How a Middle School Can Be ‘Dangerous’ and Still Get an A

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

When Shawn Carson taught last year at a middle school named the South Bronx Academy for Applied Media, he entered his room on many days to find a message from his students on the blackboard. In graphic and vulgar language, as he recalled in a recent interview, it described him committing a homosexual act.

On one occasion, Mr. Carson said, he caught his female students breaking open lockers in the room. Some of his pupils, known in the school’s parlance as “scholars,” threw his books and stapler out the window. When he went from desk to desk, offering editing advice on writing assignments, he was often met with profanity.

Mr. Carson was not alone among the school’s faculty members who said they endured such episodes. Michelle L’Eplattenier said a digital camera and a cellphone were stolen from her room. A student in Shannon Staples’s class routinely overturned desks. Ms. Staples was also punched while trying to separate two pupils trading blows.

Because of their experiences, Mr. Carson, Ms. Staples and Ms. L’Eplattenier have all left the school within the past year, part of an exodus that has claimed roughly half the faculty. And their concerns about the school’s climate are echoed by students. In a survey conducted last year by the City Department of Education, 98 percent of Applied Media’s students said there was fighting in the school, 94 percent said there was bullying and 67 percent said they were worried about crime and violence in the school.

Reflecting such realities, the New York State Education Department has placed Applied Media on its list of “persistently dangerous” schools, one of 52 in the state. Applied Media earned the designation after its second year of existence.

Yet when the city’s Education Department recently released its progress reports about public schools, Applied Media received an A.

There are, of course, firm statistical reasons for the grade. While the overall performance of Applied Media on standardized tests falls well below citywide averages, the school raised the scores of its lowest-performing pupils, as well as those in special education and bilingual tracks, which are indeed sensible criteria for appraising a school.

The A grade, though, may also have something to do with the fact that the progress reports weigh all safety factors as only 2.5 percent of a school’s total grade, said James S. Liebman, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer. He has said the department decided not to give safety more consideration because statistics on school violence rely on self-reporting and tend to be deceptive.

For a great many children, parents and teachers, however, the order and security inside a school matter for rather more than 2.5 percent. And so the case of Applied Media and its A is a tale of two schools, the one reflected in the Education Department’s metrics and the one experienced firsthand by many of the teachers.

“This is a school that’s doing remarkably well on the progress side, and ‘remarkably’ isn’t a word I use lightly,” said Mr. Liebman, who is also a law professor at Columbia University, where this reporter is on the journalism faculty.

The principal, Roshone Ault, said she supported teachers in disciplinary matters by bringing in experts in “social-emotional learning” to train the faculty and was offering students incentives like pizza parties for good behavior.

“ON discipline we had a system in place,” she said. “There was a lot of support around it.”

But teachers dispute her description.

“I didn’t teach last year,” Ms. Staples said. “I was a police officer and a baby sitter. You’d write up kids left and right, and then nothing would happen. No one would help you. And the kids would just come right back. After I got hit, the principal’s response was, ‘That’s what happens in middle schools.’”

Mr. Carson similarly described a lack of administrative support and meaningful discipline. “The administration would be telling you that it would all fall into place if you had a better lesson plan or more student engagement or arranged the desks in a U shape,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter how good your lesson plan is if the kids can’t even stay still long enough to write the ‘Aim’ and ‘Do Now’ off the board. There are no repercussions. There is no punishment fitting the infraction.”

The woes, Ms. L’Eplattenier said, went beyond discipline. Many classrooms lacked books, a problem also cited in the student survey. A school supposedly oriented to media did not have a student Web site. A closet’s worth of canned food, donated by pupils before Thanksgiving 2006, was never given to any charity and eventually spoiled, Ms. L’Eplattenier said.

During the 2006-7 term, 13 of the 16 teachers were in their first year. The principal, Ms. Ault, had never led a school before founding Applied Media in 2005. She previously coordinated special education at a charter school in Harlem that was shut by the state for academic deficiency.

Still, Applied Media showed student progress on its standardized tests.

