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Last week, the DOE announced the final list of schools it wants to close, and attached to it came the usual press release designed to justify their continued implementation of a failed policy. The release was so clearly misleading that very few people in New York City would believe a single thing it has to say. But since the folks at Tweed have ambitions bigger than the five boroughs can contain, and because the rest of the country might actually believe them, a few corrections are in order. So here you go

It's a lot more satisfying showing that a 'failing' school is being unfairly closed than showing that a 'miracle' school is getting accolades it doesn't deserve. I applied the same analysis I recently did for Jamaica High School to the just announced closure of a New York City school since 1913, Washington Irving High School.  I learned that they had very respectable Regents 'progress' scores compared to the rest of the New York City High Schools.  A weighted Regents pass rate of 1 means that the students did just as expected on the Regents.  Higher than 1 means they outperformed expectations. 

Despite a snowstorm, hundreds turned out to Friday's round of school closing hearings, and tensions were high as supporters brought on yellow school buses clashed with parents, students and community activists.

How does the DOE decide which high schools to close? For the third straight year, and all claims to a nuanced review of quality aside, the schools the DOE chooses to shut are simply those that dare to teach the students with the city's highest needs. There's nothing terribly nuanced about it at all. (For previous years, see here and here).

The sun had not yet risen on Washington Irving High School when students, teachers and parents began gathering on the school's steps on Tuesday morning to protest its likely closing. Their school, which is located in the middle of Manhattan's upscale Gramercy Park neighborhood, is one of 25 public schools the city's Department of Education is proposing to close over the next several years for poor performance. But the group that assembled on the school's steps in the cold morning air was determined to have it otherwise.

At their core, public charter schools are about one simple trade-off: a charter school receives more autonomy to operate in the way its staff thinks will provide the best results for students. In return, it accepts greater accountability for the results it achieves academically and operationally - with the understanding that if a school fails, it will be closed. That is why charters get a license to operate for five years at a time - and have to make the case that they should be renewed.

About 15 percent of the nation's charter schools close-and that's not a bad thing, according to a newly released report, which argues that those shutdowns are proof that the system weeds out institutions that can't cut it for one reason or another. Of roughly 6,700 charter schools that have opened in the United States, 1,036 have closed since 1992, says a report unveiled today by the Center for Education Reform, in Washington.

DC would likely close some successful schools while expanding failing schools if it relies upon a study released last week. The much-anticipated study, which the Deputy Mayor for Education commissioned to help plan school closures and charter school policies, is highly flawed.

Closing schools doesn't save very much money in the context of an urban district's budget, and selling or leasing surplus school buildings tends to be difficult because they're often old and in struggling neighborhoods, a recent report from a Philadelphia research group says. On the positive side, however, the study finds that students appear to make it through a school closure with minimal effects on their academic progress. And it says school districts can help generate some acceptance for a downsizing plan by involving the community early and establishing clear reasons for why certain schools must close.

A city board voted on Thursday night to close 18 schools and eliminate the middle school grades at five others, citing poor performance. The decision drew howls of opposition from hundreds of teachers' union members, parents and students, who gathered in the auditorium of Brooklyn Technical High School along with a group that was inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The Philadelphia school district could close as many as 64 schools and eliminate hundreds of central office jobs in the next few years. A sweeping reorganization proposal made public Tuesday includes more than half a billion dollars in budget cuts by 2017. It's called "A Blueprint for Transforming Philadelphia's Public Schools" and it includes a proposal to divvy up the remaining schools among "achievement networks" led by teams of educators or nonprofit institutions. The achievement networks would have 20 to 30 schools each and be connected by either geography or a common, creative approach to teaching and learning. The leaders of the network, which could include successful principals, would have contracts based on performance and be required to serve students of all abilities and situations equitably, reports thenotebook.org.

In what should be the biggest story of the week, the city of Philadelphia's school system announced Tuesday that it expects to close 40 public schools next year and 64 by 2017. The school district expects to lose 40% of current enrollment to charter schools, the streets or wherever, and put thousands of experienced, well qualified teachers, often grounded in the communities where they teach, on the street. Ominously, the shredding of Philadelphia's public schools isn't even news outside Philly.

