at Stuyvesant, the most selective of the schools, only 2 percent of all students are black, according to the city Department of Education.
The student body at the newer select schools is more diverse. The High School for American Studies at Lehman College, which opened in 2002, is 31 percent white, 23 percent black, 26 percent Hispanic and 20 percent Asian and other. But it still fails to mirror the citywide ethnic breakdown of students: 14 percent white, 35 percent black, 37 percent Hispanic and 14 percent Asian and other.
City officials have repeatedly said they have no explanation for the drop in black enrollment. Some experts blame the reliance on a single test for selecting students and the ability of more affluent parents to hire tutors to prepare their children for that test. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has resisted any effort to alter the admissions criteria. He has, however, expanded the Specialized High School Institute to help students prepare for it.
Clara Hemphill, former director of Inside Schools and author of New York City’s Best Public High Schools, attributed the decline in black enrollment to the increase in the number of Asian students. Today Asians constitute 56 percent of Stuyvesant’s student body. Given the limited number of seats at the select schools, if enrollment from one group increases substantially, the number of students admitted from other groups must decline.
“There is a culture of test-prep among many Asian families which doesn’t exist (or which exists to a much lesser extent) in black and Hispanic families,” Hemphill wrote in an email. “Some Asian kids start prepping on Saturdays for the test as early as third or fourth grade.” Hemphill added that many of the brightest black and Hispanic students get offers from private schools, leaving fewer top minority students available to attend the elite public schools.
A report released in January by the Coalition for Educational Justice on New York City’s Middle-Grade Schools suggests another factor: “pervasive low achievement in the city’s middle-grade schools, particularly those serving predominantly African-American and Latino students, based on the patterns of low academic expectations and inequitable instructional quality.”
“I honestly feel like kids in low income community schools are not provided with the kinds of resources that prepare them to take the necessary tests to make it into some of the specialized high schools,” wrote Ocynthia Williams of the coalition in an e-mail. “Plenty of resources are provided in elementary and high schools, but by the time they enter junior high (a critical period in their lives in many ways), the system seems to just forget about what is needed for those kids.”
Dona Matthews, director of the Hunter College Center for Gifted Studies and Education who has written widely about gifted education and adolescents, said that gifted programs tend to be predominantly white or Asian, raising questions of cultural identity for the black and Hispanic students in them. “Making it work and making it comfortable and welcoming so they don’t feel they have to choose between being black on the one hand and gifted on the other is important,” Matthews said.
Whatever the explanation for the paucity of black and Hispanics in elite schools, the education department hopes the addition of three select schools, including Columbia Secondary, by 2009 will help reach more minority students. “We are definitely positioning these schools in neighborhoods where we hope we can attract the attention of historically underserved populations like blacks and Hispanics,” said Melody Meyer, press secretary for the Department of Education. “It was important for us to have a specialized school in Harlem.” she said, explaining that strong students from northern Manhattan have had to travel to the Bronx, lower Manhattan or Brooklyn to attend a select school.
Location isn’t the only factor that differentiates Columbia Secondary from the other elite high schools. For starters, Columbia Secondary is the only one to begin in grade six, rather than nine. The first sixth-grade class starting in fall 2007 will have 86 students. The school will admit an additional grade each year. In seven years, the school will reach its full capacity of seven grades and 650 to 700 students. In keeping with the general move toward small schools, Columbia Secondary will be significantly smaller than the three original select schools, which have between 2,500 to 4,000 students in grades nine through twelve.
Science class At Brooklyn Tech
For grades six through eight, Columbia will admit only students who live north of 96th Street, which includes Harlem, Washington Heights and East Harlem, home to large populations of blacks, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics. For ninth grade and above, Columbia Secondary, like the other select schools, will be open to students throughout the city.
The restricted admissions policy guarantees an applicant pool with large numbers of blacks and Hispanics, said the school’s principal, Dr. Jose Maldonado-Rivera, a native of Puerto Rico and long-time educator. to further guarantee diversity, the school admissions committee selected the students from each of four districts in northern Manhattan.
