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Speaking at a panel on big-city school reform in Washington, D.C. on March 2nd, Mayor Bloomberg repeated a claim he's made before: "We have closed the gap between black and Latino kids and white and Asian kids," he said. "We have cut it in half." It's a claim that has never held up to serious scrutiny.

Now our small community is faced with the unthinkable - we may be forced to close a highly performing public school to hand that school lock, stock and barrel over to a Charter School.  Shocking, isn't it?  How could this happen?  Charter school law was intended to help children who are under-served and falling through the cracks of traditional education systems.  Unfortunately, across the country there are more and more charter schools popping up which are taking advantage of loopholes to create pseudo-private schools with questionable admissions practices, high "suggested donation" requirements from parents and low representation of truly underprivileged children.

The UFT on April 3 filed suit in New York State Supreme Court to force the Department of Education to hand over copies of official emails, including exchanges about school closings and charter schools, that the union has been requesting since May 2010. The union cited a statement by Mayor Bloomberg that "to say that the parents shouldn't get what information is available is just an outrage," in arguing that the city's nearly two-year delay in providing the emails represents a "constructive denial" of the requests under the state's Freedom of Information law.

In the '60s it was an ambitious experiment in progressive education. Today John Dewey High graduates its final class after being closed as a failing high school. What led the Gravesend facility from success to shut-down?

The New York City reform model is centered upon closing 'failing' schools and opening new ones. Some of these 'failing' schools have been pillars of their communities for decades. One such school I read about in The New York Times is Jamaica High School in Jamaica, Queens. This large high school opened in 1925. But it is in the process, now, of being shut down. New York City rates schools on an A to F scale and if a school gets an 'F' or a 'D' or three consecutive 'C's, then it runs the risk of getting shut down. I thought I'd take a look at the last Jamaica High School progress report to see if there was anything 'interesting.' What I found is that Jamaica High School, in the 2009 to 2010 school year did very well on the regents component of their 'progress' score. They ranked, in fact, 164th out of 424 schools. In this post, I'll explain how the 'Weighted Regents Pass Grades' are calculated and how Jamaica High School fared quite well on this metric.  Below is from Jamaica High's 2009-2010 progress report.  The left bar graph is the comparison to their peer group and the right graph is the comparison to all city schools.  Click on the image to enlarge it.

Either charter schools have gotten a lot better over the past decade during which they've grown enormously in number -- this is what CER's Jeanne Allen tells HuffPost reporter Joy Resmovits -- or, well, they've just gotten better at avoiding being closed.

...this year's crop of seniors is the third-to-last that will ever graduate from Columbus. The school is in the process of being closed because of its low performance, despite valiant efforts to fend off the city's decision that included hearings, lawsuits, and two attempts at charter school conversion. This year, no new ninth-graders enrolled, and Columbus is scheduled to graduate its last students in 2014. It is now just one of seven schools sharing space in the four-story stone building that once housed it alone.

The most recent call to close underperforming charter schools came not from a teachers' union or a school district, but from a charter-school trade association. On Thursday, the California Charter Schools Association trumpeted its call for districts to discontinue 10 charter schools the group identified as culprits of "consistent academic underperformance."

Rahm Emanuel, whom Occupy Chicago has dubbed Mayor 1%, fired another shot at the city's public schools December 1. He proposed seven school closings and phase-outs, 10 "turnarounds" in which all the teachers and staff get fired, and six "co-locations," where private charter school operators grab portions of existing public schools.

A new study commissioned by D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray recommends that the city turn around or close more than three dozen traditional public schools in its poorest neighborhoods and expand the number of high-performing charter schools.

The repercussions from closing persistently failing schools are about to be felt by tiny Premont, Texas, which is located about 150 miles south of San Antonio. The town of 2,700 is bracing for the shuttering of the Premont Independent School District by the Texas Education Agency because of poor academics and a high truancy rate ("Texas district cancels sports in hopes of improving grades," Fox News, Jan. 21). In a last ditch attempt to avoid what seems to be inevitable, officials are eliminating sports this spring and next fall to save enough money to keep the district's schools open. Although school districts across Texas are dealing with about $4 billion in state-aid cuts, rural districts are particularly vulnerable because they have limited local tax bases. That's why the situation in Premont serves as an invaluable case study.

The percentage of charter schools that are being closed when they are up for renewal has fallen for two straight years, a new report finds, though it's unclear whether the decline is a result of improved quality, or lax oversight and persistent political pressure to keep low-performers open. In the 2010-11 year, 6.2 percent of charters reviewed for renewal were shut down, a decrease from 8.8 percent the previous year and 12.6 percent the year before that, according to a report released today by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. NACSA officials acknowledge that they don't have clear explanations for why closure rates fell.

