On another post Anonymous wrote:
This "School Closure Guide" published by the Broad Foundation will make
your head spin. Pittsburgh is highlighted in it. They have a playbook.
http://failingschools.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/school-closure-guide1.pdf
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18 comments:
Who are the "stakeholders"? The community?
I only got as far as page 8, and it appears that PPS did not follow the recommendations here. "Ensure that schools are being closed only if it is the best way to improve resource allocation in the district."
Schenley!!!!!!!
Page 16. This is regarding Schenley. It is a "how to" close a higher performing school. No mention of asbestos...
"One of the key decisions regarding academic factors is how to weigh absolute performance (e.g., percent of students scoring proficient on state exams) versus growth (e.g., year over year gains made by students at a school). Many districts have prioritized the growth criterion because trend data is a closer proxy for the effect any given school is having on the achievement of its students. In one example, Pittsburgh Public Schools brought in RAND to help them evaluate their schools prior to closure because they wanted to build a more sophisticated method for evaluating which schools were best serving their students. RAND developed the School Performance Index (SPI), which estimated the added value that each school provided based on student-level growth. Pittsburgh used this metric to inform the closure selections, including the decision to close one school which had relatively high test scores but which was failing to accelerate student achievement. The index also highlighted the dramatic gains students were making in certain schools, despite low overall test scores. Although politically challenging, the SPI was mostly well-received across the city as an equitable way to make closure decisions."
What was crazy was that the sips closings were made with no mention whatsoever about facilities and then all of a sudden when the closings were done a half million was spent on the facilities study. And sips ratings were not mentioned at all when high schools were closed. And the underlying data and calculations for the ratings were not disclosed so no public review or comment.
SPI, SPI, SPI; it means School Performance Index.
SIP has a completely different meaning: School Improvement Plan
Q, don't feel bad. Even on the inside the School Performance Index was a mystery. RAND never disclosed the formula.
Were schools with a low SPI placed on an improvement plan? This all seems really arbitrary and made up on the fly by RAND.
Was Schenley closed due to fictional asbestos or fictional SPI issues? Roosevelt did what he wanted and hired people & consultants that would make the "facts" fit his narrative. Schenley is the most obvious piece of the puzzle, but so many other schools have been closed too.
they don't care.
Why on earth would you advocate on this site for complete abdication of a requirement for schools to provide students with minimal basic skills competencies?
That is really completely irresponsible for adults who have been educated to the degree that they live successfully in the world. To NOT want that for those with less good fortune or who, as you say, are "impoverished" is unconscionable. Why?
When you posture so prominently for Schenley, think back about whether or not you similarly postured for the
students relegated to the Spartan Academy in the basement Schenley.
Where these students of concern to you? If so, please tell us about your advocacy in that regard!
It is really not helpful to use pejorative words like posture. Yes advocacy efforts were made before the arrival of MR.
Spartan students had robotics, gym, pool, musical, varsity sports in their building, and Oakland among 100 other things that UPred kids are missing today.
OMG--So it was okay to be in the basement of their own neighborhood school while others from across the district were in the rooms with windows---because they had robotics, etc.?
It is doubtful that any student except perhaps those in robotics spent most of the day in the basement. Classrooms were clustered by subject not program. History, English, sciences, etc were not in the basement and so students taking those classes would not be in the basement. It made sense to have heavy gym and robotics equipment at the lowest level of the building.
Riddle me this...
U-Prep middle school swim team won the boys PPS Championship this year, breaking a streak of some 17 years by Frick/Obama, but, none of the kids on the team are at U-Prep.
Where does this middle school team practice and what school do team members actually attend- are they all Obama students or Obama with a sci tech or two?
Middle School sports at U-Prep and Sci-Tech are combined.
Obama is on its own for Middle School.
In HS, the combo is Obama, Sci-Tech, U-Prep, hence USO for football.
Non of this years MS team from U-Prep had anyone from U-Prep. They all were Sci-Tech kids.
They swim at Sci-Tech.
(My Howwarts post didn't make it?)
Mark, were they called the UPrep team? Why not call them Sci-Tech?
Beats me.
That team was called Uprep. They practice at Sci-Tech.
They were good enough to win and snap a streak that was longer than the life of any of the swimmers on the team.
Given the comments that a know-nothing like Jeannie French has made in the press over the last few months, you cannot convince me that there is some movement afoot to close Westinghouse and move it into Peabody.
Here is a woman who equated the racial achievement gap at the two schools as being similar.
Really? I mean, are you serious?
African American students at Obama are somewhere in the range of 68-70% proficient. In French's small minded way of thinking, that is noteworthy because whites are about 20 percentage points higher.
THIS is the gap she is referring to?
And what are the proficiency rates again at Westinghouse?
So unless French is ill-advised or just hallucinating, what can one possibly attribute those comments to?
2015: the year we go broke.
Let's close schools--especially in the east end. Let's throw up our hands and say hey, we tried.
Let's cut even more teachers.
But hey...don't cut any administrators. We have 700 or so, and although they aren't in classrooms, we need all of them.
Amazing.
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