Picture this.


A third-grader who is 8 years old does not know how to read. Perhaps his teachers didn’t push him hard enough in school, or maybe because of problems at home, he didn’t really go. He fails both his English Language Arts and math standardized tests, exams that third-, fifth- and seventh-graders are required to pass to be promoted to the next grade, according to New York City Department of Education standards. He is held back and repeats the third grade, relearning the exact same curriculum without extra help to understand the material he couldn’t understand before.


The second-year third-grader, who is now 9, still has trouble reading, but his parents want him to go on to fourth grade so he can get through school. He fails his standardized tests again, but his parents file an appeal, allowing his teachers, the principal and the parents to sit down and evaluate his work. The school grants the appeal, and he moves on to fourth grade. Now, after five years of barely passing his way through elementary school and middle school, the student is 15 years old and in the eighth grade, but he still can’t read.


“This hypothetical example is very true to life as to what can happen,” said Susan Crawford, an advocate for non-profit organization The Right to Read.


The above scenario is one I could not use in my story, but Crawford painted the picture quite clearly. My final piece focused mainly how middle-schoolers are pushed through the system, despite that they are unprepared, and now that they are in eighth-grade, the system wants to hold them back. The story addressed the question: Is it too late?


What I found was that middle schools need to put supports in place for students if they have any chance of making it to high school and graduating. Several of the overage middle-schoolers I spoke with seemed confident that they would get there. Even despite their low test scores, the students wanted to get to high school and had serious goals and dreams for themselves. This type of motivation -- which is certainly not found in all overage students -- is good, but is it good enough? Middle schools must revamp the curriculum or bring in more supports -- like teachers, tutors, etc. -- so that when students repeat the eighth grade, they are not simply failing again. It is a vicious cycle and, certainly, there must be a solution.

Possible Solutions

Yesterday I interviewed Ronald Rivera, the principal at Public School 89 in the Bronx, which serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Rivera said that when he first arrived at the school six years ago, students were failing miserably and the school was in bad shape. Two years ago, he, and an entire new staff, came up with a plan to focus their attention on middle school grades.

The program, called the "Seven-Plus Program," was designed specifically for sixth- and seventh-graders who were most at-risk for failing -- such as gang members, special education students and students who have trouble reading. By taking high school credits at Truman High School throughout the year and during summer school, students are expected to complete seventh grade by the beginning of spring and eighth grade by the end of the summer of that school year, Rivera said.

The other component of the program is called "Spring Forward," which provides Saturday math and engineering classes for high school credit for overage seventh-graders who are not as at-risk of failing. The idea was to combine classes of two completely different levels -- one farther ahead academically than the other -- so they can work together and help each other. So far, Rivera said, the program has been extremely successful in helping students make it to high school early enough and with enough confidence that they will hopefully not drop out of the system.

See more information about the Seven-Plus program in the Advocates for Children of New York City report, "Stuck in the Middle: The Problem of Overage Middle School Students in New York City."

55 Middle Schools Receive $13 million in grants

In early April, the New York City Department of Education announced that 55 middle schools in New York City received $13 million in grants from both the Department of Education and the General Electric Foundation, according to a DOE press release.

Seventy schools applied for the grants -- which range from $50,000 to $250,000 -- but the 55 that won over Schools Chancellor Joel Klein provided the best proposals as to how the money will be used to increase academic achievement in middle schools.

The GE Foundation is funding the grants for 17 of the middle schools in Northern Manhattan, while the DOE is funding the remaining 38 schools, according to the DOE.

These grants were part of the DOE's fairly new "Campaign for Middle School Success," a blueprint for middle grade achievement that the DOE announced last August. The schools that received the funding will use it for new resources, such as after-school or summer programming.

Last week, I interview Barbara Gross, of the Coalition for Educational Justice. The CEJ has been working with middle schools for a long time, closely following the Bloomberg administration's every move with the system. Gross was quite pleased with the way the DOE took initiative and geared more of its focus toward middle grades.

"[The Department of Education] has made more of a priority of middle school education," Gross said. "They're now putting all this money into the lowest performing middle schools. Until a year or ago, there was no central staff whose job it was to support middle schools, and that is different now. Middle school staff is on board. There's more of an explicit understanding of the fact that what happens in middle schools is a critical link to high school graduation."

Reading -- Root of the Problem?

Background in Brief:

Mayor Bloomberg's new eighth-grade promotion policy, which will begin in June, will require eighth-graders to pass classes in core subjects and score a basic level on English and math standardized tests in order to advance to high school.

Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Kline have said that the intention is to make sure students are prepared to move on. If they are not, the administration argues, they should not advance. In theory, it seems reasonable. But the solution for failing middle schoolers could be far more complicated than making them repeat the a grade -- and relearn the exact same curriculum.

The Real Problem?

The issues stem from students not even being able to read, said Susan Crawford, of nonprofit organization The Right to Read. She wonders how repeating the same material -- without any extra help -- will benefit these students.

Christie Love, of Advocates for Children of New York, agreed. “[The policy] could potentially hold over 1,000 students this year. And there weren’t a lot of details given as to how the year that the students are repeating would be different than the year that they didn’t pass the first time. If they’re going to hold them back, what are they going to do to make sure that they succeed?”

Here are some supporting statistics from non-profit organization Coalition for Educational Justice:

• Less than half of NYC 8th graders can read and write at the state standard. In many schools in East Brooklyn, Harlem, and the South Bronx, fewer than 1 in 4 students can read and write on state standard.

• National tests show no improvement in 8th grade Reading scores over the past five years, and no narrowing of the achievement gap.

Middle schoolers aren't the only ones behind

A Gotham Schools article by Philissa Kramer showed that new high school requirements could cause the graduation rate in New York City to plummet.

Five years ago, the graduation rate was 37 percent. Now, it is just more than 50 percent but could drastically decrease as a result of the following requirements:

- "Beginning with this year's freshman class, all students will have to earn a Regents diploma by scoring a 65 or higher on five different state exams. Until now, the state has allowed students who scored between 55 and 64 on any of the tests to graduate with a less rigorous diploma."

At the Department of Education press conference, the Coalition for Educational Justice and other advocates were among those who urged that the DOE turn its focus to the high schools. Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer and the DOE's middle school initiatives leader Sabrina King both agreed that the groups' requests were reasonable. King said the DOE has added Regents-level courses to more middle schools in hopes of increasing the eighth grade promotion rate, as well.

"Student performance in eighth grade is a predictor of high school graduation, so we knew we had to start early," King said. "Otherwise, [students] don't have a fighting chance."

The First Story

Here is the first of the three-part series. Meet Destinee Rivera, a 16-year-old eighth-grader who is trying to break the cycle of overage middle schoolers.

Overage Middle Schoolers Struggle to Pass

Education in the News

First Impressions Can Create Unrealistic Expectations for Recruits

While some middle school students are behind, others are soaring ahead. A New York Times article discusses Kendall Marshall, a 6-foot-3, 175-pound junior guard at Bishop O'Connell high school in Columbia, S.C. But years ago, when Marshall was just 5-foot-2 and 90 pounds, he was ranked the No. 1 sixth-grade basketball prospect in the country by analyst Clark Francis. The story discusses how Marshall is still a good player but is no longer the best. Perhaps ranking children at a young age sets them up for failure, the NYT says.

Rewards for Children Under a Microscope

What are they, dogs? High school students have been getting paid to perform well on standardized tests. Now, it might be backfiring. Lisa Guernsey, of the New York Times, writes, "Reward programs that pay students are under way in many cities. In some places, students can bring home hundreds of dollars for, say, taking an Advanced Placement course and scoring well on the exam."

2 Schools Bloomberg Started Cited for Poor Performance

The Schools Under Registration Review is a list of state schools that comes out every year to show what schools are doing so poorly that they are in danger of being shut down. The Bloomberg administration created several smaller high schools in hopes of replacing "large, abysmal high schools." This year, two of Bloomberg's schools made the cut and appeared on the state list.

FOIL/FOIA Request

Below is a draft of my FOIL/FOIA request letter that I plan to send to the NYC Department of Education. I am requesting the number of overage middle school students in New York City organized by both school and borough. In order to show how evident the problem of overage middle school students is in NYC, I need these statistics in my story.


March 2, 2009

Ms. Christine Kicinski
Records Access Officer
New York City Department of Education
(212) 374-6888
FOIL@schools.nyc.gov

Dear Ms. Kicinski:

Under the Freedom of Information Law, N.Y. Public Officers Law Section 87 et seq., I am requesting documents showing the following statistics:

- The number of overage middle school students in New York City organized by borough (overage middle school students are students who are in grades six through eight and have been held back one or more times.)

- The number of overage middle school students in New York City organized by school

I am a freelance reporter and graduate journalism student at New York University writing a story about overage middle school students in New York City. Please telephone me at 443-812-2241 if you have any further questions.

