For Immediate Release
May 20, 2008 2:54 PM
Regents Chancellor Robert M. Bennett and State Education Commissioner Richard Mills announced on May 15 that a total of 1,759 public schools, 19 charter schools and 288 public school districts in New York State have been deemed “High Performing/Gap Closing” under the No Child Left Behind Act along with 373 schools, 10 charter schools and 62 districts deemed “Rapidly Improving.” New York City has 328 high performing/gap closing schools and 161 rapidly improving schools, almost twice as many as last year.
“It is encouraging to see that the hard work of New York City’s public school educators has resulted in the city having 161 schools on the state’s rapidly improving list – almost twice as many as the year before – and 328 high performing, gap closing schools. We still have to strive to ensure sustained academic improvement in more of our schools, but these results show that we are on the right path. We can only hope that this academic progress will not be endangered by the $450 million in education budget cuts that Mayor Bloomberg and the city Department of Education have proposed for our schools.
One other concern is the city’s failure to align its school rating system with the state’s. We still have schools that got bad grades on the city’s school progress reports while being rated as rapidly improving by the state such as PS 33 in Manhattan and PS 182 in the Bronx, both of which received an F from the city. Parents and educators need clear, accurate and consistent measurements for judging their schools’ progress, and the city needs to provide a yardstick that is more consistent with the state’s.”