134 schools to get good-grades lagniappes

Posted by Philissa at 3:59 PM

With great fanfare today, Chancellor Klein announced that the 134 schools that earned both an "A" on their progress reports and a "well developed" on their quality reviews would get the cash prizes promised to high performers. (The DOE's press release calls those the "top-performing schools," but we know that isn't quite accurate -- they're really the schools that improved most from 2006 to 2007.) The schools will get $30 per student to use at their discretion, as long as they also share the secrets of their success with schools that didn't get such high marks.

Three times as many elementary schools as high schools are getting the funds, as are more than twice as many schools in Queens as in the Bronx. According to the list of schools the DOE released, schools are taking home chunks of change ranging from $4,458 (East New York Family Academy) to $122,837 (Franklin Roosevelt High School). I wonder why the amounts being disbursed are not all multiples of $30 -- perhaps it's a result of the DOE's class size reduction plan that diminished classes by an average of just a fraction of a kid each?