Long Island malaise launches glory era for local Tea Party groups, Steve Flanagan:
A confluence of political events and depressed local economic circumstances has made Long Island a great place for the Tea Party to make itself heard, if not obeyed.
Bio: Kyle Spencer is a New York-based freelance writer. Her work has appeared in New York magazine, Slate, Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, Baby Talk, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald and The Prague Post. She is at work on a novel.
Stephen Flanagan, a 57-year-old trade-directory publisher who once had aspirations of running for office, is now a study in conservative grassroots activism, illustrating both the way in which Tea Party groups can figure into policy fights even in a liberal state like New York, and how they maximize the influence they have with public officials. More
Posted on July 21st, 2011 7:07am
Yesterday, while ex-I.M.F. chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was pleading not guilty to charges that he sexually assaulted a Sofitel hotel employee, French expats in New York’s most Frenchified neighborhood—a swath of bucolic streets that make up Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens known to some of its residents, semi-seriously, as Little Paris—were calling l’affaire D.S.K. infuriating, sad and even “comique.” More
Posted on June 7th, 2011 8:23am
1. Is NEST+m a magnet school or a gifted and talented school?
Technically, it's both. A magnet school is a school that draws from inside and outside its zone. The term does not address how students are selected for the school. A non-charter lottery school can be a magnet school. So can a gifted and talented school like NEST+m. New York City parents don't use the term as often as parents in other areas. They will more often refer to a place like Nest+1 as a gifted and talented school. But that does not mean it is not also a magnet school.
2. Do charter schools self-select?
A lottery system is by nature a self-selection system because it requires a certain amount of effort on the part of the parents. For prospective students whose parents who do not have the time, the energy or the ability to make that effort, charter schools are not an option. Once a parent has a child in a charter school like the ones Moskowitz runs, he or she is expected to remain actively engaged. That level of engagement can be too intense for some parents because of work, home or health issues. And this serves as a further weeding-out process.
Zoned schools do not self-select in the same way. Yes, there are gifted and talented programs which allow schools to recruit bright students. But the city itself has acknowledged that its gifted and talented programs are not serving as much of the city's diverse population as they ought to, a problem it is trying to rectify. So the argument about who actually gets into these programs would seem to support what the article says: that middle- and high-income parents know how to work the system. Sharon Otterman wrote a good piece on this in The New York Times last year.
To the extent that zoned schools have flexibility in choosing which out-of-zone students to admit, it serves as further evidence that well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class parents can leverage their clout and the schools' flexibility to get their children into institutions they're not actually zoned for.
4. Where did the demographic/special education numbers for Harlem Success and PS 149 come from?
The numbers came from a piece Gotham Schools did last year in response to Steve Brill's Times magazine piece on the Race to the Top competition, which looked at both schools and came to the conclusion that one was doing a much, much better job. Gotham Schools questioned whether their challenges were really the same.
I was able to check the free lunch numbers and the English proficiency stats myself in the state report cards. These are 2009/2010 report cards that include 2008-2009 numbers. They're here and here.
Gotham Schools got its special-education numbers from reports for PS 149 and special-education invoices given to the UFT by the New York State Department of Education.
The special-education figures for the students requiring the most intense assistance can be confusing because the percentage (67 percent for PS 149 and 35 percent for Harlem Success) is a percentage of each school's total special-education population, which is also uneven. At PS 149, 21 percent of the children fell under the special-education category, compared to Harlem Success where 14 percent fell under that category.
5. Do middle-class parents have options?
The story does not seek to belittle the issues facing middle-class parents as they struggle to get their children into good schools, nor does it seek to downplay the city's overcrowding issue. But it does suggest that as a group, middle-class parents have much better options than the low-income families to whom the charter operators have sought to appeal up to this point.
And
6. thank you for pointing out our editing snafu. What Klein was referring to was a quadratic equation.
Posted on May 13th, 2011 3:41pm
She's had great success generating interest in neighborhoods with the city's poorest-performing public schools. Parents in those neighborhoods have typically responded to her marketing by scrambling madly for the relatively few slots being offered. But there’s something significantly different about this latest round of outreach from Moskowitz, who currently runs seven schools in Harlem and the Bronx, all of which fit neatly into the popularly understood charter-school mandate of providing options to low-income families zoned for poor-performing public schools. This time, she’s going after the middle class. More
Posted on May 12th, 2011 8:48am
IBM’s plans to open a high school for 100 aspiring information-technologists in Crown Heights, Brooklyn can seem innovative or desperate, depending on how you look at it. It might be both. More
Posted on February 18th, 2011 9:36am