One reason for the improving scores, Ms. Ault said, was that during the period of test preparation in the late winter and early spring, she removed the “most disruptive” students from their regular classes. Dmitry Terekhov, a teacher, said: “The A we received is a testament to the teachers. We got the job done.”

Mr. Liebman advanced another view of Applied Media’s identification as “persistently dangerous,” saying it actually speaks well for the school. Only a school that keeps track of its disciplinary incidents will compile enough examples to make the state list, he said. Ms. Ault, the principal, offered the same explanation. Some teachers, however, say they were dissuaded from reporting incidents.

As for the high attrition rate among teachers, Ms. Ault called it “commonplace” at new schools. Mr. Liebman said many teachers flee schools that are in the midst of reform and instilling a “culture of accountability.” He did not address the roles of theft, violence and insults in persuading teachers to leave.

Even Mr. Terekhov, one of the few teachers striking some optimistic notes about Applied Media, conceded the challenges. “No principals want to be where we are,” he said. “No teachers want to be where we are. It’s too hard.”

Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. His e-mail is sgfreedman@nytimes.com.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/nyregion/19education.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print

A Teacher Grows Disillusioned After a ‘Fail’ Becomes a ‘Pass’

A Teacher Grows Disillusioned After a ‘Fail’ Becomes a ‘Pass’

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

NY Times, Aug. 1, 2007

Several weeks into his first year of teaching math at the High School of Arts and Technology in Manhattan, Austin Lampros received a copy of the school’s grading policy. He took particular note of the stipulation that a student who attended class even once during a semester, who did absolutely nothing else, was to be given 45 points on the 100-point scale, just 20 short of a passing mark.

Mr. Lampros’s introduction to the high school’s academic standards proved a fitting preamble to a disastrous year. It reached its low point in late June, when Arts and Technology’s principal, Anne Geiger, overruled Mr. Lampros and passed a senior whom he had failed in a required math course.

That student, Indira Fernandez, had missed dozens of class sessions and failed to turn in numerous homework assignments, according to Mr. Lampros’s meticulous records, which he provided to The New York Times. She had not even shown up to take the final exam. She did, however, attend the senior prom.

Through the intercession of Ms. Geiger, Miss Fernandez was permitted to retake the final after receiving two days of personal tutoring from another math teacher. Even though her score of 66 still left her with a failing grade for the course as a whole by Mr. Lampros’s calculations, Ms. Geiger gave the student a passing mark, which allowed her to graduate.

Ms. Geiger declined to be interviewed for this column and said that federal law forbade her to speak about a specific student’s performance. But in a written reply to questions, she characterized her actions as part of a “standard procedure” of “encouraging teachers to support students’ efforts to achieve academic success.”

The issue here is not a violation of rules or regulations. Ms. Geiger acted within the bounds of the teachers’ union’s contract with the city, by providing written notice to Mr. Lampros of her decision.

No, the issue is more what this episode may say about the Department of Education’s vaunted increase in graduation rates. It is possible, of course, that the confrontation over Miss Fernandez was an aberration. It is possible, too, that Mr. Lampros is the rare teacher willing to speak on the record about the pressures from administrators to pass marginal students, pressures that countless colleagues throughout the city privately grumble about but ultimately cave in to, fearful of losing their jobs if they object.

Mr. Lampros has resigned and returned to his home state, Michigan. The principal and officials in the Department of Education say that he missed 24 school days during the last year for illness and personal reasons. He missed two of the three sets of parent-teacher conferences. He also had conflicts with an assistant principal, Antonio Arocho, over teaching styles. Mr. Lampros said all of this was true.

Still, Mr. Lampros received a satisfactory rating five of the six times administrators formally observed him. He has master’s degrees in both statistics and math education and has won awards for his teaching at the college level..

“It’s almost as if you stick to your morals and your ethics, you’ll end up without a job,” Mr. Lampros said in an interview. “I don’t think every school is like that. But in my case, it was.”

The written record, in the form of the minutely detailed charts Mr. Lampros maintained to determine student grades, supports his account. Colleagues of his from the school — a counselor, a programmer, several fellow teachers — corroborated key elements of his version of events. They also describe a principal worried that the 2006 graduation rate of 72.5 percent would fall closer to 50 or 60 percent unless teachers came up with ways to pass more students.

