Weekly news round-up: charters, asbestos, and incentives

Posted by Lindsey at 5:02 PM

As parents and students begin gearing up for the new school year, the news this week was dominated by the standard – yet colossal and complicated – contemporary education debates, including charter schools, standardized testing, and incentives.

Mayor Bloomberg kicked off the week by announcing that 18 new charter schools would open in the city this fall. The Times opened a Q and A between readers and James D. Merriman IV, the chief executive of the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence. The Sun editorialized in favor of charter schools and private school vouchers. The Daily News wrote about Bay Ridge, Brooklyn parents who oppose a charter school moving into public school buildings.

A Newsday reporter who set out to prove that the Regents exams were easy by taking the U.S. History test unprepared scored a 97 and made his point. Meanwhile, students’ scores on the Advanced Placement tests were released, and the apparently mixed results of pay-for-scores programs vaulted the issue of monetary incentives back into the papers. Employees of the Princeton Review, a high-profile national testing company, made a serious computer error that resulted in 34,000 Florida public school students' private information available to anyone online.

Several disheartening stories involved special education students: allegations of abuse in one city school, asbestos in another, and concerns over special education bus service for the fall. A disabled teacher sued, claiming his epilepsy cost him his job, and a national story about corporal punishment (legal in schools in 21 states but not New York) found that special education students – as well as minority and low income students – disproportionately felt the paddle.

And a couple of journalists used the end of the summer to ask key questions about the future. What will happen to No Child Left Behind, now that Bush is on his way out and a new president is on his way in? Will mayoral control be renewed by the state legislature, especially since Klein and Bloomberg have largely ignored politicians’ education opinions? And where does Obama really stand on education, as supporters of several different ­– and sometimes competing – initiatives claim to be in alignment with the candidate? Education mysteries abound.

Charter chatter, Q & As

Posted by helen at 11:16 AM

Citing competition as the key to success, Mayor Bloomberg says that pressure from charter schools force traditional public schools to improve. But advocates like Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters beg to differ: the small classes that are the charter norm are all too elusive in mainstream public education, despite long-fought battles. And one has to ask a question that's tough to ask aloud: Are middle-class parents fighting as hard for access to charters as families in neighborhoods long poorly served by city schools?

Maybe that's one of the questions that will be answered on the New York Times Charter School Q&A thread. And for families of high-school students and rising eighth-graders, who will be facing the high-school selection process this year, the DOE is hosting a Q&A with Evaristo Jimenez, head of high school enrollment.

As one commenter implored yesterday, speak up! If parents don't ask the hard questions to advance their child's education, who will?

Bloomberg, Klein to school House panel

Posted by helen at 9:45 AM

Quiet week in NYC? Head down to D.C.: Tomorrow morning, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein will address a House panel on progress in urban education, along with D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, Klein protegee D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and public school leaders from Chicago and Atlanta.

We bet we'll hear about test score gains and closing the achievement gap -- but we doubt the conversation will include troubling nuances, like the fact that race-based gaps between brighter kids widen over time, even as they narrow for kids with lower skills. And we bet we won't hear the nitty-gritty on why level 4 test scores have dropped for middle schoolers this year: Will anyone ask about the price bright students pay in a system so focused on raising low-level student skills?

We'll likely hear about charter schools and merit pay, about leadership pipelines and increasing accountability. We'll hear about rising grad rates -- but bet the numbers they cite will be based on old data, as the newly calibrated scores are yet to be made public.

Will we learn anything new? We doubt it, but we'd love to be wrong. As it stands now, though, our bet is on celebration over substance, and photo-ops over hard questions.

Hebrew-language charter proposal on its way to DOE, state

Posted by Philissa at 7:06 AM

I had sort of thought that the folks who last autumn were talking about bringing a Hebrew-language charter school to New York City would have been dissuaded by the controversy surrounding the Khalil Gibran International Academy, but apparently they were not. Next week, representatives of the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life plans to submit an application to the DOE and the state Board of Regents to open a charter school as early as 2009, according to a report in the Jewish Daily Forward.

The proposal will be modeled after Ben Gamla Charter in Florida, which ran into some trouble early in this school year because its Hebrew language curriculum contained religious references. Considering that doing damage control for Khalil Gibran proved costly and embarrassing for the DOE and that the controversy continues to this day, it should be interesting to see what kind of reception the Hebrew school's advocates receive.

