Search

This essay seeks to understand the origins, development, and consequences of school policing and student discipline at Franklin K. Lane High School in New York City. During the fevered years of the late 1960s, perhaps no other school in the country saw more tension, violence, repression, and resistance. What took place there represented a kind of denouement in the city's decades-long battles over race, class, policing, discipline, desegregation, community control, and student rights. In centering the happenings at Lane, this essay demonstrates how the logics and politics of school policing and student discipline were forged not only from the top down, by government officials at the highest levels, but also from the bottom up, in the complex interplay between the parents, student organizers, teachers, and administrators at the school. It also demonstrates how city officials leveraged individual school conflicts into broader carceral expansions that affected the entire public education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread expansion of school choice policies has bolstered the consumer-education paradigm where parents compete for what they perceive to be a limited number of high quality schools. In this comparative case study, we examine advantaged White parents' perceptions of meritocracy in the context of a competitive elementary and high school choice system in New York City. We find that parents' critique the choice policies and the unfair burdens they place on low-income and immigrant families while engaging in opportunity hoarding to ensure their children's privileged access to the most competitive schools, all while dismissing claims that school choice is meritocratic. Ultimately, advantaged parents' suggest returning to neighborhood zoning which would preserve their access to exclusive, high performing schools and avoid the stress and inequities of school choice policies. This study offers further examples of the powerful influence of contradictory White discourse in the context of education policy and reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study investigated how three New York City schools responded to gentrification's effects as student demographics shifted. I used the conceptual framework of urban school leaders as cultural workers to examine the tensions, successes, and challenges inherent in the school gentrification and integration process. I found that each school leader defied the school gentrification narrative by "holding the line" in terms of preserving diversity, cultivating integration, and counterbalancing the opportunity hoarding behaviors of White, advantaged parents. The results have implications for urban school leaders who want to be agents of change by leveraging gentrification's effects into positive results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses rich new data on New York State teachers to: determine how much variation in the average attributes of teachers exists across schools, identify schools that have the least-qualified teachers, assess whether the distribution has changed over time, and determine how the distribution of teachers is impacted by attrition and transfer, as well as by the job matches between teachers and schools at the start of careers. Our results show striking differences in the qualifications of teachers across schools. Urban schools, in particular, have Iesser-qualified teachers; and New York City stands out among urban areas. Low-income, low-achieving and non-white students, particularly those in urban areas, find themselves in classes with many of the least skilled teachers. Salary variation rarely compensates for the apparent difficulties of teaching in urban settings and, in some cases, contributes to the disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the extent to which the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) has delivered on its promise of improving mathematics teacher diversity, preparedness, effectiveness, and retention in hard-to-staff city schools. As a program theory evaluation study, it articulates the theory of action for selective alternative route programs and uses this to evaluate NYCTF's program for secondary mathematics. The analysis draws on longitudinal data from 620 secondary mathematics teachers who began NYCTF in the prior decade. While the results point to potential improvements, it provides evidence that selective programs like NYCTF serve to maintain important gaps in teacher quality that they were designed to address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to estimate the relationship between principal quality and turnover. Principals can have potentially large effects on student outcomes. When school leaders leave their roles, they cause disruptive effects to the school's climate. If effective principals are more likely to leave, the negative effects of principal turnover are likely exacerbated. Relatively little, however, is known about the quality of principals who leave the principalship. Research design: We use teachers' perceptions of their principals as a measure of principal quality to understand the quality of principals who leave schools. We address this research question in New York City public schools from 2013 to 2016, and then replicate it at the national level using the Schools and Staffing Survey data from 2008 to 2012. To understand how principal quality relates to principal turnover, we run linear probability regressions of principal exits on (teacher-assessed) principal quality, controlling for a set of teacher, principal, school, district/state, and time characteristics. Findings: We find that higher quality principals are less likely to leave their schools. This finding persists across school contexts and time, lending robustness to our results. Conclusions: Findings suggest that inasmuch as principal turnover is a concern, it is not driven by higher quality principals. Districts should therefore focus on recruiting more higher quality principals as opposed to focusing on reducing overall principal turnover. Moving forward, research should focus on differential attrition patterns so that efforts to retain principals can be better targeted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the large numbers of competing proposals for improving urban schools so that students perform better policymakers need to know budget as well as performance implications of proposed reforms. One n!form group with a large constituency suggests that high schools should enroll small numbers of students, but some policymakers worry that the costs of small schools are excessive. This paper contributes to the school size policy debate by using methods and data that combine budget and performance information, with the school as the unit of analysis. With data on budgets, graduates, and characteristics of students in New York City public high schools, we estimate 4-year budgets per graduate. We find that small academic and large high schools are similar in terms of budgets per graduate and that some vocational and "transfer" high schools have the highest budgets per graduate. Because the literature on school size indicates that small high schools are more effective for minority and poor students, the similarity in outcomes that small and large high schools produce suggests that policymakers might do well to support the creation of more small high schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational accountability is dominated by a focus on test scores to assess academic achievement. An emerging trend toward "next-generation" accountability includes a broader conception of student learning and multiple metrics. A policy design approach is used to analyze this trend. Four design elements—goals, actors, metrics, and consequences—are used to compare accountability systems in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Key design trends include broader accountability goals, multiple metrics with different data types, and an emphasis on school improvement. Although facing challenges, urban school districts have opportunities to play a role in shaping this accountability debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of private funding and management in U.S. urban public services has expanded through the auspices of private nonprofit organizations in formal relationships with government and aided by large gifts from wealthy donors with visions for their cities, leading scholars to raise concerns about potential harm to democratic governance and displacement of public investment. Where do these private efforts fit into current policy initiatives to improve equity in schools and parks? Employing Susan Fainstein's Just City framework, this article analyzes cases in which policy actors sought constraints on private dollars in an attempt to institutionalize equity into public private partnership (PPP) regimes. The Portland, Oregon, school board required that school foundations share funds with a districtwide foundation for reallocation. In New York City, unsuccessful state legislation proposed reallocating private funds but executive action redirected public city funds, and largely nonmonetary private resources. These cases can inform policymakers striving for just cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple studies have shown the potential for school choice policies to benefit middle-class families, often to the detriment of lower income students in the same district. Yet, there is limited research examining the role of policies in promoting inequality by encouraging exclusionary behaviors. In this article, we utilize the concept of opportunity hoarding to analyze the specific policy provisions built into New York City's elementary and high school choice plans that prompt middle-class parents to act in ways that secure advantages for their children. We find that parents' anxiety about scarcity of high-quality educational options combined with the design of the choice policies facilitated pervasive opportunity hoarding that functioned as a collective strategy of class preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 20 years, market-based choice initiatives have become a popular approach to education reform. Since 2002, the New York City Department of Education has opened over 250 high schools, creating a marketplace so widespread that many students no longer have a zoned or neighborhood school. This article uses two New York City–based case studies to examine branding or marketing practices at new small schools. It explores how and to whom schools market themselves and the nature and type of information provided to students and parents. The article raises questions about the implications of marketing and branding practices for public education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the study which shows that the urban advantage (UA) program has resulted to increased student achievement on the eight-grade standardized science examination for students in New York State. It states the use of difference-in-differences framework with school fixed effects to measure impact of attending UA school. It mentions that the attending UA school has increased student performance on its eight-grade science examination.

