Community Roots Parents Get a Belated Christmas Gift from City

LagCH – PS8 doesn’t have room to expand but this option is under consideration. This news may make it a priority.

badifat —

I’m a fan of Community Roots and not a true believer in the value of NYC’s school reports. That said, I remember this same argument — about the mismatch between the socioeconomic makeup of tested grades vs school-as-a-whole, and thus “peer group” — being made when PS 8 failed. When I looked at the way the repors are done, though, it seemed disingenuous. While it seemed reasonable to assume that mismatch could operate to put a school at a disadvantage in terms of the the basic competence numbers that factor into school grade, in theory it should (or could) operate in the other direction in terms of progress, which comprises a larger part of a school’s score. That is, the argument would go, peer group reflects the socioeconomic makeup of the school as a whole and thus puts the school in with a group of generally higher performing schools (in terms of the upper, tested grades). Those higher performing schools could have a harder time showing year-to-year progress than the lower performing schools because improvement is required from a higher starting point. That is, if 3d graders in the peer group had generally scored a 3.8 in a subject the prior year, they’d have to do better than that to show progress, while the 3d/4th graders at Community Roots might have scored lower, and thus would have an easier time showing progress.

Or am I misunderstanding the argument: is the suggestion that students from lower socioeconomic groups are simply less likely to be able to even show improvement year-to-year than those from higher ones? Even if you have more room to improve? And even in the same educational environment as the middle/upper-middle class students? This might be true, but it’s not self-evident to me, and I haven’t really seen that argument made.

Or is there some other argument I’m missing?

This is how they got an F:

-schools are rated by comparison to a “peer group” determined by percentage of free and reduced lunch students. Nearly all of the other schools in the peer group are much larger. Community Roots is a small school, and so a small sample size for statistical purposes. Also, the 4th and 5th grades (the testing grades) have a different make-up than the school as a whole, since they were the first two classes in the school, before more middle class people started being attracted to the school. So, the socio-economic profile of the testing grades is different from the socio-economic profile of the school as a whole, and would likely be compared to a different peer group. Community Roots outperformed the district, city and state on their test scores, but they did not outperform their peer group in the increase in test scores from one year to the next.

-When the test scores were re-calibrated last year (after the tests were taken) every school’s scores dropped dramatically. Some safety nets were put in to the Progress Report to account for this. Namely, schools that had received an A or B in the previous year were not permitted to drop more than two letter grades, no matter what their test scores were. Because Community Roots was a young school, they did not receive a Progress Report grade in the previous year and so they were not protected as other schools were.

This adds 150 middle school seats to District 13. Yes, the 5th graders at Community Roots will get priority for those seats, but at least it takes those students out of the competition for the other middle schools. Compared to District 15, District 13 generally has very few viable middle school options, and I think the addition of Brooklyn East Collegiate at PS 9 is an attempt to address the problem.