What does the governor's resignation mean for our schools?

Posted by Philissa at 12:37 PM

As the excitement of Governor Spitzer's resignation wanes and the state prepares for next week's leadership change, we can start to think about the practical implications of the leadership shakeup upon the city's schools. Upon taking office in January 2007, Spitzer promised to equalize funding disparities statewide in accordance with the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, and last April, the state legislature approved the budget he proposed, which included a $7 billion increase in school aid over five years, of which $5.4 billion would go to New York City. Recently, citing budget woes, Spitzer delayed the payment schedule, reducing the amount of money going to the schools next year.

Now, his departure could complicate the battle to win back state and city school funding -- or at least change its tone. Parents and advocates are planning to take to the steps of City Hall next Wednesday to demand that the mayor and governor restore the funding they promised to the city's schools -- but the governor who made the promise now will not be the same one who must decide whether to keep it.

Instead, that decision will fall to David Paterson, who will become governor on Monday afternoon, so it's good news that Paterson has supported the Campaign for Fiscal Equity since his Harlem state senator days. In addition to supporting equitable school funding, Paterson also has a reputation for championing the rights of the physically disabled; he has been legally blind since childhood. And charter advocates who were thrilled by Spitzer's lifting of the cap on charter schools will be pleased to note that Paterson is a fan of school choice.

Wisely, new charter school to integrate education, child welfare

Posted by Philissa at 9:25 AM

Charter schools have never sounded like a better idea than they do now — at the same time that regular public schools are being forced to cut essential services like tutoring and counseling, a new charter school is planning to offer unprecedented levels of social support. According to the Sun, Mott Haven Academy Charter School, opening this fall in the Bronx, will offer not only academic instruction but also a full-service welfare agency running tutoring, counseling, and activities for kids.

The Sun reports, "The result, the school's founders say, could be to revolutionize the way the government tackles poverty, giving the public better results for the same buck." I'm not sure the situation outlined in the Sun article is quite revolutionary, but it sure does make sense. Poverty, not teachers' lack of skill or dedication, is the greatest hindrance to student achievement. Greater coordination between city agencies will be necessary
to help kids learn and want to learn — and that's something that the founders of Mott Haven Academy Charter School seem already to understand.

Proposed charter schools being approved now for fall opening

Posted by Philissa at 4:03 PM

The Post today has a little more information about charter schools opening this fall. It looks like the Board of Regents is approving a dozen new charter schools: four in Queens, three in Manhattan, three in the Bronx, and one more that is still trying to settle its location. Here are three schools the Post mentions whose approval was news to me:

• La Cima, a Spanish dual-language school in Queens, opening with kindergarten and 1st grade. According to an October article in the Queens Times Newsweekly, schools in District 24 welcomed the school with "not exactly open arms" because of the district's widespread overcrowding.
  
• Voice, in Queens, which will have daily music classes. According to the State Education Department, Voice's proposed principal is currently an AP at PS 131.
  
• Ethical Community Charter School, in upper Manhattan or the Bronx, which is being opened by people who are inspired by the philosophy of humanist and reformer Felix Adler.
  

Check out our earlier post on charter schools opening in 2008 to see the names of more schools that will be opening their doors this fall. We'll let you know about charter school application deadlines and lotteries as soon as we find out about them.

Bronx charter school says staying home is best test prep

Posted by Philissa at 7:36 AM

Never mind that today is the start of the elementary grades state ELA exam — what school cancels Monday classes over the weekend? Bronx Preparatory Charter School, apparently. Maybe it was snowing yesterday in Bronx Prep's corner of Morrisania because the school's Board of Trustees canceled classes, giving no explanation to parents and students who were already nervous about the testing, according to an article in the Post today.

As Seth pointed out once, many high school kids skip school the Friday before the SAT to rest and prepare, so perhaps Bronx Prep was just giving its kids the same opportunity that kids at Staten Island Tech have. Still, should charter schools' scheduling autonomy extend to spur-of-the-moment decisions? And I wonder whether the board has gotten a rude awakening about the price of heating oil — the school recently moved into its own (stunning) building.

