Schools’ Progress Reports Mean Little to Parents

By Miranda Neubauer

Greenpoint elementary schools have received uneven grades in progress reports released earlier this month by the Department of Education. The three Greenpoint public elementary school schools have gone from having straight As last year to only one A, to P.S. 31, a B to P.S. 34 and a C to P.S. 110.

For the school that dropped the most, P.S. 110, the overall C grade was made up of an F in Student Progress, a C in student achievement and an A for student environment.

Conversations with parents with children at the schools, however, showed little concern about the grades, which are given to each school each year according to a scoring system that has changed from year to year. Parents in the neighborhood said that for them, the race to improve progress reports and test scores matters far less when it comes to judging the quality of a school than the knowledge that students have grasped the learning material independently of tests.

“Just because they get a C doesn’t mean it’s not a good school,” said Nadine Nemeth, who was waiting outside P.S. 110, which three of her children have attended. “All those other schools push them just for tests, tests, tests, this school doesn’t….[The Students here] know how to think, the other kids just know how to take tests.” P.S. 110 puts less emphasis on tests, she emphasized. “They have gym, they have art, they have Italian, the other schools it’s just English, writing, reading and testing, that’s it. When they go into the middle school they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Daniel Slesinski was outside P.S. 110 consulting with a teacher about his younger son’s homework. Those running the school system, “don’t teach reading, writing and arithmetic anymore,” he said.

“Now they study these kids for tests. Some teachers care enough that they’ll teach the children and some teachers just teach the test and the kids learn nothing,” he added. He said he had had a problem with his older son, who just started at I.S. 128 in Williamsburg. “I had to teach him long division and long math which I didn’t know he didn’t pick up last year,” he said, adding that his son had had a teacher who had been frequently absent and did not make up for missed homework.

For Slesinski, parental contribution makes a big difference. “If my wife and I did not study with our children, they wouldn’t be learning as much as they did,” he said. “I had one teacher actually tell me your child doesn’t need to know how to write because he’s going to be on the computer…They’re told not to teach phonics. So you have these kids who can’t spell properly and can’t sound out words. Thank God I bought Hooked on Phonics for my son.”

In a letter to parents posted on the school website, Principal Alicja Winnicki of P.S. 34, wrote regarding the “B” grade that “in the times of so many changes on last spring tests, especially last minute changes in state benchmarks, our students faired very well”. She added that P.S. 34 only missed an A by 1.4 percent.

The data that determines the progress reports comes from three sources, according to the Department of Education. Parent, teacher and student surveys on the school environment make up 15 percent of the data, while student achievement and student progress on standardized tests make up 25 and 60 percent of the data. Those three indicators together make up the overall score for a school. The top 25 percent of schools received As overall, with the next 35 and 36 percent receiving B’s and C’s, according to the Department of Education.

The Department of Education, in a press release, said it adjusted the performance and progress measures this year to account for the state’s decision to retroactively raise the bar for passing its annual exams. The new model measures the change in student test scores from last year to this year by comparing students who started at similar levels of proficiency, according to the DOE.

Heidi Foy-Williams, whose son just started Kindergarten at P.S. 34, blogs about the neighborhood as Greenpointmom. “The principal and the teacher are very accessible, they communicate with me a lot…My son seems very happy,” she said, adding that he is also enrolled in an afterschool program at the school.

“He has a lot of friends at the school…sometimes he has to be dragged away because he’s with his friends.” She noted that the school has programs with the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music and offers family passes to New York City museums.

She emphasized that it was important to complement those opportunities with parental involvement. “We sit down as a family and do the homework together and go through all the readings he’s supposed to be doing…a lot of the learning for me also has to take place at night at home to show my son that it’s something that we value as a family.”

She said she was surprised what an enjoyable experience getting involved with the school has been. “I don’t think when I sent him to school I realized how much more part of my neighborhood I would feel, and all these different people I would meet that I never would have met,” she said. “We’re getting to know our neighbors. It’s made me more aware and more invested in my neighborhood.”