During a week in which the Bloomberg administration has embraced an independent, landmark study that linked its hallmark policy of small schools to increased student success, a group of parents and elected officials took to the steps of City Hall on Friday to denounce the administration's education agenda, particularly its decisions to close or phase out city schools and its policies to address low college preparedness rates for minority students.

What I'm not for… and I'm not yet sure what's going on here… is pretending that we can simply shut down schools in high poverty neighborhoods, blaming teachers and principals for their failure, and then either a) replacing the school management and staff with individuals likely to be even less qualified and less well equipped to handle the circumstances,  or b) initiating an inevitably continuous pattern of displacement from school to school to school for children already disadvantaged.

Newark's new schools superintendent, Cami Anderson, outlined a broad plan on Friday to reshape the state's largest school system, including closing poorly performing schools and lifting standards for charters. Although many of the changes echoed similar efforts in New York City, Ms. Anderson cast the blueprint as one tailored to the needs of Newark, a district where some parents, teachers and other stakeholders have grown resentful and suspicious of outsiders after more than 15 years under state control. But in what was perhaps a sign of difficulties to come, her presentation before parents, teachers and residents at Rutgers-Newark on Friday evening was drowned out by shouts for her to return to New York City, where she worked as a superintendent under schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

In this report, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) claims that California charter schools are reversing the trend of low academic achievement among African American students and effectively closing the Black-White achievement gap. After a review of CCSA's analyses and findings, however, it becomes clear that the claims are misrepresented or exaggerated. In the years under study, African American students enrolled in traditional public schools outgained those enrolled in charter schools by a small margin, although the charter school students started and ended higher. In addition, the authors present a regression model, with Academic Performance Index (API) scores as the outcome variable, that accounts for only 3-6% of overall variance. Based on this model, the percentage of African American enrollment is negatively related to API scores in both charter and traditional public schools, a trend that will not reverse the academic standing for African American students. In fact, the gap continues to grow, albeit at a slightly slower rate in charter schools. Finally, the report's claim that charter schools are centers of innovation does not hold. Rather, as the authors eventually conclude themselves, there were no instructional practices observed in California charter schools that are not also present in traditional public schools.

Of the unions representing public school teachers and principals in New York City, the principals' union had played a passive role in the charged and increasingly divisive dispute over an evaluation system to gauge the performance of teachers and principals in 33 struggling schools receiving federal grants to help improve their results. No longer. On Wednesday, the principals' union president, Ernest A. Logan, pre-emptively condemned the city's proposal to close and reopen most of those schools under a new improvement model, saying in a strongly worded letter to the state's education commissioner, John B. King Jr., that it is simply a ploy to shut out the unions.

Federal school "turnaround" strategies that call for firing teachers, replacing managers, or closing troubled public schools or converting them into charter schools often meet with understandable skepticism, resistance and even anger among the parents whose children attend those schools. How should policymakers react? According to a recent study from the think tank Public Agenda, the answer is to treat the harsh realities caused by turnarounds as a public relations problem. That's the conclusion of a review released today of What's Trust Got to Do With It? A Communications and Engagement Guide for School Leaders Tackling the Problem of Persistently Failing Schools.

Every year, Mayor Bloomberg's DOE creates a new list of struggling schools. Once the schools have been identified, the DOE generally moves to shut them down. This year of the 21 high schools have landed on Bloomberg's latest struggling schools list, at least 8 (38%) are new schools that were opened on Bloomberg's watch. And, when you consider that Bloomberg's new high schools represent about 40% of all existing high schools,1 you quickly realize that Bloomberg is shutting his new schools at about the same rate that he shuts the older ones. Put another way, this year, DOE is thinking of closing 5.4% of its new schools and 5.8% of its old. Figure out the sense in that. But if you can't (because I can't), read on.

"In response to a request under the NJ Open Public Records Act (OPRA), Education Law Center has obtained a confidential proposal prepared for the Broad Foundation by the NJ Department of Education (NJDOE) to "turnaround," take control, and potentially close over 200 public schools over the next three years.  NJ Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf submitted a draft "School Turnaround Proposal" to the Eli Broad Foundation in November 2011, seeking to secure millions in grant funds from the private, Los Angeles-based foundation. The draft formed the basis of a final proposal, submitted February 2012, requesting $7.6 million in grant funds."