We’ll always have Paris, as noted in Casablanca, but Cambridge evidently doesn’t think very highly of us.
It is now somewhat well known that the consulting firm Cambridge Education has been hired by the Department of Education (DOE) to survey and rate each and every school in the city. Our judgment day has come and gone, and we have been determined to be “proficient,” the middle of the three ratings given by the group (above us are the “well-developed” schools, while those below are termed “undeveloped”).
Our rating has been finalized, so there is little that can be done. Therefore, we should embrace our mediocrity. Forget “Pro Scientia Atque Sapientia.” Our new motto needs to be “The Best Merely Proficient School In the Country.”
Cambridge Education assesses schools based on 28 categories, which include topics ranging from principal effectiveness to student-staff relationships. We received an average rating in 19 of them (and even did poorly in one), and thus are “proficient” overall. Only a few hundred other performance reviews have been completed, but once they are all done, the DOE hopes to have a full picture of what needs to be done to help each school. This would be a worthy cause if the consultants hadn’t already proven that their rushed methodology (each school receives a total of three days of visits before a final decision is made) can and will lead to unwarranted ratings, such as ours.
Stuyvesant’s stellar academic record and innumerable student success stories certainly should be enough to convince the DOE that it has wasted millions on a shoddy rating system. If such examples fail to enlighten the heads of the school system, our partners in the middle of the road should alert them that something is amiss.
One notable example is Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn, slated to be shut down and broken into small academies due to its consistently poor performance. How will the Department of Education respond to such a strange situation? Will it view Tilden’s rating as a sign that the school has hope, research systems which have led to drastic improvements in other formerly failing schools around the country, and work to fix Tilden’s problems?
Will it denounce the rating system in light of its incongruities with the Department’s own decisions, or continue to display marked ambivalence about Stuyvesant, lauding the school as well as us, the students, when convenient, and throwing us under the proverbial bus when supporting us would mean admitting mistakes? Indeed, will it react at all?
In a city where a 50 percent high school graduation rate is celebrated as an improvement, the fact that fewer than 10 percent of the schools rated have been labeled “undeveloped” should be shocking. City schools obviously have many problems. To only state that about the absolute worst of the schools is to do a grave disservice to every parent in the city.
Calling nearly half of the public schools “well-developed” when the numbers show this cannot be the case, treating the bad schools as pariahs, and throwing everyone else in the middle is not going to solve anything. Meanwhile, the DOE is choosing to selectively ignore the ratings, closing schools as it sees fit (as is the case with Tilden) while including the ratings in their process of determining things such as principal bonuses and school “letter grades.”
The ratings given by Cambridge Education and the DOE’s actions in light of them are equally disgraceful. The DOE cannot simultaneously bemoan budget crises, spend millions on a consulting firm that may spend a handful of silent minutes in each class, and selectively ignore the data it receives.
The DOE has a choice to make, and that choice should be clear: stop wasting money on unnecessary consultations and start getting personally involved in trying to fix the schools.