City-chartered schools getting grades get very good ones

Posted by Philissa at 7:02 AM

When the progress reports first came out, many, including Regent Merryl Tisch, were not happy that charter schools did not get grades. Chancellor Klein said he didn't have the authority or the data to issue grades for charter schools. But now the city has issued grades for more than a dozen of the schools it chartered, and the results are, unsurprisingly, favorable to the charters. Of the charter grades, 79 percent were A's and B's (compared with 62 percent of other schools), and only one school, Peninsula Preparatory Academy in Queens, received an F. KIPP Academy was among the five schools with A's — guess the staff retreat in the Carribbean paid off!

The charter progress reports are shorter than those for regular public schools, and "environment" is measured solely by attendance. Because of this, the reports clearly note that "it would be inaccurate to make a direct comparison to the grades assigned to non-charter DOE public schools" — but that hasn't stopped the press. The Sun proclaims, "Charter Schools Win Top Grades: Surpass Traditional Public Schools on Progress Reports," and notes that two city-chartered schools had higher numerical grades than any other schools in the city.

For equity's sake, I'm glad the charters are getting grades, but in reality, how much will they matter to the hundreds of families waiting for spaces to open up in charter schools that are often more disciplined and academically oriented than neighborhood schools? The charter schools' strong showing does little to dispel the notion that lots of test prep will equal a high grade in the city's accountability system. As Julie Trott, head of Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School, which got one of the two highest grades in the city, told the Sun, "We just basically are super, super serious about academics and don't play at all." Parents don't need a grade to tell them whether that's an environment they want for their child.

Still, given how little information is available about charter schools that isn't generated by the schools themselves, charter school reports strike me as more useful than those for regular public schools. We'll soon have more information; according to the Sun, the state has agreed to have all charter schools receive grades next year.

School opening news: A bumper crop of charters to open in 2008

Posted by Philissa at 5:29 PM

This past spring, when the state lifted the cap on the number of allowed charter schools, you could hear prospective school operators salivating. Now some of the first charters have been granted under the new cap.

Eight schools chartered by SUNY will open in the fall; all are part of existing networks of charter schools. There will be a new Achievement First school in Brownsville, a Carl C. Icahn school in Far Rockaway, an Uncommon Schools middle school in Brooklyn, and three replicas of the Harlem Success Academy Charter School in Manhattan. That represents a 300 percent expansion of Eva Moskowitz's charter school, which opened in 2006. And of course the UFT-endorsed Green Dot charter high school, based on the model out of Los Angeles, will open somewhere in the Bronx.

And while I can't find evidence that the DOE has actually granted charters yet for next year, this summer it did invite a number of schools to submit full charter applications for the fall of 2008, and at least a few of those are now hiring. It looks like the DOE is more comfortable with home-grown charters than the state; many of the proposals it requested came from individuals or community-based organizations.

Everyone deserves a Carribbean workation

Posted by Philissa at 4:24 PM

Other than Alexander Russo, am I the only one who isn't totally repulsed by the Carribbean vacations that KIPP Academy Charter School staff members took in the last two years? The papers, the state comptroller, and bloggers are up in arms about the $70,000 spent on trips of only moderate educational benefit, and KIPP says it is putting into place tighter internal controls to prevent similar uses of funds in the future. But if, as the school claims, the funds really came from private sources, not the state, is it so bad that KIPP holds some of its professional development on the beach?

KIPP teachers work long hours (often 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.), teach on weekends, and give out their cell phone numbers to their kids. Their hard work seems to pay off for their students (although some dispute the evenness of the field they're playing on). As KIPP founder Dave Levin, who attended the retreats, told the Post, creative rewards are required to keep teachers motivated. A system that struggles with teacher retention should appreciate Levin's attitude, if not the particular reward KIPP offers.

When teachers leave the profession after only one or two years, it's destabilizing for schools and expensive for the system. But when they, like career-changing Teaching Fellow Robert Pondiscio or Bronx blogging teacher Ms. Frizzle, hit a wall or begin "teaching on the ledge" after half a dozen years, schools lose their most valuable teachers. The public wants its teachers to be highly educated, hardworking, and constantly improving. If there's no cost to the kids, why not spend a few bucks to keep teachers happy?