To spread word about the school, Maldonado-Rivera undertook an extensive recruitment effort last academic year, visiting elementary schools and holding information sessions for parents, students and guidance counselors. More than 800 students from across northern Manhattan applied to the 2007 sixth-grade class. Of these, school officials, based on standardized English language arts and math test scores and fifth grade report cards, selected 227 students to take an essay exam. Only 105 made the final cut when admittance letters went out in the second week of March.
The entering class is 55 percent Hispanic, 15 percent black and 30 percent white and Asian. “I know of no other math/science specialty school that can claim this diversity,” Maldonado-Rivera wrote in an e-mail.
Maldonado-Rivera’s hope is that the diversity of the sixth grade class will spill over into the high school. Columbia Secondary will really be two schools in one – a middle school serving grades six through eight and a high school for grades nine through twelve. The high school will be open to students throughout the city based on their score on the specialized high school test. But students who attend grades six through eight at Columbia Secondary could get some kind of preference in admissions. Maldonado-Rivera said that exactly what that “preferential treatment” might entail was still being worked out and emphasized that their admission to the Columbia Secondary high school would not be a free ride.
In including grades six through twelve, Columbia Secondary is part of the trend toward combining middle school grades with either elementary schools or high schools. Some educators believe the best way to solve the problem of failing middle schools is to largely eliminate them.
Maldonado-Rivera sees the length of time students could spend at the school as an advantage. “We’re here for seven years as opposed to only three or four,” he said
Students at Bronx Sceience
The school will provide a rigorous core curriculum with courses in science, math, engineering, social studies, English and philosophy. Students will be able to take creative arts minicourses and physical fitness electives as well, along with after-school electives like journalism, robotics and webpage and multimedia design. The school will also host field expeditions and a travel abroad program.
Columbia Secondary will embrace the cultural backgrounds of its students. In addition to requiring five years of Spanish instruction, the school will offer courses that focus on black and Hispanic scientists and literary figures. Maldonado-Rivera said he has lined up black and Hispanic scientists and engineers to give lectures and participate in career fairs.
As part of the school’s outreach efforts, Maldonado-Rivera wants to initiate a tutoring-buddy system with four elementary schools in the area. This would give Columbia Secondary students, who will be mentored by Columbia engineering undergraduates, the opportunity in turn to mentor local third-grade kids.
“The idea is that the elementary kids of these four schools will start to visualize themselves as future Columbia Secondary students,” said Maldonado-Rivera.
Maldonado-Rivera said the school plans Saturday projects in the community, such as . a cleanup of Morningside Park. In keeping with the school’s emphasis on developing it students’ social and political consciousness, each sixth-grader will participate in a group that will design and carry out a community service projects like measuring water quality or monitoring garbage disposal in the city’s parks.
Like most of the new schools the Department of Education has launched in the last few years, Columbia Secondary has experienced startup problems. Relations with the Harlem community got off to a rocky start last fall when the city Department of Education announced plans to temporarily house Columbia Secondary in PS 36, the only K-2 school in the city. The department said this would only be temporary and Columbia would eventually have its own new building.
This did not mollify many in the PS 36 community. Parents and local residents held rallies to protest the decision, which they said the Department of Education made without consulting them. They also expressed concern over 13-year-olds attending school with kindergarteners and first-graders. Eventually their protests convinced the department to withdraw its proposal early this year.
Columbia University is planning to construct a building for the school as part of its expansion into Manhattanville, but this would not take place for at least five years, according to Columbia’s vice-provost, Roxie Smith. She said Columbia University’s support for the school would continue regardless of whether or not its controversial expansion plan goes forward.
For now the Department of Education has decided to temporarily house the new school on two floors of PS-125 on 123rd Street.
The confusion about location did not faze Barbara Pressman, who thought the school might be a good fit for her son, Matthew. She particularly liked the school’s emphasis on reaching out, being communicative and relating science to the world, which she described as “crossing the science/society barrier.”
Adam Stern, whose son Jackson will enter the sixth grade at Columbia Secondary this fall, said the school almost sounded too good to be true. “The fact that he can be in this school up to college and take classes at Columbia is fantastic,” Stern said. “What more could you ask for?”
Â