Thank you very much for your time.

Sincerely,


Sarah R. Kaufman
Graduate Student
Department of Journalism
New York University
(443) 812-2241
SarahRKaufman@gmail.com

"Why Should Educators Assess Student Learning?"

Sometimes, when a student is way overage for her grade, teachers will still pass her to the next grade because, if she gets even further behind, it's not likely that she will graduate high school. This means a student moves on, regardless of how she does on an exam, class assignments, participation and, as a whole, how well she understands the material. In a section of Alan J. Singer's book Social Studies for Secondary Schools, he examines the question: Why should educators assess learning?

"According to the [National Council for Social Studies] (1991)," he writes, "'the overriding purpose of testing in social studies classrooms is to improve learning.' Unfortunately, that is not always the case."

There are various ways to excite students about taking tests and, more importantly, desiring high grades when taking them. Singer recites a few he experienced as an education student in college: encourage competition between students for higher grades (so that everyone would study), make all of the choices on multiple-choice tests the same length, avoid making "B" the right answer too often (because it is the most popular "wild guess" answer) -- among other tips. But, Singer returns to his main question as to why educators assess students using tests and grading. He is quite critical of the concept and argues that "testing and grading are only indirectly related to instruction and the assessment of learning. Additionally, the assumption here is that education is a series of contests between students and teachers."

The chief purposes of attending school are to (1) learn academic material and (2) use that material to become academically prepared for the following grade (or, year in school). But singer argues that:

"The purpose of testing was to assignment grades. Tests and grades were weapons to control classes and make students do the work through extrinsic rewards and punishments. Students who tried, but who did not do very well, we offered extra help, but ultimately put in 'slower' classes where they would 'experience success.' Those who failed the tests because they did not seem to care were cajoled with threats, calls or letters home, low grades, or failure for the course."

Again, Singer provides examples as to why tests and grading do not directly related to their jobs of helping students to learn the academic materials and preparing students for the next school year. Finally, he uses a specific example of one student who was quite charismatic about school and usually performed well but only in class -- never on tests. The student loved social studies and was very vocal in class, but he refused to do homework assignments and failed miserably on the tests. After retaking tests -- even after studying, but only upon Singer's request -- he still failed. Eventually, one day during lunch, Singer read aloud to him multiple choice questions and the students fed back the answers. He answered 80 percent of them correctly. Singer describes the student:

"He understood what we were studying in class, but he did not know how to read well enough to do the homework assignments or distinguish between the choices on the multiple-choice tests."

Ultimately, the student passed the class, enabling him to move on to high school. But, that was only because he was already overage for middle school. Singer explained that this case might be one of extremity but argued that it common to have students like him -- students who are excited about the information and about the classes but continue to perform poorly on tests because of poor literacy skills. "Unfortunately, in teaching, as in life," Singer said, "there are few fairy tale endings."

"Stuck in the Middle"

Here is the overage middle school students report (the top link) by the Out of Youth Coalition and written by the Advocates for Children in NYC. The introduction of the report states:

"New York City does not have a good record of being able to prepare all middle school students to succeed in high school. Leading education advocacy groups in the city, such as the New York City Coalition for Educational Justice, have documented that middle schools have largely been a place of failure for blacks and Latinos with "twice as many White and Asian eighth-graders meetin[ing] the New York State standard in ELA [English Language Arts] than African American and Latino students." Research demonstrates that middle grade achievement is strongly connected with achievement in, and ultimately graduation from, high school. Given that only one in four black and Latino students can expect to receive a Regent's diploma, New York City must make a serious commitment to improving middle school performance."

The report documents specific cases of students who have been held back in middle school for various reasons, as well as statistics seen in my previous blog entry.

The Opposite Side

Remember that many over-age middle schools students do not advance to high school for three specific reasons -- (1) Schooling is interrupted, (2) students need to change schools but have nowhere to go and (3) appropriate academic supports are not provided -- according to the reported published by Advocates for Children of New York City.

But what about the opposite end of the spectrum? The New York City public school admissions process has grown to be competitive and overwhelming. The New York Times published an article in December about the struggles of one mother and daughter to show the tedious steps for families who have children getting ready for high school. Reporter Jennifer Medina writes:

Ms. [Clara] Hemphill, who is a senior editor at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, has skipped at least two full days of work this fall, and has come in late or left early many other times to attend campus tours. She spent much of November on the phone with parents of children enrolled in the schools Allison was interested in. This weekend, her daughter had an 8 a.m. audition at Professional on Saturday and a 1:30 p.m. interview at Beacon on Sunday.