DOE hires new charter schools leader

Posted by Philissa at 1:05 PM

The city is gearing up to open 50 more charter schools in the next few years, and it needs a charter schools leader to fill a void in the "Office of Portfolio Development" (formerly the Office of New Schools). Yesterday, Chancellor Klein announced that he has hired Michael Thomas Duffy, the executive director of a pioneering charter school in Boston, to fill that position, reports the Sun today. Duffy is familiar with the bureaucratic challenges of getting charter schools up and running and told the Sun that he is relieved that Klein and Mayor Bloomberg will support his work; the leadership in Boston is less charter-friendly.

Duffy also told the Sun, "All of the easy options for charter schools to locate in city space have been taken. We're going to have to get more creative about the locations for these schools." We'll have to wait to find out whether that statement is ominous or open-minded.

In Brooklyn, advertising HS (probably) in; progressive MS out

Posted by Philissa at 12:16 PM

Brooklyn may be getting an advertising-themed high school next year, the Daily News is reporting. Borough President Marty Markowitz is leading the push for the school, which will have the American Association of Advertising Agencies as its lead partner. The DOE says the idea of the school -- which Markowitz hopes will attract more minorities to the overwhelmingly white advertising field -- is "very interesting" but that it hasn't yet been approved.

The advertising high school would join the Ghetto Film School's cinema high school in the Bronx in 2008. One school not opening next year? The parent-proposed District 15 middle school, Brooklyn Prospect Charter School, whose proposal the SUNY chartering board recommended not move forward after the first round of charter school applications. Organizers are confident they'll be able to secure approval for a fall 2009 opening date.

Two years after Katrina, New Orleans and its charter schools still in trouble

Posted by Philissa at 6:32 AM

Today is the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastating landfall along the Gulf Coast. In the last two years, not too much has improved in New Orleans, but the schools have changed dramatically, with important lessons that we in New York can learn.

First, I think we'd be better off if we kept some perspective about how bad things can be when we get worked up over comparatively minor affairs.

Second, and more rooted in policy, New Orleans has embraced charter schools as a panacea for its educational woes, including those that were entrenched well before the storm. As an article in this week's Nation magazine points out, the state and federal government has privileged charter schools over regular public schools in decisions about funding, enrollment, and space. Among the many consequences are increased violence, diminished teacher quality, and reduced attention to students with special needs. In addition, according to the article,

If a child doesn't have parents or guardians willing or able to navigate the sometimes labyrinthine path into a charter school, that child will join the other, less fortunate students in an [regular public] school. "Many in New Orleans now refer to the [regular public] schools as 'the dumping ground,'" writes Leigh Dingerson of the Center for Community Change. "Such a set of catch-all schools is required in a free market system, because there must be a place for the kids who don't gain entry elsewhere."

As New York continues to go wild over charter schools, we must guard against this consequence. Already some regular public schools are feeling squeezed by sharing space and resources with charter schools; the Post reported this week that the Choir Academy of Harlem isn't happy about the Harlem Children's Zone Promise Academy Charter School expanding in its building. The Choir Academy's response seems psychic more than realistic -- the school has more than enough classrooms to accommodate its own students, even after giving over part of the building to the charter school -- but as we know, psychic damage can be crippling.

The Nation article reminds readers that although the charter movement is "represented on the national stage by conservatives," it's "dominated in the trenched by progressives," and that charters may introduce real possibilities for positive change. But New Orleans' experience shows us that unrestrained zeal for charters hurts kids and schools. We are fortunate in New York not to have had a disaster clear the field here, and we have no reason not to proceed cautiously with charter schools. I hope that's a message Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein take from this somber anniversary.

Hebrew language charter school on the horizon?

Posted by Philissa at 11:55 AM

The man behind a Florida charter school that features Hebrew language instruction wants to replicate the school in New York and eventually nationwide, the Sun reported yesterday. Ben Gamla Charter Academy, which is opening this month with a kindergarten through 8th grade, will teach Hebrew language one period a day and offer another period of Hebrew-English dual language instruction. The school's founder hopes to bring a Ben Gamla clone to New York in the next couple of years, taking advantage of the recent lifting of the cap on charter schools.

