According to a Facebook post we saw last night, Community Roots parents got the news yesterday that the Fort Greene school’s charter was extended and the expansion to K -8 was approved.


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  1. Such good news – we need middle school seats so badly and this give us 50 more! and MS kids in K-8 schools uniformly score better on tests and suffer less emotional upheaval than their counterparts who have to switch schools 2 times in 3 years, first from elementary to MS then to HS. And the expansion equals that many more kids who wont be competing for spots in stand alone MS’s. from what I’ve heard, 2 new MS opened recently in district 13 (ft. greene prep and another that I cant remember the name of,) but more options are needed, and than some. it is a mystery as to why ps8 doesn’t expand to include a middle school since it is the only zoned school in district that is full of zoned kids which makes it a no brainer to fill its seats in MS.

    re Stonergut’s mention of the soon to be vacant building off of flatbush – sadly, that is in district 15, so not an option for dist. 13 schools.

  2. 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?

  3. gotcha. as for the grading, i understand what you’re saying. to me, the second factor would affect my impression of the letter grades, but the first not so much without understanding more… but i suppose it’s a matter of how much the other schools increased, and what the actual results of the testing were, comparatively (setting increases aside).

    about middle schools – tish james mentioned starting a d13 middle schools working group. it seems crazy to me that the city can’t come up with more middle school expansions (like this one) that don’t directly impact, in a negative way, pre-existing schools.

    is the schermerhorn school space within D13?

  4. 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.

  5. Well phed: Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant for middle school. Where are all the graduates of PS 8, 9, 11, 20, 56, etc. going to go? This move doesn’t reduce headcount, but currently Arts & Letters is one of the few schools in Dist. 13 that has something to offer for high (and even medium) achieving kids, who are increasingly populating the district’s elementary schools. Where are these kids going to go to middle school?

  6. 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.

  7. There’s an empty school building on Schermerhorn and 3rd Ave, across Flatbush from the BAM sign.

    I’m pretty sure the high school which once occupied it has been disbanded.

    I wonder why this building can’t be put to use by FG elementary and middle schools? It would be a natural location and very easy to reach.