In the years since the publication of "Silenced Dialogue" and the 1995 book it inspired, Other People's Children, the standards-and-accountability school reform movement rose to prominence. Its focus on closing the achievement gap through skills building echoed many of Delpit's commitments, but she found herself troubled by the movement's discontents. Many low-income schools canceled field trips and classes in the arts, sciences and social studies, for example, in order to focus on raising math and reading standardized test scores. Now Delpit is responding in a new book, "Multiplication is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children. (The title quote comes from an African-American boy who, bored and discouraged by the difficulty of his math assignment, proclaimed the subject out-of-reach for kids like himself.) "I am angry that the conversation about educating our children has become so restricted," Delpit writes in the introduction. "What has happened to the societal desire to instill character? To develop creativity? To cultivate courage and kindness?" Here, in an interview with The Nation, Delpit discusses the intelligence of poor children, how she would reform Teach for America, and why college professors should be as focused on closing the achievement gap as K-12 educators are. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Anyone who wants to start a charter school must of course receive permission, and there are laws and policies governing how such permission is granted. In some states, multiple entities (mostly districts) serve as charter authorizers, whereas in others, there is only one or very few. For example, in California there are almost 300 entities that can authorize schools, almost all of them school districts. In contrast, in Arizona, a state board makes all the decisions. The conventional wisdom among many charter advocates is that the performance of charter schools depends a great deal on the "quality" of authorization policies - how those who grant (or don't renew) charters make their decisions. This is often the response when supporters are confronted with the fact that charter results are varied but tend to be, on average, no better or worse than those of regular public schools. They argue that some authorization policies are better than others, i.e., bad processes allow some poorly-designed schools start, while failing to close others. This argument makes sense on the surface, but there seems to be scant evidence on whether and how authorization policies influence charter performance. From that perspective, the authorizer argument might seem a bit like tautology - i.e., there are bad schools because authorizers allow bad schools to open, and fail to close them. As I am not particularly well-versed in this area, I thought I would look into this a little bit.

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made school choice a foundation of his education agenda, and since he took office in 2002, the city opened more than 500 new schools; closed, or is in the process of closing, more than 100 ailing ones; and created an environment in which more than 130 charter schools could flourish. No neighborhood has been as transformed by that agenda as Harlem. When classes resume on Thursday, many of its students will be showing up in schools that did not exist a decade ago. The idea, one that became a model for school reform nationwide, was to let parents shop for schools the same way they would for housing or a cellphone plan, and that eventually, the competition would lift all boats. But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform."

Education marketeers argue that closing persistently underperforming schools is necessary in order to provide students with the education they are entitled to. The strategy has great intuitive appeal to taxpayers who are fed up with efforts to turn these schools around. But this approach promises far more than it can deliver for reasons that are poorly understood.

The new breed of paternalistic schools appears to be the single most effective way of closing the achievement gap. No other school model or policy reform in urban secondary schools seems to come close to having such a dramatic impact on the performance of inner-city students. Done right, paternalistic schooling provides a novel way to remake inner-city education in the years ahead.

Three West Harlem secondary schools are on the chopping block for poor performance and in danger of being closed. All three schools are, or will soon be, sharing buildings with charter schools belonging to the Success Academy Network. Some in the community think their schools are being sacrificed to allow for the expansion of the well-funded and politically potent Success Academy Network. They say the DOE has not done enough to support the struggling schools. The DOE is "starving these schools so they have an excuse to shut them down," said Noah Gotbaum, a representative for Community Education Council 3 who attended public hearings about the future of all three schools.

Closing down underperforming public schools in Chicago has historically been a traumatic process, with battle lines drawn between affected communities and district leaders.

For the first time, officials are moving to shut down an entire New York City charter-school network. Three schools that make up the Believe High School Network are slated to close in June after the state Education Department said on Tuesday it plans to revoke the charters of the two schools it oversees. The announcement came a day after the city Department of Education said it would close the Believe school under its purview. Although the city's struggling schools generally face closure because of poor academic performance, the Believe schools are being targeted for fiscal and governance problems.