What happens when you give a commie douchebag $582 million of your money to fix your schools?

Just ask the suckers that pay taxes in New York City.


WTF? The Old Gray Whore damns their commie wet dream of a mayor, Spill de Blah-zio, with faint praise:

For $582 Million Spent on Troubled Schools, Some Gains, More Disappointments ...

When it comes to New York’s schools, Mayor Bill de Blasio has placed his biggest bet on the Renewal program, which has pumped extra money and other resources into a group of the city’s most troubled schools, at a cost of $582 million.

On Tuesday, when Mr. de Blasio held a news conference to announce how the city’s third through eighth graders had done on the annual state math and reading tests, he singled out the Renewal schools for praise, saying that they had “outpaced the citywide average” on those exams. At those schools, the percentage of children who passed the reading tests increased by 3.2 points from last year; the percentage passing the math tests increased by 1.5 points. Citywide, reading proficiency increased by 2.6 percentage points and math proficiency grew by 1.4 points.

But a closer look at the performance of the elementary and middle schools in the program last school year — there were 57, five of which have closed or been merged with other schools — shows that those numbers mask a yawning divide among the schools, with some making impressive gains, while others languish. And almost all of them lag behind the city over all: On average, in reading, just 15.9 percent of Renewal students scored as proficient, compared to 40.6 percent citywide; in math, only 9.4 percent of Renewal students passed, compared to the citywide average of 37.8 percent.

To track the effects of the program, which gives schools a longer day and access to special services like vision care for students or mental heath supports, The New York Times analyzed Renewal school performance on the 2016 and 2017 tests, as compared with the 2015 scores.

Over that period, citywide, the percentage of students who passed the reading tests increased by nearly 10.7 points; the percentage who passed the math tests grew by 2.9 points.

Of the 57 schools in the Renewal program, only 16 narrowed the gap between their performance and the city average in English since 2015. The rest fell further behind. In math, 27 schools narrowed the gap, while 30 fell further behind.

The best performer among the Renewal schools was Public School 15, the Roberto Clemente school, an elementary school in the East Village, which has a challenging population. Last year, 45 percent of the students were homeless, according to city records. On the 2015 tests, just 5.4 percent of the school’s children passed the English test. On the most recent round of tests, 35.8 percent did — a huge improvement. On math, Roberto Clemente was the only Renewal school where a higher percentage of children passed the test, 45 percent, than did so citywide.

While Roberto Clemente’s growth is impressive, the school has just 180 students, and only about 70 of them took the tests this year, so the test scores of a small number of children can have a big impact on its passing rates.

Speaking of the greatest ballplayer ever, when is MLB going to get its head out of its ass and retire his number league wide?

Other high-growth schools included J.H.S. 123 James M. Kieran, in the Soundview section of the Bronx, and P.S. 328 Phyllis Wheatley in East New York, in Brooklyn, which made less dramatic gains than Roberto Clemente. Students at James M. Kieran outperformed the city’s growth rate by 6 percentage points in math, but only 13.3 percent of its students passed the test this year.

Under Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, many struggling schools were closed. Alison Coviello, the principal of the Jonathan D. Hyatt school in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx, said that when she took over five years ago, her school was set to be closed. The Education Department later reversed that decision and this year nearly 31.8 percent of the students passed the reading tests, compared with 17.6 percent in 2015. Last year, she said, there was a big drop in the number of students who scored a Level 1 on the English exam, which is the lowest possible score.

At the bottom of the performance list were schools that, despite the extra resources, have made almost no progress, or even fallen behind where they started.

The Hunts Point School in the Bronx, for example, has improved only marginally in English, and the percentage of its students who pass the math tests fell to just 1.8 percent this year. Other schools at the bottom of the list were J.H.S. 291 Roland Hayes in Brooklyn and Urban Science Academy in the Bronx. The only school that performed worse than those three on the two tests was M.S. 584 in Brooklyn, which closed at the end of the school year.

The Department of Education said that the Hunts Point School has a new principal, assistant principal and guidance counselors, and that Urban Science Academy is revamping its curriculum. Roland Hayes offered Regents algebra, which gives high school credit, to its eighth graders for the first time this past year, the city said, so many of its high-achieving students took that test instead of the state math test their peers sat for. Seventeen of the 18 students who took the algebra test passed, the city said.

At least on paper, it is difficult to tell what separates the schools at the bottom of the list from those at the top, which cuts to the core of what makes school turnaround so difficult: nobody knows precisely what works.

“The problem is that there is no silver bullet to turnaround interventions,” said Priscilla Wohlstetter, a distinguished research professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “It’s a really tough thing to figure out what makes the difference in schools.”

TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.