“I’m about as well-equipped as I can be, and I find it to be incredibly exhausting and frustrating,” she said. “You have to keep track of which application has to come with an essay, which has to be hand delivered, which requires a tour. It can be a full-time job.”


When they are in eighth grade, more than 80,000 NYC students must rank the city's 400 high schools in order from their top to bottom choices. When spring arrives, each student is assigned to a high school, usually the student's top choice. But the process is demanding and confusing because public schools do not have an admissions staffs like private schools do.

In this particular case, eighth grader Allison Snyder and her mother, Clara Hempill, make the time and have the motivation to trek through the tiresome high school admissions process. But what about those who don't? As mentioned in last week's posting, a new policy in New York City will make it so that students now must pass standardized tests to advance to high school. This -- in addition to the already demanding process of high school admissions, in addition to those listed by the Advocates for Children -- may only increase the number of over-age middle school students and might, in fact, fuel the problem even further.

The Actual Introduction

“A 16-year-old eighth grader has a 16 percent chance of walking away with a high school diploma once she reaches high school.”

--Stuck in the Middle: The Problem of Overage Middle School Students in New York City, a report by the Out of School Youth Coalition and written by Advocates for Children of New York

MY INVESTIGATIVE SERIES

New York City recently proposed a policy that will not let middle school students graduate if they get failing grades on standardized tests that are required to advance to high school.

The problem here is that there are already too many students being held back for other reasons. If this new policy is implemented, those numbers will continue to rise. Clearly, 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds should not have to be placed in the same classes as 11-, 12- and 13-year-old students. So, I'll examine why so many students are being held back and what NYC middle schools are doing in response to this.

Other questions: Are there particular schools that have a lot of these failing students? How are the schools helping the students? Or, are they even helping at all? How do the teachers feel about the new policy, and what are their struggles?

THE PROBLEM

In July 2008, Advocates for Children released a report revealing shocking statistics of overage children in middle schools.

IMPORTANT DEFINITIONS

Overage middle school student: A student in grades six through eight who has been held back one or more times. Although a student is technically overage once she or he has been held back once, the examples and figures in the previously mentioned report will focus on those students who have been held over two or more times, as school districts, including New York City, commonly use this definition to categorize overage students.*

Middle school: Middle schools for the purposes of the AFC study are defined as schools with grades six through eight, and they usually serve students between the ages of 11 and 14.*

STATISTICS*

Overage Middle School Students in the Bronx
Out of 6,052 students:

• 1,592 students or 26.3 percent of population of the nine schools are overage
• 1,103 students or 18.2 percent are one year overage
• 397 students or 6.6 percent are two years overage
• 92 students or 1.5 percent are three years overage

THE POSSIBLE CAUSES*

1. Schooling is interrupted.
2. Students need to change schools but have nowhere to go.
3. Appropriate academic supports are not provided.

THE POSSIBLE EFFECTS*

As the number of years a student is overage increases, the student’s average attendance rate decreases:

• Non-overage students have a 92 percent attendance rate
• Students who are one year overage have an 88 percent attendance rate
• Students who are two years overage have an 82 percent attendance rate
• Students who are three years overage have a 67 percent attendance rate

* Information taken from Advocates for Children Report

WHY MIDDLE SCHOOLS ARE "A MESS"

Middle schools in New York City have been in trouble for a long time.

In 2007, The New York Times published The Critical Years, a series of stories challenging teaching methods in middle schools and altering communication techniques with adolescents.

In March 2007, nine of the city’s schools were at risk of shutting down because of academic failure. Of those nine, eight were middle schools.

Later that year, the Times wrote a story about a NYC middle school where students committed intolerable acts — such as throwing books out the window and writing hateful messages using vulgar language on the blackboard—and yet the school received an A from the city’s Education Department.

The Intro to the Intro...

Welcome to my first blog. Ever.

I am literally two days into the second semester in the graduate journalism department at New York University. For my Investigations in Depth class, I will spend the next 15 weeks completing a three-part series about problems in the New York City middle school system. Specifically, I will focus on the issue of overage students: students that are ages 16 through 18 and still taking seventh- and eighth-grade courses. Each week, I will post relevant notes, thoughts, photographs and other findings that will help me with the stories.

This week, my goal is to learn everything I can about the NYC school system: Laws, policies, possible sources, problems, funding issues, etc. Please stay tuned.