After having failed to graduate with her class in June 2006, Miss Fernandez, who, through her mother, declined to be interviewed, returned to Arts and Technology last September for a fifth year. She was enrolled in Mr. Lampros’s class in intermediate algebra. Absent for more than two-thirds of the days, she failed, and that grade was left intact by administrators.

When second semester began, Miss Fernandez again took the intermediate algebra class, which fulfilled one of her graduation requirements. According to Mr. Lampros’s records, she missed one-third of the classes, arrived late for 20 sessions, turned in half the required homework assignments, failed 11 of 14 tests and quizzes, and never took the final exam.

Two days after the June 12 final, Miss Fernandez told Mr. Lampros that she had a doctor’s note excusing her from school on the day of the exam, he said. On June 18, she asked him if she had failed the class, and he told her she had.. The next day, the principal summoned Mr. Lampros to a meeting with Miss Fernandez and her mother. He was ordered, he said, to let her retake the final.

Mr. Arocho, the assistant principal, wrote in a letter to Mr. Lampros that Miss Fernandez had a doctor’s note, issued March 15, permitting her to miss school whenever necessary in the spring. Mr. Arocho did not respond to telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment.

There is such a note, issued by Dr. Jason Faller, but it excused absences “over the last three months” — that is, the period between mid-December and mid-March. In a recent interview, Dr. Faller said he saw Miss Fernandez only once, in March, and confirmed that his excuse note covered absences only before March 15.

For whatever reason, school administrators misinterpreted the note and told Mr. Lampros that Miss Fernandez would be allowed to retake the final — and to retake it after having two days of one-on-one tutoring by another math teacher, an advantage none of Mr. Lampros’s other students had, he said.

Mr. Lampros, disgusted, did not come to school the next two days. Miss Fernandez meanwhile took the test and scored a 66, which still left her far short of a 65 average for the semester. Nonetheless, Mr. Arocho tried to enter a passing mark for her. When he had to relent after objections by the teachers’ union representative, Mr. Lampros was allowed to put in the failing grade. Ms. Geiger promptly reversed it.

Samantha Fernandez, Indira’s mother, spoke on her behalf. “My daughter earned everything she got,” she said. Of Mr. Lampros, she said, “He needs to grow up and be a man.”

From Michigan, Mr. Lampros recalled one comment that Mrs. Fernandez made during their meeting about why it was important for Indira to graduate. She couldn’t afford to pay for her to attend another senior prom in another senior year.

E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com

So Much Paperwork, So Little Time to Teach

July 4, 2007

On Education

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Allison Rabenau celebrated an inauspicious milestone on the otherwise unremarkable day of Oct. 18, 2004. Six weeks into her first year as a teacher, she finally taught a class.

Ms. Rabenau had left a long career as a stage manager in the commercial theater to learn how to teach English as a second language to immigrant children in New York’s public schools. The only problem, she quickly discovered, was that the avalanche of paperwork and other assignments meant she actually got to teach only sporadically.

In a perfect, if dispiriting bit of symmetry, her initial year at Public School 123 in Harlem ended the same way it began. Ms. Rabenau lost the last six weeks of the spring term to prepare, administer, then score a standardized test for English fluency.

Essentially, her teaching year, and her students’ learning year, had run only from mid-October to mid-April, with numerous interruptions even then. During the time when the students were entitled to instruction in English, they were sitting in other courses that they may or may not have understood.

Being a newcomer to the profession, by way of the alternative track of the Teaching Fellows program, Ms. Rabenau assumed the fault lay with her alone. Except that in her next year, the pattern repeated itself. (Well, O.K., she did manage to convene the first real class on Oct. 7, 2005, a mere five weeks along.)

In the spring of 2006, she came up with a strategy to help her students’ writing. She had them become pen pals with her cat, whose photograph adorned the classroom and was the subject of plenty of classroom chatter. The arrival of the annual English-fluency test, with all of its attendant duties, scuttled that plan.