In this article we examine induction policies and practices for new alternatively certified mathematics teachers in the country’s largest urban school district, New York City. Our focus is on the support system for such teachers as it is legislated and as it is enacted. This includes the induction and general supports (e.g., mentoring, coaching, networks) that are available to mathematics teachers in the New York City Teaching Fellows Program (NYCTF). Data sources include a survey of one entire cohort of Fellows (N=167), as well as more in depth interviews and written reflections from 12 case study Fellows. Results indicate that the supports, while as espoused seem adequate, as delivered are inconsistent and in many cases inadequate. A key finding is that many teachers found that informal relationships, usually within their local school settings, provided more effective support to help them through their first years of teaching mathematics. This research has implications for the induction of alternatively certified teachers and more generally of all new teachers particularly those in urban schools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many urban school districts have recently implemented sweeping reforms that alter the ways in which educational services are administered. The environment in which these reforms are embedded is increasingly and more directly tied to core political institutions and business elites. Hence, as this dependence has grown, districts have become more likely to reflect the rational myths regarding the structure promoted by these proximate political institutions and business elites. Using a subset of the educational field in New York City, this article explores the process through which conformity to these pressures results in organizations changing structural arrangements to become isomorphic with institutionally prescribed expectations emanating from proximate organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the curricular and pedagogical impositions of scripted lessons and mandated curriculum, patterns associated nationwide with high-stakes testing, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and the phenomenon known as the "narrowing of curriculum" new teachers in New York City (NYC) find their personal and professional identity thwarted, creativity and autonomy undermined, and ability to forge relationships with students diminished--all critical factors in their expressed job satisfaction. These indirect consequences of accountability regimen as it operates in NYC may exacerbate new teacher attrition, especially from schools serving low-income students. The data reported here suggest a mixed picture of frustration and anger, alongside determination, resistance, and resilience in the face of these impositions. Responses vary by school and grade level, lending support to the notion that the organizational environment serves as a critical factor in teachers' early career decisions about staying or leaving a school or the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite nationwide decreases in school crime and violence, a relatively high and increasing number of students report feeling unsafe at school. In response, some school officials are implementing school police partnerships, especially in urban areas, as an effort to deter criminal activity and violence in schools. This article examines the initial effect of New York City's Impact Schools Initiative, a punitive-based school-police partnership developed in January 2004 that increases police presence at some of the city's most dangerous public schools. An initial examination of school-level demographic and environmental variables reveals that, despite increased police presence, students enrolled at New York City's impact schools continue to experience higher than average problems linked directly to future criminality, including more student suspensions and lower attendance rates than other New York City Schools. The data also reveal that relative to other New York City public schools, impact schools are more crowded and receive less funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In New York City, where almost 14% of elementary school pupils are foreign-born and roughly half of these are "recent immigrants," the impact of immigrant students on school resources may be important. While immigrant advocates worry about inequitable treatment of immigrant students, others worry that immigrants drain resources from native-born students. In this article, we explore the variation in school resources and the relationship to the representation of immigrant students. To what extent are variations in school resources explained by the presence of immigrants per se rather than by differences in student educational needs, such as poverty or language skills, or differences in other characteristics, such as race? Our results indicate that, while schools resources decrease with the representation of immigrants, this relationship largely reflects differences in the educational needs of immigrant students. Although analyses that link resources to the representation of foreign-born students in 12 geographic regions of origin find some disparities, these are again largely driven by differences in educational need. Finally, we find that some resources increase over time when there are large increases in the percentage of immigrants in a school, but these results are less precisely estimated. Thus, elementary schools appear not to be biased either against or for immigrants per se, although differences in the needs of particular groups of immigrant students may lead to more (or fewer) school resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systemic reform has been advanced as a policy strategy in the past decade to improve urban schools. This study compares published reports of implementation of systemic reform in New York City and Community School District 2 to perceptions of mothers and teachers in a community-based school with a long history of parent involvement. Their lived experience contradicts conclusions of high-profile research, raising political, moral, and methodological questions about the role of research and researchers in systemic reform. The most critical issue is researchers' accountability when they assist in implementation of reforms neither fully understood nor endorsed by teachers or parents, especially in schools serving students, families, and communities that have low status and little power. The article concludes with recommendations to reestabilish systemic reform's democratic ideals, operationalizing learning by all by including parents, school people, and citizens in assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article states that a paper written by Jacques W. Redway on the problems of New York City schools, which was published by "The Journal of Education" in its April 3, 1913 issue, is again featured in the May 25, 1922 issue because of the article's relevance to the city's school conditions in 1922. Redway is an author of geography textbooks and a contributor to the "New York Herald" and other publications.