Ben Gamla NYC sounds like a controversial prospect. Opponents of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public secondary school focusing on Arabic language and culture set to open in September in Brooklyn, have accused the school of being a "public madrassa." In fact, they recently filed Freedom of Information Act requests to find out whether the curriculum will have Islamic content, even though DOE officials have repeatedly assured critics that the school will be using standard curriculum packages. So are those same people worried that Ben Gamla NYC could be a "public yeshiva" that will inculcate students with Jewish culture and religion?

Those who have said they are opposed to all schools that cater to a single population don't like the idea of a Hebrew charter school, and the Anti-Defamation League told the Sun it's concerned that Ben Gamla may be skirting the line between church and state. (It's unclear how many Ben Gamla students are Jewish. About 20% of students are transferring from Jewish day schools. The school has been eager to mention the fact that 20% of students self-identify as Hispanic; of course, those kids might also be Jewish.)

But many of the most vociferous Khalil Gibran opponents don't see a problem with Ben Gamla. A member of the "Stop the Madrassa Coalition" told the Sun, "It's just so much different with Arabic because there's so many instances of the language being wrapped up with the religion, whereas Hebrew it's not." Right.

All kids should have the opportunity to learn foreign languages and about other cultures. Arabic and Hebrew are just as worthy of being taught in the city's public schools as Spanish, French, or Latin. But it's a serious problem for the city if controversy over schools' themes distracts from discussion about how the schools are going to serve their kids before they even open, and if the only language kids can choose to learn is the one their grandparents speak. I'm willing to bet that most parents would rather enroll in a school with a number, rather than a fancy themed name, if it meant their kids would get a well-rounded education free from angry protest.

Study: NYC charter schools outperform public schools

Posted by Unknown at 9:59 AM

A new study on New York charter schools provides compelling evidence that charter school students see greater test score gains than they would have in regular public schools. The study, written by Harvard Economics Professor Caroline Hoxby and the National Bureau of Economic Research's Sonali Murarka, can be downloaded here. (Be forewarned: the study is 81 pages long, but the Executive Summary outlines the main findings in two pages.)

Hoxby and Murarka find that charter schools raise student performance by about .09 standard deviations in math and about .4 standard deviations in reading. We can put those numbers in terms of our standardized tests: On New York's standardized tests, students receive scores from 1 (not meeting standards) to 4 (exceeding standards); a score of 3 is considered proficient. Charter schools raise math scores about 12% of the distance between a score of 1 and a score of 2, or between 2 and 3, etc. For reading scores the gain is about3.5% of a performance level. Keep in mind that these gains are in addition to whatever gains the students would have made in ordinary public schools.

The findings in Hoxby and Murarka's study are particularly convincing because they use truly random sampling to compare charter school students and regular students. The notorious challenge in evaluating any educational policy is that it is often extremely difficult to separate the effects of the policy from other correlations. For example, if we tried to compare the effects of private school and public school, we certainly couldn't just compare standardized test scores of public school students with those of private school students, since the students differ in many ways besides the school they attended. If private school scores were 20% higher than public school scores, for instance, some of that difference might be a result of the differences in education quality, but some of it may come from differences in parental education or socioeconomic status. Even small class size, which many parents and educators have long believed to be good for student achievement, has been very difficult to measure how beneficial small classes are, since students often differ in other ways as well. (If parents who tend to be more concerned for their children's education tend to demand small classes more often than other students, and if those concerned parents also read to their kids more, for instance, some of the test score differences between small-class and large-class students may come from differences in how much they're read to at home.)

So how can we accurately measure the effects of some educational policy? If students are randomly assigned to either "treatment groups" (those with the effect) and "control groups" (those without), we can compare those two groups without worrying about other factors that might bias the results. Fortunately, New York City charter schools provide an ideal opportunity for such a comparison. In New York, when more students apply for a charter school than can be admitted, they are selected by lottery-- a random sample! So Hoxby and Murarka compared the scores of students who were selected for admission with those who entered the lottery but were not selected. This type of comparison is typically considered so convincing that researchers will weigh the results of one good random-comparison study more heavily than any number of other, non-random results.

Finally, the study notes that charter school advocates would say the true benefits of charter schools are even greater than the findings in this study suggest. Since one of the supposed benefits of charter schools is that they bring competition for regular schools, advocates would say that charter schools actually improve the quality of education in regular public schools, as those schools are forced to improve to keep students from leaving for charter schools. If that's true, even the non-charter school students, i.e. the "control group," would have benefited from the effects of charter schools.

