Top o' Monday morning

Posted by helen at 9:23 AM

School may be out, but there's plenty buzzing in the city press -- about education, budget cuts, and attendance vigilance gone awry. Plus, the Mayor's slated to make an education statement at 1 pm today; more news will follow as the day unfolds.

In today's Times, Jennifer Medina celebrates a terrific grad rate (and estimates the human cost) at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, one of the city's new, small high schools, where the principal, having marked the school's first graduation, is leaving for another job. In the Sun, Elizabeth Green returns to MS 201, to air concerns about a new principal's effect on test-score rises. The budget compromise comes under closer scrutiny at Gotham Gazette -- yes, millions for education were restored, but deep cuts in NYCHA programs, Beacon community centers, and infant-mortality prevention efforts cast a long and gloomy shadow.

And yesterday, the News profiled a student aggressively pursued for truancy: Enrolled at a Brooklyn parochial school, she never showed up at her public high school, raising the ACS flag high. As always, the details devil the case: Inaccurate contact information, the DOE says, made finding the girl nearly impossible. That they're looking hard for absent students is in itself a sign of progress, however misguided this effort.