Plan for Low-Performing Middle Schools

Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan yesterday to grant New York City's 50 lowest performing middle schools an additional 5 million dollars and appoint an administrator to design professional development programs for middle school teachers and principals. The following article from the New York Times describes the announcement:

Citing Learning Slumps, Mayor Presents Plan for Low-Performing Middle Schools

By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: August 14, 2007

Calling middle school students the hardest to reach, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that he would direct an additional $5 million to about 50 of the city’s lowest-performing middle schools and appoint a high-level administrator to devise professional development programs for middle school teachers and principals.

He acted as the City Council released a report detailing problems in the city’s middle schools, including teacher retention difficulties and large class sizes, and issued a number of recommendations to address them. The council report noted that the percentage of eighth graders who perform at grade level is just 45.6 in math and just 41.8 percent in reading. Those were sharp drops from elementary school.

“That’s when many students begin to lose their footing,” the mayor said, referring to middle school. “Generally speaking, those in elementary school do what you tell them to do. And I think it’s also true by the time they get to high school, they don’t. It’s in those middle years where they transfer from one to another.”

Driven by newly documented slumps in learning, by crime rates and by high dropout rates in high school, educators across New York and the nation have been struggling to rethink middle school programs and the best way to teach adolescents at a transitional juncture of self-discovery and hormonal change.

In a show of widespread support for the changes, the mayor and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein appeared yesterday next to Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn; Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers; and dozens of members of the Coalition for Educational Justice, a group of parents who had agitated for increased attention to the city’s middle schools and their 220,000 students. The group released its own report in January.

But the mayor shied away from adopting the most far-ranging changes recommended in the reports, like significantly reducing class sizes, creating a special middle school academy to train teachers about early adolescence, and removing police officers from city schools to create a more welcoming atmosphere.

The mayor said the city would work to expand the number of advanced level Regents classes in middle school, which prepare students for tests they are required to pass in order to graduate from high school. The effort will first be focused on about 50 of the lowest-performing schools; those students will be able to take advanced-level classes at other schools if their current ones do not offer them.

“New York City’s public schools have had a particularly high and unacceptable level of academic underachievement for the over 220,000 middle school students citywide,” read the report released by Ms. Quinn.

The administration was right to focus on the neediest schools first, Ms. Quinn said, adding that that by 2010, all middle schools would be offering high-level classes.

“But we don’t have to wait,” she said, to loud applause at the news conference at William J. O’Shea Junior High School on West 77th Street in Manhattan. “What we are going to do today will help, but it is not going to be all we need for middle schools.”

The City Council’s report made it clear that many parents complain about large middle schools and large class sizes, and the task force recommended that education officials work to cap classes at 25 students. Although the mayor and chancellor did not make any pledges to reduce class sizes, the speaker said she was not disappointed.

“I don’t think the focus today should be what didn’t happen, what we still need to talk about,” she said. “It should be what we accomplished.”

National research has shown that middle school teachers are often trained to teach in elementary or high schools. A minuscule fraction of the city’s middle school teachers have been certified by the state as “middle school generalists.”

While the task force recommended creating a special middle school academy, Mr. Bloomberg instead said the office overseeing middle schools would first create a “catalog” of available professional development classes for teachers and principals. Teachers from the 50 lowest-performing schools will be able to attend those classes free.

Other school systems, like those in Baltimore and Philadelphia, have considered folding middle schools into elementary and high schools, shifting to kindergarten-to-8th grade or 6th-to-12th grade. The Department of Education has experimented with such ideas, but the mayor says there are no plans to overhaul the system.

“It would be great if kids could go to elementary school and then come back to us for high school, but I think we have a responsibility to do something in the middle,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “There’s no easy answer when you have a transitional period.”

“I think the real answer here is to take a look at the schools we have and make them work,” he said.