But it gave birth to another idea. Less inclined after a second futile year to blame only herself, Ms. Rabenau set about surveying other teachers of English fluency for a research paper in her graduate studies at City University of New York.

The results, which she assembled in the summer of 2006, told her that her frustrations were shared. The situation was most acute for teachers in schools that did not have a staff administrator to handle the voluminous paperwork required for English language learners, as the students are called.

Teachers in such schools were responsible for completing more than a dozen different forms, evaluations, assessments and reports that came variously from the levels of district, city, state and federal government, and grading standardized tests.

Teachers like Ms. Rabenau were also repeatedly conscripted within their schools to substitute for absent colleagues, to proctor exams in other classes and to chaperon field trips.

“I’ve worked with opera singers and Rockettes, so I know what stress is,” said Ms. Rabenau, 44. “And when I was a stage manager, I did plenty of paperwork. But this frustration was unlike anything I ever felt because the stakes were so much higher.”

Ms. Rabenau makes no claim that her research paper is defensible as social-science scholarship. She approached a modest sample of 150 teachers and received responses from 24. Still, her findings at the very least suggest an endemic problem with consequences for both teacher morale and student achievement.

Wojciech Schneider, who participated in the survey, started teaching at a kindergarten-through-Grade 8 school in the Bronx after more than a decade of instructing adult immigrants in English.

Even with such experience, and with a supportive principal, he scrambled to deal with nearly 100 students spread across three levels of fluency and all nine grades. He was able to teach them for only about 60 percent of the supposedly allotted classroom time.

“It was a reality check for me, to have the number of students I was supposed to serve and on top of that all the paperwork,” said Mr. Schneider, 36. “It was like trying to swim and stay afloat, and I was feeling this strong pull downward from all the other things that did not entail teaching.”

Jim Knox, 55, took up teaching after a career in health care administration, making him an expert of sorts in bureaucracies. As the sole instructor for about 60 elementary school students learning English in the Bronx, he lost so much class time to other tasks that eventually his principal arrived at an inventive and perverse solution: Mr. Knox would steal time from himself, teaching the day’s class in periods designated for preparing the next day’s lessons. “Systemically,” Mr. Knox said of the conflicting demands on teachers like him, “it is absurd.”

Before hearing the response from the Department of Education, it is worth making one point. Ms. Rabenau, Mr. Schneider and Mr. Knox offer no sense of being complainers or goldbrickers. If anything, as accomplished professionals who came into New York’s public schools and specifically the education of immigrant children because of a certain idealism, they are the kind of teachers the department ought to be holding onto, not giving reasons to leave.

The Education Department put forward Andrés Alonso, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, to deliver a long, detailed and aggressive defense of the city’s track record with immigrant students. (Since that session, on June 20, Dr. Alonso has become the chief executive of Baltimore’s public schools.)

“The bottom line is outcomes for us,” Dr. Alonso said.

THE department delineated those outcomes in a 23-page PowerPoint presentation chart it supplied subsequently. The data indeed showed that English language learners were performing better on basic skills tests and Regents exams, as well as in promotion and graduation rates, during Joel I. Klein’s tenure as chancellor.

The improvements, though, also have coincided with New York State’s raising of graduation requirements and with the federal No Child Left Behind law, which forces schools to show the progress, or lack thereof, of student subgroups, including those with limited English. So any credit has to be shared.

When it came to addressing the experiences of teachers like those in Ms. Rabenau’s research paper, Dr. Alonso recalled his own experiences teaching English as a second language in Newark. He did not express a surplus of sympathy.

“It was part of my job that was no different from my weekly routine,” he said, referring to the paperwork. “The bottom line is, are the kids being promoted, are they passing the Regents, are they being mainstreamed? We should be tremendously skeptical of anecdotal data.”

As for Ms. Rabenau, she resigned during the school year and will be leaving New York soon for Bangkok to teach at an international school. Perhaps the schoolchildren there will get to correspond with her cat.

Samuel G. Freedman is a journalism professor at Columbia University. E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com.