Does more state money really mean more accountability?

Posted by Unknown at 3:39 PM

Elizabeth Green at the New York Sun reports today about the City's use of the upcoming dramatic increase in state education funding, which are supposed to be used in accordance with Governor Spitzer's "Contract for Excellence" initiative. (For more on the Campaign for Fiscal Equity's lawsuit behind the increase and the details of the Contract for Excellence, see Green's article or the recent Insideschools piece on the parent letter to the Board of Regents.)

The city will see an increase of about $700 million for the 2007-2008 school year, and, in principle, this money must be spent on one of the five priorities outlined in Spitzer's Contract for Excellence, including reducing class size, providing after-school programs, and lengthening the school year. However, there are a number of loopholes that allow the money to be used for other purposes, such as charter schools and "experimental programs."

Green writes:

The state had reported in April that $317 million of the new funds would be governed by Mr. Spitzer's accountability plan, called the Contract for Excellence. But new numbers released Thursday will likely leave just $228 million to be governed by the contract's restrictions, a city spokeswoman, Debra Wexler, said.

Some are disappointed with this change, including Michael Rebell, one of the attorneys who brought the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, Green reports.

For an alternative view, check out the dissent by Joe Williams on the Dems for Ed Reform blog.

Applications for new charter schools due today

Posted by Philissa at 2:52 PM

Since the state announced in April that the cap on charter schools would increase to 200 from its current 100, charter school advocates have been salivating at the opportunity to start more schools. Today, the Charter Schools Institute at SUNY, one of three chartering agencies in the state, is accepting applications for new schools. The other chartering agencies, the State Board of Regents and the city's schools chancellor, have their own deadlines. [For background on how charter schools are organized, check out Insideschools' charter school primer.]

Parents in District 15 are applying to create a new middle school that will open in the fall of 2008, the Brooklyn Paper reported this week; Insideschools' director, Pam Wheaton, told the paper, "Parents have long complained about middle schools in District 15.”

In recent years, many charter school founders have been trying to help kids escape from failing schools. I'm wondering whether we'll now see folks trying to start charter schools so they themselves can escape from the strictures of mayoral control -- and to rescue kids from ever-increasing assessments. It will be interesting to hear next spring what charter schools have been approved for the city, where they will be, and who will be leading them.

Charter school news

Posted by Philissa at 7:44 AM

Two articles appearing in the Times today offer a mixed bag of news about charter schools.

The Times has an article about internal tensions at Beginning with Children Charter School, where the wealthy founders and benefactors have fired most of the school's Board of Trustees in an effort to move toward better performance, threatening the funding the school needs to survive and alienating parents in the process. Insideschools called Beginning with Children "noteworthy" after visiting in 2005.

With the recent expansion of the cap on the number of charter schools allowed in New York State, the Times also reports that a charter management organization out of Los Angeles is working with New York's teachers union to plan a new charter high school here. Unlike teachers at most charter schools, teachers at Green Dot charter schools are members of a union — although the terms of their contracts are somewhat different from the UFT's. Green Dot schools offer higher starting salaries but fewer long-term benefits like pensions and some job protection but not the public school's tenure system. Green Dot has had a tense relationship with the Los Angeles schools, but with such a charter-friendly administration in New York and the support of the teachers union, I can't imagine it will have the same difficulties here.

More on math scores (updated)

Posted by Unknown at 12:32 PM

6/17 update: For a summary of the reasons to be wary of the new math test scores, check out Diane Ravitch's article over at the NYC Public School Parents blog. Ravitch urges readers to "wait patiently to see whether the recent gains on the state tests are reflected on the national tests when the results are posted in November 2007."

6/15 post: The math scores published last week have attracted a wave of commentary, everything from ecstasy to serious skepticism. Today a few more publications weigh in. Elizabeth Green at the New York Sun reports that city officials are touting charter school scores as evidence that charter schools are working. She writes:

This year, 74% of city charter students scored proficient on the state math test, up from 66% last year, a review of state data by a procharter group, the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, found. Just 65% of students citywide scored as well this year, up from 57% last year.

Meanwhile, the Times published a cautiously optimistic editorial, concluding that "all signs suggest that the city and state are on the right track."