Progress reports show stability as mayor-elect plans changes

Officials released what could be the city’s final round of school grades today, emphasizing stability even as major changes are likely imminent.

The Department of Education and City Hall will soon be full of new officials, and last year was chaotic for different reasons—Superstorm Sandy and the first round of the state’s new, tougher Common Core-aligned exams. That meant today’s release was marked by little fanfare and lowered stakes.

The A to F grades and accompanying school progress reports are based mostly on calculations of student test scores, and they have become a signature of Mayor Bloomberg’s focus on school accountability since the city began giving them out in 2007. But they may not stick around at all, as mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has promised to eliminate those grades and pause the school-closure process.

So the 45 schools that received Fs and 102 that received Ds this year will not be considered for closure this year, as has become the norm.

The overall grade distribution across schools—fixed for elementary and middle schools, but not for high schools—remained fairly steady, despite across-the-board score decreases following the introduction of new state tests. Overall, 27 percent of the 1,624 schools receiving grades earned As, 36 percent earned Bs, 28 percent Cs, 6 percent Ds, and 3 percent Fs.

Some of this year’s scores also felt the impact of Superstorm Sandy, which devastated a number of city schools. Eleven hard-hit schools that would have received low grades had those grades withheld, though they did receive overall progress reports.

The results were good for new unscreened high schools, which continued to outperform high schools opened before 2002. Sixty-seven percent of the new schools earned an A or B, compared to 46 percent of the older schools. For charter schools, the results were also positive, with 69 percent earning an A or B.

De Blasio has called those letter grades too simplistic, though he hasn’t yet said what he would replace them with or whether schools would still be assessed by the complex algorithms that go into the grades.

Bloomberg rebuffed de Blasio’s assessment of the school grades at another event on Wednesday, saying that they made it easier for parents to understand school quality. “Getting it down to something that they can use is not making it too simplistic; quite the contrary, it is making it useful,” Bloomberg said.

But Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky, who presented the results on Wednesday, said he sees middle ground. “I hope that, there’s a sense that when we look at these questions, it’s not a dichotomy,” he said. “You don’t have to either do progress reports or no progress reports, you don’t have to either do no accountability or yes accountability. You can find ways to address whatever concerns are out there and build them into the system in a smart and thoughtful way.”

This year, adjustments included a new metric for college and career-readiness, after the department heard complaints from teachers and principals that their students were doing well in college despite not having exam scores that met the city’s college-readiness threshold.

They were right. Though only 25 percent of the class of 2011 was deemed college-ready by their state scores, an additional 23 percent of students who graduated then are still in college after three semesters, and high schools are now receiving credit for preparing those students as well.

The city also emphasized the success of its efforts to work with schools that received Ds or Fs in recent years but that the city decided not to close. Of the 76 schools with one of those plans last year, 76 percent improved at least one letter grade this year. Eleven percent improved three or more grade levels.

That may be a result of a suggestion in a recent report on school networks. “Although it is not widely discussed (either by the DOE or its critics), the last few years have seen the DOE take steps to test out more assertive direct support models for struggling schools,” that report said.

The city will release a list of schools eligible for “early intervention” because of low performance on Thursday.

And while Polakow-Suransky said it wasn’t his place to advocate for the specific continuation of the school grades, Bloomberg was happy to do just that.

“I would certainly urge my successor to keep going,” the mayor said.

Patrick Wall contributed reporting. 

Correction: This story previously misstated the number of schools that received Ds. That figure is 102, not 202.